
People who know the mild-mannered artist and musicologist Bedros Alahaidoyan would never dream of using the adjective "rebel" to describe him. Please give the benefit of a doubt and read on.
I met him, for the first time, about three months ago. He and his wife had graciously accepted our invitation for a lunch at my mother’s house in Los Angeles. However, I knew of Bedros long before that.



People who know the mild-mannered artist and musicologist Bedros Alahaidoyan would never dream of using the adjective "rebel" to describe him. Please give the benefit of a doubt and read on.
I met him, for the first time, about three months ago. He and his wife had graciously accepted our invitation for a lunch at my mother’s house in Los Angeles. However, I knew of Bedros long before that.
Bedros’s interest did not make much sense or sit well with the members of the downtown’s Armenian business community who knew and related to each other much like the members of a clan would, even though they competed ferociously in business. They were a business force to reckon with, if not the predominant businessmen of the area. Their opinion mattered. My father worked at and later ran Hotel Lux on Allenby Street, a walking distance from Pharmacie de la Paix where I had been many times with my father. He would never fail to point out to me how good the lot of a pharmacist could be in Beirut.
The ’60s was the era of the Woodstock, “do not trust anyone over thirty” and of the “flower power” generation. Music to the young and the restless of the ’60s was an instrument of the counterculture, if you will. It was the era of rebels without much of a cause. I thought of Bedros as the son of the well-to-do family pursuing his “thing” in Europe. Little did I know of what I found over the last decade or two about Bedros’ real vocation during those years. I realize now how wrong my perceptions of him were then.
Bedros did study pharmacy in Belgium, but rather than engage in the profession, he continued his studies in music. He graduated as a musicologist from the State University in Brussels and worked at the state-run radio. However, his mission was to salvage Armenian folk songs from their inevitable loss, due to the passing away of the displaced survivors of the Genocide of Armenians.
In early ’70s he embarked on his mission to collect Armenian folk songs. Initially, he collected the folk songs of Kurdified Armenians who had settled in Belgium and in Holland. He then expanded his search by visiting other European, American and Middle Eastern cities and their Armenian seniors’ homes. His decades-long endeavors culminated in the publication of “An Ethno-Musicological Collection of Palou and its Neighboring Areas” in 2009.
The book is in hard cover with a dust jacket depicting an actual Armenian inscription in Palou. It is in Western Armenian and is printed in Yerevan with easily readable fonts over good quality white paper. One does not need to be a musicologist to be impressed by the
Alahaidoyans live in Glendale, California where Bedros pursues his calling with a youthful passion and the continued support of Violet. Their email address is [email protected].