«Կորսված ձայների որոնումներով» - Հարցազրույց Ալեքսանդր ՍԻՐԱՆՈՍՅԱՆԻ հետ

Diana Stepanyan's article is devoted to an interview with the pianist, conductor, and collector Alexandre Siranossian, focusing on his creative path, musical career, and contribution to the preservation of Armenian musical heritage in France.

Introduction and Methodology
The material is structured as a conversation recorded during a meeting with the musician in the Lyon suburb of Décines. The structure of the interview sequentially reveals the interlocutor's biography, his family life, his research work on the heritage of the composer Stéphane Elmas, his concert activity, and his practice as a collector.

Biography and Professional Formation
Alexandre Siranossian was born in France into a family originating from Constantinople, and received his musical education in Lyon and Switzerland, studying piano, conducting, and composition. From a young age he was involved in the Armenian community movement and maintained correspondence with leading composers of Soviet Armenia — Robert Atayan, Edward Mirzoyan, Arno Babajanian, and Tigran Mansurian. For more than forty years he headed the National School of Music and Dance in the town of Romans, where, among other things, he founded the only duduk class in a European state institution.

Family and Questions of Identity
A separate section is devoted to the musician's family: his daughters Shushan and Astghik are professional violinist and cellist respectively, raised in a bilingual Armenian-French environment. The interlocutor emphasizes the importance of music and language for forming a full-fledged national identity in the children of the diaspora.

The Heritage of Stéphane Elmas
The key subject of the interview is the story of the discovery of the archive of the forgotten Armenian composer Stéphane Elmas, a student of Franz Liszt. Alexandre Siranossian speaks about:

the chance discovery of the composer's grave in Geneva;
the search for his descendants and the surviving archive;
the creation of the Stéphane Elmas Foundation and the digitization of about two thousand pages of scores;
the organization of a memorial room dedicated to the composer at the Yerevan Museum of Literature and Art.

Concert and Educational Activity
The musician describes his many years of practice promoting Armenian music abroad: joint performances with Arno Babajanian and Edward Mirzoyan, his role in initiating Tigran Mansurian's composition "Miserere" in memory of the victims of the Spitak earthquake, as well as the restoration and premiere performance of forgotten scores, including a symphony by Vincent d'Indy.

Collecting
Considerable attention is given to his activity as a collector: the discovery of autographs by Komitas, the acquisition of rare documents via the internet (the program of an evening at the Sorbonne in 1916, an album by the artist Sarkis Khachaturian), as well as the formation, together with the Saryan family, of a collection of manuscripts by Armenian composers.

Conclusion
The key conclusion of the interview is that Alexandre Siranossian's life path demonstrates an organic combination of two cultural identities — French and Armenian — realized through musical performance, scholarly research, and the deliberate preservation of Armenian musical heritage for future generations of the diaspora.