Fred Thomas and Lucine Musaelian are exploring the vast reservoir of sacred and secular Armenian monody. Having met in 2023 in London, their duo unifies Lucine’s Armenian heritage and experience in Early Music, with Fred’s grasp of improvisation and Medieval repertoire. Theirs is an open-minded practice which combines writing original compositions with a deep dive into the incredible musical repository of Armenian chant.

According to Lucine, “Grigor Naregatsi’s texts have been recited, read, chanted, and sung for centuries. Expressing Armenian faith and identity through these chants has been incredibly rewarding. Narekatsi’s Book of Lamentations is rich with prayers that inspire depth and peace. Setting these prayers to music has allowed me to embody the prayers in an unexpected way, and I hope that the music resonates, shedding new light on these ancient texts.” Fred believes that “a very personal creative essence can be extracted from combining poetic fantasy with historical enquiry, using imagination to supplement the kind of knowledge – always fragmentary, often hidden – that an excavation of the past digs up.” By pairing their own co-written works with inventive interpretations of rare chants from the 11th and 12th centuries, a surprising yet coherent body of work emerges.

Both multi-instrumentalist composers, Fred and Lucine have a rich palette of colours to explore freely: dramatic vocal moxwnodies are enveloped by the nebulous drones summoned by a viola da gamba or a wheezing shruti box; whilst a prepared piano intones ritualistic bell-like patterns against abstract microtonal atmospheres, a haunting Medieval vielle ghosts improvised  countermelodies behind the voice. Via this striking blend of sonorities, this duo is  assembling its own book of devotional chants, blurring the lines between old and new, and softening the edges between past and present.

Lucine Musaelian – voice, viola da gamba, vielle, shruti
Fred Thomas – prepared piano, vielle, double bass