Yeghiazaryan was born to an Armenian peasant family[2] in the village of Blur, Erivan Governorate, Russian Empire (today Enginalan, Iğdır Province, Turkey), on December 21, 1908.
"For the first time, after the privations and misfortunes endured by the Armenian people, there was hope for salvation and we could finally live in peace", he told an interviewer for Soviet Music in 1984.
This comment led to a creative crisis, which coincided with ongoing debates as to how to develop the emerging music from the non-Russian Soviet republics.
It also led to numerous reworkings of "Dance", which culminated in a final version entitled Concert-Poem for violin and orchestra that was composed in 1981 for Ruben Aharonyan.
Another incident occurred during an open audition of new works by conservatory students, during which Yeghiazaryan was harshly criticized for his perceived modernism by the rector, Bolesław Przybyszewski.
[9] In 1944, Yeghiazaryan's symphonic poem Armenia was performed at the Festival of Music of the Transcaucasian Republics in Tbilisi, where it was considered the highlight work.
In 2018, the Armenian State Symphony Orchestra retrieved and digitized a number of manuscripts, which they performed that year at a festival dedicated to the composer's music and legacy.
[7] From early in his career, Yeghiazaryan prioritized composing orchestral music which depicted aspects of Armenian life and culture.
He cited the contrasting examples of Mikhail Glinka and Sergei Prokofiev as two composers who found inspiration in folk music, while retaining their individuality.
[6] Yeghiazaryan was appreciative of modernism and the need to seek new ideas, he told Soviet Music, though he was critical of polystylism; a technique that he said reduced a composer to dependency on their source material.