The Armenian priest, musicologist, composer and musician Soghomon Soghomonian (1869-1935), known as Komitas, was the originator of the modern Armenian school of composition and forerunner of ethnomusicology. Through composer Makar Yekmalyan in Tiflis, Komitas became acquainted with European compositional techniques; he then went to study in Berlin. He was a contemporary of Bartók, and Debussy considered him brilliant: ‘I bow before your musical genius!’ Komitas was a master of the scholarly subdisciplines that have surrounded old forms of Armenian music geographically and historically. Komitas visited different regions of Armenia and wrote down thousands of Armenian, Kurdish, Persian and Turkish songs. In many parts of the world, he propagandized Armenian music by giving lectures but also as a musician: he was active as a choir director, singer, flutist and pianist. In 1904, he published the very first anthology of Kurdish folksongs. During the persecution of the Armenian intelligentsia, Komitas was deported in 1915 to Anatolia, where he witnessed the killing of his companions. He was rescued with the help of influential people and spent the last 20 years of his life, a broken man, in a Parisian psychiatric clinic.