[Oganyan, Aleksandr]
(b Soganlug, Georgia, 1889; d Tbilisi, May 31, 1932). Armenian k‘emanch‘a player, teacher, theorist and composer. He began to play the k‘emanch‘a at the age of seven and joined a sazander ensemble in which he played the tiplipito and the duduk as well as the k‘emanch‘a. He became a soloist in the composer Anton Mailian's Eastern Orchestra in Baku in 1905 and often appeared with the instrumental ashugh group Haziri in Tbilisi. In the same year he toured the Transcaucasian region, Central Asia and Iran with two mugam performers, the singer D. Karyagdogli and the t‘a ṙ player K. Pirimov. During the period 1906–12 recordings of his performances of classical mugam and Armenian dance music were released by the companies Kontzert-Rekord, Patye and Sport-Rekord. He studied the k‘emanch‘a with Oganez Oganezov, an authority on the Persian mugam, and took the pseudonym Oganezashvili (‘son of Oganez’) in his honour; Oganezashvili added a fourth string to the ...
