What do a Milford man, Armenian genocide and Burt Bacharach’s piano have in common?
They are all crucial elements in the making of "An Armenian Trilogy," a PBS documentary premiering at 7:30 p.m., March 12 on Channel 56, Detroit Public TV.
Here’s a preview of what you will see — and hear — when tuning in on Sunday or streaming at your leisure following the special’s debut.
Yessian, 78, is a Milford resident who took an unconventional path to becoming a success, composing award-winning music for television, movies, theme parks, Fortune 500 companies and memorials including the One World Observatory in New York City.
Yessian Music has an office in New York City, as well as Los Angeles and Hamburg, Germany, but the company is based in Farmington Hills. It got its start in 1971 when Yessian risked disappointing his parents and gave up a teaching career after only four years to compose music that to this day he is unable to read or write.
“I don’t read or write music, I play music,” said Yessian, who had lessons in clarinet and saxophone as a child, but played by ear. He later did the same with the piano. “What I had to do producing music — I would tell them (instrumentalists) what I want to hear—chords I wanted… For many years, I didn’t know where middle C was on the piano. Somehow or other, I banged out a career doing it this way.”
The 22-minute symphony Yessian composed at the request of his church priest in 2014 was a three-year project commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide. In this horrific event, 1.5 million Armenian citizens were massacred by the Ottoman Empire, in an act Yessian said was not unlike the Holocaust.
“There were no ovens to destroy them," he said, "but the Armenians were forced to march through the desert until they dropped dead.”
Yessian completed a symphony with three movements, “The Freedom,” “The Fear” and “The Faith.”
With little patience for historical data, he sought to convey in his music the emotions the Armenian people felt.
“We are supposed to learn from history, but that doesn’t seem to happen,” Yessian, who is of Armenian descent, said. “The thought was, ‘Let me lay this out, so people might understand what they are going through.’”
Bacharach, who died last month after a lifetime of fame composing such popular hits as “Rain Drops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” “I Say a Little Prayer” and “What the World Needs Now is Love” was a musical hero for Yessian.
So much so, that Yessian purchased one of Bacharach’s pianos during a 2005 charity auction. Bacharach signed the instrument and added a message: “I wrote a lot of good music on this piano.”
He also wrote a letter of authenticity to Yessian, in which he mentions that he had bought the piano in 1959 and it had stayed at the home of his former wife, actress Angie Dickinson, for many years.
Yessian recalled that when he asked Dickinson if he could buy the piano's bench, she declined, telling him, “No, that is where Burt’s butt was.”
No matter. Yessian found a bench and has composed much of his own music on the Bacharach piano, including “An Armenian Trilogy.”
“The documentary takes you from the beginnings of a budding clarinetist and saxophonist through a progression of time that leads up to what I would suggest would be my legacy now, which is the 'Armenian Trilogy,'” Yessian said. “It’s important to know where we’ve been and where we’re going. … There is something about music that creates emotion and that was my aim through all of this.”
Learn more at armeniantrilogy.com.
Contact reporter Susan Bromley at [email protected] or 517-281-2412. Follow her on Twitter @SusanBromley10.