Carolyn Jack

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."

The path that Afi Scruggs has been following takes a lot of left turns. Even before she faced what she considers her most profound upheaval in life, her instinctive reaction to barriers, reversals and dead ends had been a rare one: When she couldn't find any way to get where she wanted to go, Scruggs didn't wear herself out by hammering for years on unyielding walls or trying to cut through the maze. Instead, she swung around and chose a whole new destination.

 

Over and over, she taught herself how to do something surprisingly different. With a Ph.D in Slavic languages from Brown University, she understandably started out as a university professor, but when that career got stymied, she went to work briefly for the YMCA. Then she became a newspaper reporter. Then a graphic designer and photographer. Then an author of a children's book, a memoir and a collection of essays. Then a professional musician and teaching artist. In every case, she bravely figured out what skills were called for, got proficient enough in them to get a job in that field and then mastered the work as she did it.

 

Scruggs has become her own best retraining program. She needed to be that unstoppable learner, especially when the biggest change came. "For me, it was all about survival," she said of her many self-reinventions. "My transitions were practical."

 

A native of Nashville who started playing keyboards at age six and grew up making music in church, Scruggs got her first career job teaching at the University of Virginia. But she wasn't on the tenure track. Concerned about her earnings, she decided to leave the position and look for something higher-paying, something for which she wouldn't have to wait the usual year or 18 months it often took to find another academic role. So she consulted a career counselor, who suggested that Scruggs try cocktail waitressing.

 

If her mother and grandmother had heard she'd taken a job like that, "They would have driven to Virginia and killed me," Scruggs said, laughing.

 

While casting about for another profession, she took a job at the Y that revealed to her how much she liked writing and photography - especially writing, because the overhead was so low. Scruggs began freelancing and, with the help of a friend in journalism, learned movie and music reviewing. Before long, she had a full-time job at the Charles County, Md., newspaper.

 

There had been no plan, she recalled. "This was just throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks."

 

Journalism stuck. Once she realized that reporting was just like academic research, except you interviewed people instead of staying holed up in the library, she was hooked. "It makes you fearless and courageous. I got to talk to people, I got to go places. You're always looking for answers," Scruggs said. As a general-assignment reporter, "I could reach more people with one story than I could with a lifetime of academic research. Intellectually, it was much more satisfying for me."

 

She moved on to other papers in other states. Eventually, The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Ohio, came calling, and though she was reluctant – " I didn't want to come, it was cold!" – Scruggs finally accepted. She grew to love the city and the paper, the sheer variety and unexpectedness of covering news there. "I had planned to retire from there, 'cuz  it was just so nutty," she recalled. "Cleveland has so much to offer."

 

And then, after not quite eight years, it all fell apart. "I did not get a merit raise at The Plain Dealer. My dad always said, 'If they pass you over, leave,'" she noted. "They told me to wait. And I said, 'Well, I ain't going to be here.'"

 

Though Scruggs had dealt with change many times before, this was different. Bigger. Deeper. It wasn't just her beloved job situation that had imploded: Journalism was also imploding. By 2001, the year she left, the internet had started reshaping the industry, slowly, almost imperceptibly, and then all of sudden. Advertising disappeared from print pages, moving online what seemed like overnight, and papers were hemorrhaging money and jobs. With news outlets downsizing and so many reporters being laid off nationwide, Scruggs found that she couldn't get back into the industry. Life had suddenly become uncertain again. And no other job felt as if it could be as rewarding and worthwhile as news. It had been a calling.  

 

"Journalists are very idealistic," Scruggs explained. "It was hard to figure out what else to do. I had a lot of skills there was no place for."

 

But she wanted to stay in Cleveland. What Scruggs realized she had to do was learn how to apply those skills to whatever work she could devise for herself in the Northeast Ohio area. So she got busy and creative. She taught a little on the college level, discovered a real liking for design, resumed freelancing as a journalist.

 

And then, "By chance, I was playing some old-time music, hanging out with some jams," said Scruggs.  That led to her going into the public schools as a teaching artist. While her skills as an educator of children grew - helped in part by a visiting workshop leader from the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. - so did her interest in composing and performing music. As usual, Scruggs didn't hesitate to take the steps she thought necessary: She found a temporary content-migration side job that paid decently, spent the money on a bass and learned to play it.

 

"I was just looking at the bottom line," she said about the resulting music gigs that helped her cash flow.

 

Once again, Scruggs had studied and practiced her way out of a career dilemma and into a whole new way of working. Bass (and mandolin) in hand, she expanded her reach, playing for Antioch Baptist Church, increasing her art-teaching gigs and forming bands, starting with a group called Timbara. Now she leads Afi'n the Mix. Recently, she was commissioned by NPR to write four songs for its program, "This American Life." And at the end of December, she joined Cleveland's Djapo Cultural Arts Institute on an enrichment trip to Gambia, where she studied balafon, a xylophone-like instrument made of wooden keys and resonant gourds.  

 

Between music and freelance journalism, Scruggs has gotten by, though a bit precariously. "I don't know – I'm still very insecure about making a living," she admitted a few days into 2024, and then whooped out a big laugh. "I'm traumatized!"

 

Two weeks later, her life changed again: All that learning and daring paid off when the Music Settlement in Cleveland announced that its new Creative Aging Department within its Center for Music would be headed by Scruggs in an important role that will use all of her experience as a communicator, teacher and artist.  

 

On never-say-die trying, learning and finding good work, she mused, "It's just being able to turn on a dime. If you did it more than once, you can do it, you can figure it out. I have faith in myself. My grandmother is my role model, she was bigger than life  – she lived her best life until she couldn't." 

 

Scruggs wants to be like that, doing all kinds of things, she said. And the nonstop learning is easier now than it was for her grandmother, she added with a wide smile in her voice. "You have YouTube now."