Lucineh Hovanissian has a fractured elbow.
That's a serious problem for a pianist. It's not a great situation for a composer, poet, translator, or artistic explorer of spiritual and scientific ideas, either. And Hovanissian is all of those. She needs two functioning arms to perform the imaginative artworks she travels the world to research and create, including music albums, film soundtracks and multimedia works.
After two surgeries and more than seven months, she still hasn't fully healed from the bad fall she took, thanks to an illegally parked scooter, while walking to the bank in her hometown of Yerevan, Armenia. Her frustration has grown.
"I cannot work," she lamented on a Skype call from Yerevan in February. "This is the biggest challenge I've ever faced."
But it's not the biggest change Hovanissian has had to navigate. She came to that crossroads when she was only 15.
A gifted musician from an early age, Hovanissian had already spent years playing piano, singing and composing by the time she was of age to apply to secondary schools. She had even won a significant piano competition two years in a row ("It was one of the most important for teenagers") and was considered a top student. The Romanos Melikyan Musical State College was where she wanted to go next. So she applied, going through the system set up by the Soviets who controlled Armenia at that time. And then …
"They didn't accept me," Hovanissian recalled. "Because my family was not musical, they said. 'We have a very strict number of places and so you cannot enter.'"
The authorities expected a bribe, she explained, which her father could not pay. "It was my biggest dream, to become a real musician, to compose," she said. "I was crying the whole day. That changed my life forever."
Irony filled her eyes: "Years later, in 2014, the same college invited me to have a master class in the same hall where I was stressed as a child."
With her hopes crushed but her bright mind needing a suitable focus, Hovanissian chose to study dentistry, earning her medical degree with honors and a specialty in children's dental care. She practiced for a number of years. Yet she never let go of her artistic goals.
She kept composing and playing. Forced to cut her own path, musically, she found and made opportunities to perform, helped immensely by a financial award bestowed on her by the UNESCO-Aschberg support program for young artists that enabled her to apply for and accept artist residencies in other countries, including the U.S. Inspired by her faith in the Apostalic Church – the national church of Armenia, which is considered the oldest Christian nation in the world – and by the work of lyric soprano Lucine Zakaryan, a mid-20th-century Armenian star who championed her country's traditional sacred music during Armenia's troubled, Soviet-oppressed era, Hovanissian began combining ancient regional tonalities and compositional forms with classical and modern styles. Her original compositions have also come to mix acoustic and digital sounds that reveal both deep spiritual roots and cutting-edge inventiveness.
Before long, Hovanissian was creating choral works using her own poetry as text, combining musical exploration with scientific topics such as Nikola Tesla's idea of creating an artificial aurora borealis. She experimented with video, began writing music for films and has most recently started directing. Like her own nature and training, Hovanissian's path has branched again and again while remaining one with her intellect and emotions.
Her many influences and eclectic work have made her a crossover artist and a polymath on a world scale. This same woman who has studied brain science at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, undertaken independent research in disciplines ranging from neurophilosophy to human ecology and can speak five languages has established an artistic career that's taken her on tours of Europe and North America and to such residencies as Villa Straeuli in Winterthur, Switzerland; Visby International Composers Center in Sweden; Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France; and, in the U.S., those of Ohio's Cleveland Foundation and the Manhattan, N.Y., arts center, Symphony Space.
But, for now, Hovanissian remains stranded at home with an ailing elbow, worried that she may have to postpone or cancel important upcoming trips to Iceland and France and enduring with her fellow Armenians the fallout from the recent war with Azerbaijan, the latest chapter in a conflict that's been going on for decades. It's a lot to deal with, on top of the life interruptions that Covid-19 visited on the whole world.
"It's horrible," she said.
In the latest violence, which happened last September, in 2023, Azerbaijan attacked and drove out 100,000 inhabitants of a traditionally Armenian enclave – called Artsakh by its residents and Nagorno-Karabakh by Azerbaijanis – that was located within its borders. People have flooded into Armenia with nowhere to live and no means of support. A family of eight is now trying to live in the studio apartment next door to Hovanissian's. The situation, happening so soon after the pandemic, has done something to the Armenian spirit, she fears.
"Something changed – art is just…" her voice trailed off. People aren't supporting art the way they used to, she explained later, perhaps because they're confused and distracted by all the upheaval.
Certainly, coping with societal change this big and pervasive has been hard for Hovanissian and other Armenians, and the effort is ongoing. Suffering and struggling under all that pressure, Hovanissian even thought about leaving Armenia, but couldn't abandon her mother and brother. When bad went to worse with her fall and her lingering injury, she became desperate.
"I started to doubt my faith," she said.
Her search for answers led her into an exploration of Eastern Buddhism. Since then, she's been making her way back to Christianity, she said, but in the meantime, she realized something: She doesn't think her fall happened by chance.
"You know why it happened to me?" Hovanissian mused. "When I think it over, I think it was my reluctance: I knew I had to change, and I didn't. You have to change, like water, [flowing] with the times. Life is change. If we are reluctant to change, then change happens to us in an ugly way, a brutal way, like with the Covid, because humanity was reluctant to change. It will force you.
"But if we accept, take a little step every day, then you won't have big catastrophes. Natura non facit saltus – nature does nothing in jumps. Because of the stress, I made an unwise choice," she said. "And was forced."