Dear Editor:

Congratulations and kudos to the editors of TAR Int'l. for their courage and fortitude in publishing "New National Anthem for Armenia?" (editorial in TAR Int'l, Dec. 23, 2000).

We all know why the current miserable excuse for a national anthem, along with the tricolor and the coat of arms of the previous republic [1918-1920] was adopted. It was not advertised but the Levon Ter-Petrossian administration, after publicly announcing an invitation to poets and composers to compose a new national anthem, decided to incorporate the existing ones. The move served a dual purpose. It imparted a sense of continuity from the first republic to the present one, while in the process trying to whitewash the interim Leninist/Stalinist regimes, and probably more to the point, to once and for all salvage the symbols of the homeland from being identified with a certain faction.

It served the purpose. The LTP administration should be congratulated for their political expediency and courage.

At this point we have matured, we have achieved more than we ever had before. We have turned the tide of losing, we have actually gained, reversing a trend of losses of the past two thousand years. It is time that we take our own destiny in our own hands and determine what is best for us.

A poor excuse for an anthem does not become our national character. I am neither a poet, nor a musician, but one does not have to be either to see that our current national anthem is not an anthem at all.

It is a foreign ditty comprised of a couple of bars of nursery grade music and words of poor literary standard, not to mention the context of uninspiring kindergarten rhymes. No crescendo, no majesty, not even an indication of whose national anthem it is. It refers to the "enemy" but no where would one find whose "hayrenik" it is about. The Soviet Armenian anthem was more majestic, both poetically and musically. It was deliberately composed by none other than the dean of Armenian music, Aram Khachaturian himself. Even the "Haraj Nahatak," the anthem of HOMENTMEN, composed by Barsegh Ganachian, another accomplished composer, is more suitable.

I agree with the editors of TAR. If we decide not to compose a totally new one, the previous Soviet Armenian anthem is the best choice, albeit with slight retrofitting of certain phrases.

"Herosakan azat ashkharh Hayastan......Park kez misht park 'Herosakan' Hayastan ...."

Zohrab Heghinian
Clifton Park, NY