Anna Sara Poghosyan is the voice of the Armenian highlands.
Anna was born and raised in Yerevan in a family from the Armenian Highlands; her father’s family from Javakhk and her mother’s from Tavush. That mix of regional influences, she adds, has shaped who she is as a person and as an artist, giving her music an emotional palette that draws from distinct local traditions and memories.
Music entered Anna’s life virtually from the cradle. By age two, the child was repeating the lullabies her mother sung, and afternoons spent with her Javakhk grandmother, who would hold her in her arms and sing and rock her, made for an early imprint of song and movement. Those household situations of song and dance, repeated across childhood, created a living repository of melodic fragments and vocal timbres that would return in her adult work. Anna recalls those moments as not just comfortable, but formative, an instinctive method of acquiring phrase, rhythm and storytelling through voice.
Anna herself draws constant inspiration from the Armenian countryside. Mountains, hills and valleys are not just landscapes, but the spiritual center of her work. In 2020, she created a personal brand, LerAnē ( “Anna in the Mountains”) and has since taken up mountaineering as a hobby and an art form. Singing at altitude is a different, transcendental experience for her, changing phrasing and breath and adding a different type of resonance to songs she knows. She calls these outdoor concerts a dialogue with place: the echo of a canyon or the silence of a ridge is part of the music, and the physical strain of climbing sharpens the emotional honesty of the voice.
Her formal musical education started at the age of six, when her parents enrolled her in piano lessons. She studied piano for seven years at the Ghazaros Aghayan Music School and then pop vocal performance for four years at the Arno Babajanyan Music College. She recalls about having “suffered” through those piano years, and now struggles to remember things she once knew, but the training gave her a technical foundation discipline in practice, sight reading and awareness of harmony that today informs her arrangements and composition. Upon graduation, her involvement with ethnographic song and dance ensembles deepened her engagement with folk repertory, performance practice and communal musical rituals.
Her style journey has been one of exploration. Anna has tried with pop, jazz and blues, but it was folklore that eventually won over. “Folk music is where I feel most authentic,” she explains, allowing herself to connect with tale, language and the ancestral vocal inflections of her regions. In recent years she has also been influenced by the textures of eastern and Middle Eastern music and this has led her to a stage identity best described as folk fusion. The hybrid method keeps the classic melodic bones, but adds modern rhythms, modal ornamentation and cross cultural instrumentation. She is also intimately connected with the daf, a frame drum she mostly taught herself to play as its percussive heartbeat now underlies many of her compositions and live presentations.
Anna is open to collaboration. She enjoys creative collaborations that deliver beauty and longevity, seeing each partnership as an opening to new connections and chances. She has collaborated with instrumentalists, producers and other vocalists to explore the limits of blending old modes with modern beats or re-imagine a village lament as an intimate, contemporary ballad. But she’s very early in her recording career and sees these collaborative encounters with groups and individual musicians as significant milestones on a path she believes is just beginning. She’s still interested in cross genre ventures that honor source material but take a new route acoustically.
Live performance is really important. The most touching moments on the stage for Anna are those when there is real communication with the audience. When listeners are attentive, feel the music and respond really. She explains that when the energy is returned, it fills the performer; without it, the experience might feel hollow. She loves places that create intimacy, tiny rooms, cultural centers, outdoor mountain gatherings where the nuances of vocal intonation and traditional storytelling may be completely experienced. At the same time, she is excited about the task of taking folk content to larger events and the international stage, while retaining its core.
Anna has created some originals, but she likes her very first composition the best, written over a decade ago, at the time she initially dove into folk music. The music is under production and will be released on streaming services soon, she says, a project she approaches with shyness and eagerness. For her, writing is often emergent, musical ideas emerging from long walks, field recordings or the echo of an old family melody reframed by a new lyric. She is planning future releases that will incorporate historical material, modern collaborators and location specific recordings recorded in the mountains as well as solo works.
Anna has a name that brings to mind mountains and a voice influenced by family, landscape and research, and she is creating an original space within contemporary folk fusion. Her career, still in the making, promises more collaborations, concerts on high ridges and studio releases that resonate the complex cultural influences of the Armenian Highlands. As she continues to integrate ancestral song with present day emotions, Anna exemplifies an artist honoring heritage, while still seeking fresh ways to make it connect with modern audiences.