We met at Hovanes\u2019s Duduk Art Studio, tucked behind a narrow street in Arinj. The kind of place where the air itself seems to vibrate with something older than memory, where wood shavings catch the light like amber, and the walls have absorbed decades of breath, of longing, of sound that reaches beyond just Armenian history, as there is so much more to it.The moment Hovanes lifted the duduk to his lips, everything else fell away.
There’s no way to prepare yourself for the first time you hear a duduk played by someone who doesn’t just know the instrument but someone the instrument knows. It’s not music in the way you’ve understood music. It’s not performance. It’s not exactly sound. It’s like standing in front of something raw and ancient that has been waiting for you without knowing your name. The sound that came out wasn’t human. It was more human than anything human could be.
Hovanes Khudaverdyan was born and raised in Yerevan, Armenia. But his real birth, his awakening, came on a summer day in a village when a teenager with no idea what was about to happen met an old neighbor named Zaven who played the duduk. He was thirteen. Just thirteen.
Zaven, the old neighbor, didn’t announce anything grand. He didn’t say, “I’m going to change your life.” He just called the boy over and placed the instrument in his hands. “Let me play for you,” the old man said. Hovanes didn’t know how to hold it. His hands were clumsy. He was young and the instrument was ancient, and he was standing at the threshold of something he couldn’t name.
“When Zaven played, the voice of the duduk got into Hovanes’s heart and soul and didn’t leave.” That’s not poetry. That’s what Hovanes said. That’s what happened. The voice entered him like a living thing. Like it had been searching for him across centuries and finally found him in that village on that summer day when he was thirteen years old and still believed the world made sense. He asked if he could keep it overnight. Just one night. He wanted to stay awake with that voice. He wanted to understand what had just happened to him. Zaven said yes, and Hovanes played all night. When morning came, he tried to return the duduk. Zaven looked at him. this boy whose entire being had been cracked open by a single performance and said, “Keep it.”
Years passed. Zaven’s grandpa died. But Hovanes still has that first duduk. It’s still in his hands. It’s still breathing. It’s simply when an instrument becomes part of your soul. When you ask Hovanes when he realized the duduk was more than an instrument, when he understood it was a whole world the answer comes without hesitation: “The first time when Zaven introduced the duduk to me and I fell in love with the duduk.”
There’s no separation between the moment and the understanding. The moment was the understanding. The love was instant and absolute, and it has never wavered in all the years since. This is what people don’t understand about the duduk. It’s not something you learn to appreciate. It’s something that chooses you. It reaches into your chest and claims a piece of you that was always meant to belong to it. Hovanes knows this in his bones.
When you ask what’s hardest about the duduk, whether it’s the making or the playing, Hovanes’s face grows serious. This is where the tenderness ends and the truth begins, raw and unadorned.
“Both are very hard. You both need years of practice.” But here’s what sits beneath those words like a stone in his chest: “If we look at it practically, there are more players than actual masters who make them. They are rare nowadays.” \u201cThe duduk is dying. Not the instrument, but the knowledge.\u201d The hands that know how to shape it. The ears that can hear when the reed is right. The hearts that understand that you’re not just carving wood; you’re birthing a voice.
Hovanes has spent years learning both: how to play and how to make. He knows the exhaustion of it. He knows the failure, the reeds that crack, the tubes that won’t sing, and the nights when you wonder if you’re wasting your life on something the world doesn’t care about anymore. But he also knows something else: that every master duduk maker who dies takes centuries of knowledge with them. Every young person who chooses a different path is another break in a chain that stretches back to antiquity. This terrifies him. This is the real struggle.
His first performance was “Dle Yaman”a traditional Armenian song that translates to something like heartbreak, longing, or the ache of being alive in a body that can feel. “And it worked,” Hovanes says simply. But what does “worked” mean? It means the reed vibrated correctly. It means the air moved through his body and into the instrument and became something that made people stop and listen. It means, in that moment, he was no longer just Hovanes; he was a vessel for something that had been waiting to speak through him.
When asked what you need to create a good duduk, Hovanes is direct: “You need education and practice.” But then he says something that cuts deeper than any technical instruction could: “The duduk is like an Armenian soul’s voice. It’s the closest to the human voice.”
This is the secret. This is what makes the duduk different from every other instrument that has ever existed. A violin can sing. A cello can weep. A piano can rage. But the duduk doesn’t imitate the human voice it is the human voice stripped of everything except pure emotion.
When you play the duduk, you can’t hide. You can’t fake it. Every tremor in your breath becomes audible. Every doubt, every certainty, every moment of vulnerability becomes sound. The instrument demands that you bring your whole self to it, your pain, your joy, your history, your ancestors’ struggles, the weight of being Armenian, and the weight of being alive. There is no other instrument that makes this demand so completely.
Hovanes is the master of making the duduk’s mouthpiece the very tip that becomes the instrument of the voice itself. He has spent years, and continues to spend years, perfecting this delicate, essential work. The mouthpiece is where the reed becomes breath. Where intention becomes sound. Where the player’s soul meets the wood and air. This is where Hovanes lives. The part that wakes him at three in the morning, palms sweating. He’s given everything to it not because he’s some devoted craftsman chasing perfection, but because the alternative terrifies him. Duduk making has to go on.
His fingers have learned the wood’s secrets over decades. He can feel what it wants to become. But some days the wood refuses him. Some days his hands betray him. That’s when the precision matters most when everything in him wants to rush, to force it, and he has to stop and breathe and trust the process even though trust feels like luxury he can’t afford.
This specialization matters because the mouthpiece determines everything, whether the duduk will sing or merely whisper, whether it will carry the weight of the Armenian soul or fall flat and silent. His perfectionism isn’t vanity; it’s responsibility. Every mouthpiece he crafts is a gateway through which future players will speak.
When he plays, Hovanes has one singular intention: “When I play I want people to feel emotions to the core of the soul.”
Not entertainment. Not a distraction. Not background music for a dinner party. He wants to crack you open. He wants to reach down into the deepest part of you, the part that remembers every loss, every moment of beauty, every time you’ve been broken and had to put yourself back together, and he wants to touch that part with the voice of the duduk.
This is the work. This is why he practices for years. This is why he still carries Zaven’s first duduk. This is why the question of the duduk’s future keeps him awake at night. Because “if the duduk dies, a certain kind of human truth dies with it.” A way of speaking that has no other language. A voice that can only come from Armenia, from centuries of survival, from the particular ache of being a people who have endured and remembered and refused to disappear.
When you ask Hovanes what excites him most about the duduk’s voice, his eyes change. They become older. Deeper. Like he’s looking at something far away or far inside. “It shows Armenian soul’s depth. It brings and also shows history of Armenian struggles.”
The duduk is not a neutral instrument. It carries weight. It carries Armenia, not as a photograph or a historical fact but as lived experience, as the voice of a people who have survived empires, displacement, and loss and still sing. Every note that comes from the duduk is haunted by this. Every breath carries it. The instrument won’t let you forget that when you play it, you’re not making music, you’re bearing witness. You’re keeping alive a way of being, a way of remembering, a way of refusing to disappear.
This is why young Armenians must learn to make the duduk. This is why the knowledge can’t be allowed to die in the hands of the last generation of masters.
The question hangs in the air between us: In the new generation, does the duduk keep it Place? Hovanes’s answer contains both hope and urgency, the two emotions that define him:
“Duduk is alive as long as Armenians live. It’s an instrument that can’t ever be forgotten and it’s part of Armenian being.”
As long as Armenians live, the duduk lives. It cannot be separated. It is woven into the DNA of what it means to be Armenian. This is not sentiment. This is survival. This is identity at its most fundamental level. But then comes the warning: “In new generation there are players. But when it comes to making the duduk we have lack of people that can make it. We need to work on new generation to teach how to make it.”
Players without makers. Voices without the hands that birth them. This is the crisis. This is what keeps Hovanes awake.
The duduk will survive as long as someone is willing to carve it from wood, to shape the reed, to understand that you’re not just making an instrument, you’re making a voice. A witness. A keeper of Armenian truth.
If Hovanes had to reduce the duduk to a single sentence to capture everything it is and everything it means, he would say, “Duduk as the voice of the Armenian soul telling a story.\u201d
Not describing. Not explaining. Telling. The duduk is the instrument that awakens your soul. It is the Armenian soul speaking directly, without intermediary, without translation, telling its story to anyone who has ears to hear.
In April of 2024, the Komitas Museum-Institute in Yerevan hosted an exhibition that understood this truth in its bones. It ran from April 5th through July 5th, and it was called something deceptively simple: an exploration of the connections between reed and territory, between the plant Arundo Donax and the lands that depend on it from the Arux river to the Mediterranean basin. But this wasn’t a botanical display. This wasn’t history tucked safely into glass cases.
The exhibition brought Armenian traditional music into dialogue with French baroque music. It looked at the double reeds that sing in both traditions, the duduk, the zurna, the oboe, and it asked a question that matters more than any other: How do we keep alive the knowledge of the people who make these instruments? How do we preserve not just the music, but the craft? Not just the art, but the artisans?
The exhibition served as a vibrant platform for encounters between historical sources and contemporary practices, between artists and craftsmen who remain devoted to this plant, who breathe life into instruments that become voices.It was, in essence, a resurrection of what organizers called “the society of the “reed”\u2014that ancient, living relationship between humans and nature, between the material world and the spiritual world, between the reed and the voice it contains. The project was supported by the Direction g\u00e9n\u00e9rale de la cr\u00e9ation artistique of the French Ministry of Culture, part of a larger initiative called “Research in music: collaborations between young researchers and artists.”
What this means is that the duduk matters enough that governments, institutions, artists, and researchers are willing to gather around it. To protect it. To ask hard questions about its future. To create spaces where the old knowledge can meet the new generation and say look , this matters.You matter. Learn this. Keep this alive.
Standing in that duduk studio, listening to Hovanes play, you understand something that no amount of research or writing can fully capture, that duduk is not an object. It’s a living inheritance. It’s a voice that has been passed from hand to hand, from generation to generation, carrying within it the weight and the beauty of being Armenian.
Zaven passed his first duduk to Hovanes when Hovanes was thirteen not because he was the best student, not because he’d earned it, but because he was chosen. Because the voice called to him. Because some connections are older than choice.
Now Hovanes must do the same. He must teach. He must play. He must speak urgently about the need for new makers, new guardians. He must keep alive not just a skill, but a way of speaking that the world desperately needs to hear.
The duduk endures because people like Hovanes refuse to let it die. Because even when the world moves on, even when fewer young people are interested, even when the knowledge is rare and the path is hard, he keeps playing. He keeps making. He keeps saying: “Listen. This matters. This is us. This is our soul speaking.”
The voice that enters your heart that first time you truly hear a duduk played by someone who loves it that voice is Zaven’s voice, and Hovanes’s voice, and the voice of Armenia itself, reaching across time, asking you to remember what it means to be human, to feel deeply, and to bear witness to beauty and sorrow intertwined. It’s asking you to listen. Really listen. And if you hear it if that voice gets into your heart the way it got into Hovanes’s heart when he was thirteen then you understand: the duduk isn’t dying. It’s alive. It’s waiting for the next person who will be called to it. The next person brave enough to let it in.
As we wish Hovanes our warmest wishes, a collaboration between Armvault and Hovanes will work to preserve the art of making the duduk’s mouthpiece and beyond. This partnership recognizes what Hovanes has long understood that the knowledge of mouthpiece-making the sacred craft he has spent years perfecting cannot be allowed to disappear. Through this collaboration, the next generation of makers will have the opportunity to learn not just the techniques, but the reverence and precision that defines true mastery.
It’s a gesture that says Your work is important. Your knowledge will be preserved. The chain will not be broken ever.
The duduk lives because Hovanes keeps it alive. And now, through Armvault’s commitment to preserving his craft, it will live for generations still to come.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We met at Hovanes\u2019s Duduk Art Studio, tucked behind a narrow street in Arinj. The kind of place where the air itself seems to vibrate with something older than memory, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":3135,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"hide_page_title":"","inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n