Eve Egoyan is an internationally active Canadian pianist and composer of Armenian heritage. She has released over a dozen solo CDs concentrating on contemporary repertoire by Canadian and international composers, including many works commissioned for her. During the past 15 years, Egoyan has explored the use of cutting-edge technology to expand the expressive possibilities of the acoustic piano and incorporate real-time audio and visual effects into live performance. More recently, she has been researching and performing music by Armenian composers. Her fellowship research project is titled In Stone. Eve is the JHI's 2025-26 Artist in Residence.
What are your main research interests?
I am a pianist, composer and improviser. I have always dreamed in sound and challenged what I am capable of expressing at the piano. This desire to extend the piano has led me to transform the acoustic piano.
By using an optical sensor that tracks the movement of piano keys, I am able to reveal sounds I have recorded and to manipulate a flexible software simulation of an acoustic piano. In this way, I can augment and extend the sound range of the piano while maintaining the physical relationship that exists between piano and pianist.
I consider the instrument I perform on a self-portrait. For my JHI project, the augmented acoustic piano I have designed holds my ancestral past (recordings of Armenian folkloric instruments), present (a recent field recording and voices of close friends) and an unknown future (explorative use of AI to “speak” the unspeakable by inverting my voice into piano).
What project are you working on at the JHI and why did you choose it?
I have composed “In Stone”, in response to Jackman Humanities Institute’s annual theme "Dystopia and Trust". “In Stone” is a new work for augmented acoustic piano reflecting on the Armenian Genocide. I am deeply grateful to the Jackman Humanities Institute and the Faculty of Music for inviting me to go on this artistic journey.
From 1915 to 1923, more than 1.5 million Armenians were killed, and half a million survivors were exiled by the Ottoman Empire. The widespread violence, forced deportations, starvation, and mass killings inflicted upon the Armenian population, which still remains unacknowledged by its perpetrators and successor states, became a template for subsequent genocides.
It is excruciatingly painful for Armenians to have to defend the truth of the Armenian genocide and, in our own lifetime, of ethnic cleansing of Armenians in Artsakh, the Nagorno-Karabakh region now occupied by Azerbaijan.
How can I as an artist express this unspeakable past in this equally distressing present moment?
My ancestors live deeply in my soul. “In Stone” is an attempt to sing their song amidst the plethora of human songs that need to be heard in our time. Nature herself is singing loudly to us through climate change.
“In Stone” attempts to situate nature as a witness to human atrocity.
I share my Armenian story by bringing into this composition fragments from sacred ancient Armenian hymns, pastoral and folkloric songs, and folkloric instruments. The songs and hymns are fragmented to express a feeling of both presence and loss. The meandering feeling of the compositional form echoes the wandering tradition of troubadour storytelling.
On Armenian ancestral lands there remain hand-carved stones including Khachkars, our crosses, and remnants of our stone churches. Through carved inscriptions and images they literally hold the Armenian language and artistic imagination within them, carrying our words, our prayers, our essence, held “In stone” through time past to time present and into the future.
These stone remains are scattered across the landscape like diasporic Armenians are scattered across the world. Gardens and orchards planted by Armenians on the historical land of Western Armenia remain.
The title of my work, “In Stone”, refers to stones on ancient land holding resonances of the past, the past both human and non-human. I trust in nature as witness and guardian of the truth.
How has your JHI Fellowship experience been so far?
My JHI Fellowship has been delight-FULL. The presentations at our weekly lunches have been engaging, surprising and stimulating. When I describe my residency to close friends, it is hard to express the many and broad range of responses to "Dystopia and Trust" I have experienced during my residency. As a musician outside of the JHI, I am mostly surrounded by a community of artists. Academics engage within their fields with similar curiosity and obsessiveness but from a different perspective. Artists and academics both spend a lot of time alone exploring relatively obscure things(!). I have found new kinships.
Why do you believe the humanities are important?
All forms of human learning are important. However, the rise of the computer and AI have increased our fascination with numbers. Things that do not involve numbers are more under threat. Areas of learning where things cannot be quantified or proven are becoming undervalued.
Our gatherings at JHI where we share wildly diverse forms of information pertaining to the human story are antithetical to the times we live in. The opportunity at the JHI to branch outside of one’s own world is unusual. The JHI embraces listening and broadening rather than narrowing. Listening is fundamental to collaborating effectively as we move forward together into an uncertain future.
Can you share something you read/watched/listened to recently that you enjoyed/were inspired by?
I am inspired by the book Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy.
I loved the fierceness of the female protagonist, Franny, her mixture of human and non-human characteristics, her wild love of the sea. We follow her journey following the last Arctic terns in a world in which their journey might be their final migration to Antarctica. It is an extremely compelling piece of fiction from a climate change perspective.
What's a fun fact about you?
I am learning my mother tongue, Armenian, but not from my Mother. I know this does not seem like a fun fact but I think it is funny and strange. The Armenian that I am learning is from the “tongue” of a stranger. In our household, Armenian was spoken as a secret language between my parents. It is very funny to me to learn as an adult the meaning of words that I heard my parents use when I was a child. “Tootoom calookh” for example, means eggplant head. Perhaps “tootoom calookh” could be my new JHI nickname as I do love eggplant.