Nagorno-Karabakh, the final volume of The Music of Armenia series serves an important extramusical funtion. It is the same function served by Parsons' previous series' The Music of Cambodia and The Music of Vietnam - namely to bring a largely unsuspecting Western audience a document of the cultural richness of a region usually thought of as a bombed-out war zone. "My own preconceptions were wildly inaccurate," Parsons says; "Images of gun-toting fierce mountain fighters largely uneducated and living by the rule of the gun. How utterly wrong I was, and I feel great sadness that the rest of the world probably thinks along similar lines."