Kristina Arakelyan’s work as composer, performer and educator is guided by a clear passion for music’s intrinsic power. Kristina is an Armenian-British musician, born in 1994. Kristina won the BBC Young Composer competition in 2010 and received an Ivors Academy Nomination in 2021. In this resource, Kristina unpacks Shushiki, which features on the Grade 6 list of the Piano Syllabus 2025 & 2026.

In this video, Kristina talks about playing a part in the ABRSM editing process and how important Komitas Vardapet’s work is to Armenian musicians today.


The composer Komitas Vardapet is best known for collecting and arranging Armenian folk songs. There are many poignant aspects to Komitas’s biography: being orphaned early in life, becoming a deacon, a student in Germany, a teacher and folk music collector, his tragic last years. The Komitas Museum-Institute is a wonderful source to find out more about Komitas’s life and works.

Unlike other historical composers, we have the privilege of hearing Komitas’s singing as it was recorded in the beginning of the last century. This can be found easily online and may be of interest to pupils wishing to hear his interpretation of Armenian songs.

It may also be of interest to your pupils to look up what Armenian national dances and costumes look like (and maybe even trying them out!),  and what the national instruments referenced, t’ar and dap, look and sound like.

Teaching Resources
There are many ways to approach teaching Shushiki. The ideas below explore some of the contexts of this composition and the connections between this work and the broader musical repertoire. In this video, Kristina expands on some of the creative tasks from the teaching resources below.

Dance Music

  • Exercise 1: Compare Shushiki with Johann Sebastian Bach's Gigue from his French Suite No. 5. What is the characteristic rhythm of the Gigue? Can you find the characteristic rhythm of Shushiki? Are there any repeating patterns? Can you isolate these rhythms?
  • Exercise 2: Using the ostinato rhythm of Shushiki, write your own pattern for the left hand. Using this pattern as the rhythmic basis, and the C major scale, write your own melody.

Descriptive Words
In Shushiki Komitas includes descriptive words to aid our interpretation.

  • Exercise 1: Using the annotations in the penultimate line (‘like a breeze’), can you find what it is in the music that sounds like a breeze? Use musical terminology as much as possible.
  • Exercise 2: Now you are in charge of this description. Can you think of a contrasting description for this passage? How would you alter the music to fit the new description? Use the correct terminology as you try these out e.g. how do musical parameters such as the dynamics/tempo/articulation/etc. change?

Modality
This composition is modal.

  • Exercise 1: Using the Dorian mode, improvise your own melody, (using the notes D, E, F, G, A, B, C).
  • Exercise 2: Which notes would you need to change to turn bars 1-4 into a major mode?

Folk Music
Komitas collected folk music, as did Ralph Vaughan Williams, Béla Bartók and Percy Grainger. Here are some questions to explore with your pupil.

  • Why did he do this?
  • How do you think did he do this? (anticipate a discussion about the lack of phones/high quality recording devices!)
  • Who were the people singing folk songs? What do you think they sounded like?

Further Listening
Shushiki comes from a collection of piano dances by Komitas.

  • Exercise 1: Listen to/play the other five piano dances by Komitas.
  • Exercise 2: Other piano compositions by Armenians to explore include the Komitas-Andriasyan folk song settings, the music of Edouard Abramyan, Edouard Baghdasaryan and perhaps one of the most famous examples of a dance (the Sabre Dance) by Aram Khachaturian.
  • Exercise 3: Listen to the piece in full on ABRSM's Spotify Channel
Last modified: Friday, 4 July 2025, 11:00 AM