This would get him in trouble with Russian authorities forcing his chorus out of Shushi where they went on to spread Armenian cultural music around the world.

The young musician received wide recognition in the city and for his beautiful voice he was nicknamed Ghali Bulbul (Armenian: Ղալի Բյուլբուլ, lit.

[a][5][6] Originating from a line of musicians, he studied music professionally from 1891 to 1895 at the Gevorgian Academy in Echmiadzin, near Yerevan, with Soghomon Soghomonian (later known as Komitas Vardapet), with whom he became friends and a long-time collaborator.

With the money he made from the concert, he moved to St. Petersburg,[8] where he studied music from 1895 to 1904 with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Alexander Glazunov and Anatoly Lyadov.

In 1904, he moved to Tbilisi where he taught at the Nersisian School until 1908, gathering Armenian folk songs from Turkey and Iran.

[1] Suni's music evoked a lot of folk symbolism such as in his work Alagyaz (Ալագյազ) where he draws a relationship to the melody and the mountainside of the Aragats mountains for which the song is named.

Because of this, he was frequently persecuted for the political nature of his works by fellow Armenian nationalists and under constant threat of arrest.

This would culminate into his eventual exile into the United States where he spent the rest of his life and joined the Armenian communist party of America, the Harajdimakan.