Many famous musicians including Fyodor Shalyapin and Sergei Rachmaninoff visited the family apartment on Merkurievskaya Street.

In 1938 he founded the Armenian State Estrada (Jazz) Orchestra in Yerevan, one of the most popular in the USSR and the only one that survived during the stalinist repressions of the 1940s.

Among his well-known songs are "Jan Yerevan", "Karine", "Get Arax" and "Im Karavan", a melody which became the unofficial anthem of the Karabakh movement in Armenia in 1988.

He is also the author of the Armenian operetta "The Eastern Dentist," (featuring the popular 'Taparnikos's Song') and soundtracks ("Inchu e aghmkum getn?

", "Mor sirtn" Armenian films, "The Snow Queen" Soviet cartoon animation).