In 1946, while still a student of
Édouard Dethier at the
Juilliard Graduate School of Music, Ajemian won the
Walter W. Naumburg Foundation Award. In the same year, she made her debut at Town Hall and received the Distinguished Achievement Medal from
Mademoiselle magazine as the
Young Woman of the Year in Music. Among the many honors that have followed, the
Order of St. James appointed her a Knight of Malta for her lifelong support of contemporary classical music. In 1947, she was a soloist with the
Naumburg Orchestral Concerts, in the Naumburg Bandshell, Central Park, in the summer series. With her pianist sister
Maro Ajemian, she performed in
Europe,
Canada and throughout the United States in a wide repertoire including works which were written for them by such distinguished composers as
John Cage,
Henry Cowell,
Alan Hovhaness,
Ernst Krenek,
Lou Harrison,
Wallingford Riegger,
Carlos Surinach, and
Ben Weber. Together and separately, the Ajemian sisters recorded extensively for Columbia, RCA Victor, MGM and Composers Records, Inc. They were the first musicians to receive the
Laurel Leaf Award of the
Composers Alliance for Distinguished Service to American Music. Ajemian and her sister were equally known for their interpretations of the standard classical repertoire. A unique feature of the many television programs they taped for NBC's
Recital Hall and the
National Educational Television Network was their series of programs comprising the complete cycle of all ten Beethoven Sonatas for Violin and Piano. They appeared as soloists under the batons of
Dimitri Mitropoulos,
Leopold Stokowski and
Izler Solomon, and recorded with the latter two. Also during the 1940s, Ajemian co-founded the New York City-based organization Friends of Armenian Music Committee, which did much to launch the career of fellow Armenian-American composer
Alan Hovhaness, via a series of well-received New York concerts of his music. These concerts were repeated in Boston, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Ajemian and her husband,
George Avakian, started Music for Moderns, a Town Hall, in 1957. In the mid-sixties, Ajemian and her fellow violinist
Matthew Raimondi founded the
Composers String Quartet at the suggestion of
Gunther Schuller, which quickly earned an international reputation and toured in more than 26 countries, including the Soviet Union, India, the Middle East, Africa, Australia, Japan, Southeast Asia and China. The Composers String Quartet recorded extensively for the
Musical Heritage Society,
Nonesuch Records,
Composers Recordings, Inc. and
Columbia Records among many others. The Quartet's 1970 recording of
Elliott Carter's "First and Second Quartets" was honored by a Grammy nomination, received "Stereo Review's "Best Chamber Music Recording of the Year" Award, and was acclaimed by
High Fidelity as "Best Quartet of the Year" and one of the "Fifty Greatest Albums of the Decade."
Time magazine called it "an astonishingly brilliant and unique achievement." ==Teaching==