Armenian Wedding Songs

So many articles written on the wedding topic, so many traditions that correspond to each nationality with the wedding event following them, plenty of nations being even divided in ways of celebrating the wedding as much as the bride and groom belong to the same nationality and to the same religious faith. This happened to me when I was trying to reach to the tradition that an Armenian wedding resonates with. Many answers were contradictory, some saying that a certain custom is being used inside the wedding celebration, some saying that depending on the region, certain customs are preserved whiled others don’t.

But what amazed me the most was in fact the way a couple’s marriage is being set up by their families. And I know as well that this “arrangement” takes place in many corners of the world, there still are nations where families establish the marriage between ‘he’ and ‘she’ with the only purpose of setting the bases of a contract which has to be beneficial for both parties. And if I think deeper, this is what happens now in almost all the wedding traditions. I can not argue with the fact that there are feelings of love involved in the act of marriage, but merely the fact that one commits to the other within the limits of a marital contract, turns the romance of such an event into an official pact agreed by both parties.

But leaving aside this ‘materialistic’ part of wedding celebrations, I have learned meanwhile that Armenian weddings are also celebrations to be performed in the presence of traditional music. It is a fact that communities of Armenians while being integrated in other’s country social life and culture, they have to keep in touch with their own identity through several family events that take place into their lives: birthday anniversaries, baptisms, weddings, and the most unpleasant ones, but still part of our life, funerals.

These events in their unfolding are the ones that appeal all the time to the presence of music; traditional or not, music is the one to give a spiritual meaning to the events occurred in the performance of a wedding day (for other cultures, of several days of wedding celebration). Looking for the Armenian wedding songs I discovered that even the fact of getting the bride ready for the wedding is accompanied by emotional songs, traditional ones which in their structure are in fact sad songs, of a daughter leaving her parental hearth.



Then, the presentation of gifts is also accompanied by Armenian songs which have become traditional in the unfolding of a wedding festivity; and it is indeed a colorful festivity that accompanies every symbolic gesture that is brought in Armenian wedding tradition. There are plenty of these symbols which are not understood by other cultures, as it happened to me, as well, but as long as bride and groom follow their national tradition, it is a sign of trying to find their own roots in a society that has somehow thrust them aside fro their own identity. You can support this theme at your wedding by choosing also traditional wedding flowers, or an armenian wedding dress.



Armenian wedding songs are listed online with presentation of CDs released by Armenian singers to offer their peers possibilities to define their origins within the frames of an event that is meant to change the rest of their lives, with or without a contract settled between them. Music is the one that is supposed to reflect honest feelings, deep emotions and states of mind that can not be either bought, or instilled since they do not spring from the bottom of one’s heart, exactly what a wedding should stand for.