ALAN HOVHANESS
Born 8th March 1911, Somerville,
Massachusetts, U.S.A.
Passed over at the Summer
Solstice June
21st 2,000
A composer for our time.
Alan Hovhaness is a highly prolific composer, with 65 symphonies at the last count and Opus
numbers in the 400s, He is well worth investigating. Having arrived at a similar
crisis point in his work as Arvo Part, John Tavener and Henryck Gorecki, except
much earlier in 1940, his works bear comparison but are richer, with a more
inclusive orchestral brush, and more spiritually poetic.
As an introduction, try his 'Fra Angelico' or his ever-popular
Symphony No.2
'Mysterious Mountain' - only make sure that it's the
(sublime - if liberal) version conducted by
Reiner!
Other popular and accessible works are his coupling of Symphony No. 50 'Mount
Saint Helens' with Symphony No 22 'City of Light'.
Hovhaness' music is always positive, uplifting, ennobling and spiritually
nourishing. He often introduces unusual meters whilst his music is largely modal
and always tonal. Nevertheless, within these self-imposed boundaries he allows
himself tremendous creative freedom. To give some idea of what his music
sounds like one could say that the harmonies of some of his music from the 1970s
onwards bears a superficial resemblance to that of the English composer
Vaughan-Williams.
Alan Hovhaness Chakmakjian began his new direction in music with the
development of his ancient Armenian heritage and then extended his research into
music of India and the Far East. In 1959 he received a Fulbright grant as
a Research Scholar to study the Carnatic system of music in South India, and in
1962 a Rockefeller grant to study the ancient court and ceremonial music of the Far
East - Gagaku, Bunraku, and Chicuen Biwa in Japan and Ah-ak in Korea. Part of
his reasons for doing so lay in his conviction that such work offered a clue to
European music during the time of the troubadours. A penchant for baroque
musical techniques helped him to find a firm organising principle for material
and procedures that might otherwise grow amorphous through extended use. As the
composer Henry Cowell stated, it is as though he had skipped the 18th and 19th centuries.
His
spiritual teacher was Hermon DiGiovanno, a Greek mystic painter. In 1943, DiGiovanno guided him into the ancient world of Armenia, Greece, Egypt and India.
Later Masatoro Togi, a great Gagaku musician of Japan, became his teacher who
taught him to play ancient Japanese music and instruments. This detailed
analysis and study of 7th century Armenian religious music, classical music of
South India, orchestral music of Tang Dynasty China, Ah-ak of Korea, and Gagaku
of Japan, revolutionised Hovhaness' approach to his own composing.
Much has been rightly made of the mixed heritage of Alan Hovhaness. The
combination of an Armenian father and Scottish mother acted as converging
cultural streams that shaped the composer's compelling hybrid compositional
style. Attending concerts of Indian classical music in Boston during 1936
also played its part. These performances triggered his interest in various
types of Eastern music, many of which had a tremendous effect on him. Some of these musical
forms have found expression in certain of his works. His is a unique voice that uniquely combines the accents and inflections of East
and West, and of times ancient and modern. Weaving through this quietly powerful
blending of cultures is a deep and poetically reverent love for nature as Spirit manifest.
He certainly created a truly unique and wonderfully beautiful bridge
between the musics of East and West on our little planet. His musical career is most often broken down into four stylistic periods.
Yet if Hovhaness' truly catholic (in the lower case, universal meaning)
aesthetic drew its initial impetus from his parents' contrasting backgrounds,
his outlook on life and music is also remarkably at one with the heritage of New
England. Surely the spirit of Emerson and Thoreau - those still-resonant
Transcendentalists - courses through Hovhaness just as strongly as the blood of
his parents' rich cultures. The Transcendentalists world view, which sees nature
as the living expression of spirit and universal intelligence, and not as
something separate from God, amply defines Hovhaness and his music.
These ideas now enjoy great currency, though recast in New Age and New
Psychology terms. Like Transcendentalism and its variants, Hovhaness' music
fills a spiritual void in the modern world, and truly set the stage for such
contemporary mystic composers as Arvo Part, John Tavener, Henryck Gorecki, Giya kancheli and Einojuhani
Rautavaara. If you like their music, then you must check out Hovhaness. There is a passion in much of Hovhaness' music and a great depth of
spiritual emotion inspired by the fiery love of the divine within his large
heart during what were to be decades of a predominantly intellectual approach to
western classical music as applied in the main by most composers of orchestral
music.
Varied and
complementary as are the sources of his inspiration, a key to his music is his
unfailing melodic sense. "I believe in melody, and to create a melody one
needs to go within oneself," said Hovhaness, adding, "I was very
touched when (composer, friend, and long-time advocate) John Cage said my music
was like inward singing." His melodies are often long and arching, clear
and consonant, generally modal, and run the gamut from Western diatonicism to
rhythmically complex Indian ragas - with many cultural variants woven in. Though
he does not tend to write in some of the traditional Western styles, e.g.,
elaborations on classic sonata-allegro, etc, he is an acknowledged master of
counterpoint. One will hear vibrant echoes of Renaissance polyphony and Baroque
instrumental writing in much of his music. An excellent example of his very long
melodic lines can be found in his Symphony #8
"Arjuna."
He also makes judicious use of dissonance, though always within a tonal or modal
context, and invariably as an expression of resolution-seeking tension. Of
atonal music he has this to say: "To me, (atonal music) is against nature. There
is a centre in everything that exists. The planets have the sun; the moon, the
earth. Music with a centre is tonal. Music without a centre is fine for a minute
or two, but it soon sounds all the same." Though calmly stated, these were
fighting words, especially in the decades preceding our own, (40s, 50s, 60s,
& 70s) which have
witnessed a marked return to tonality.
It is not commonly known that Hovhaness developed a technique that he initially
called 'senza misura' and later 'Spirit Murmur' which appeared for
the first time in 'Lousadzak'
(Coming of Light)
composed in 1943. This was widely imitated by such as Ligeti, Lutoslawski,
Penderecki etc where it was termed 'Aleatoric' music. It features in a
number of pieces ranging from a rather gentle form in 'Meditation
on Orpheus' out to a more powerful rendition as in 'Vishnu'
Symphony #19 and in-between a whole range. Examples
of this can be found on Fra Angelico, And God
Created Great Whales, Island Sunrise, Symphony #23 'Ani', Ode to the Temple
of Sound, Fanfare for the New Atlantis, Ukiyo - Floating World, Meditation on
Zeami, Mountains and Rivers Without End,
Lady of Light, Symphony #15 'Silver Pilgrimage', The Holy City, Return
and Rebuild the Desolate Places, and
Requiem and Resurrection for instance. In the piece
"And God Created Great Whales" Hovhaness
uses a selection of actual recordings of whalesongs interspersed with highly
imaginative orchestral passages. A very moving piece that is also a testimonial
to the enduring power of mother Nature and composed many years before it became
fashionable to include sounds from nature with music.
"Alan Hovhaness, an American composer of Armenian birth, writes
interestingly of the power of ancient music and of the resurrected power which
will be found in music of the future: "Armenian music belongs to the
ancient world when ragas, melody lines, and talas, rhythmic lines,
were main pillars of universal music. When music was melody and rhythm, when
each melodic combination was a gift of the gods, each rhythmic combination was a
mantram to unlock a key of power in nature, then music was one of the mysteries
of the elements, of the planetary systems, of the worlds, visible and invisible.
"The cycle of Western civilisation since the Renaissance has developed
outer laws of music and the outer forces of nature. This knowledge is limited.
It pierces no veil and brings no well-being to the inner life - it offers no
remedy for the disaster of inward disintegration - it leaves the human nucleus
unthreaded, uncentred, unrevealed, with no hope of recovering the form or the
central sun of existence.
"The laws of raga and tala bring attunement with the inner
forces of nature, freedom and from the limitation of consciousness of life and
death, indifference to the storm of broken threads. If it be the end of a cycle,
it is nothing. There have been and will be far nobler
cycles."
Alan Hovhaness.
Quoted from 'Music: The Keynote of Human Evolution' by
Corinne Heline.
"Reviewing a Hovhaness Carnegie Hall concert
in the New York Herald Tribune in 1947, Virgil Thomson wrote of Hovhaness'
music: 'He writes in the early Christian, the medieval, and the modern Armenian
techniques, possibly even a little in the pre-Christian manner of the ancient
and cultivated people. He observes the ancient rules and imitates with modern
violins a sizeable collection of near-Eastern stringed instruments. He even
extends the grammar of composition to include, as it may well have done in Greek
times, held notes against which florid melodies expand at ease and even quintal counterpoint.
It remains oriental and classical, nevertheless, in structure. . . It's expressive function is predominantly religious, ceremonial,
incantatory, its spiritual content of the purest.... The high quality of the
music, the purity of its inspiration, is evidenced in the extreme beauty of the
melodic material, which is original material, not collected from folklore, and
in the perfect sweetness of taste it leaves in the mouth.... It brings delight
to the ear, and pleasure to the thought. For all its auditory complexity - for
ornateness is of the essence - it is utterly simple in feeling, pure in spirit
and high-minded.'"
Fred Grunfeld: "The
most dynamic balance yet struck between East and West occurs in the music of
Alan Hovhaness, an American composer of Armenian-Scottish descent who has made
the most of both possible worlds. Like the architecture of San Marco in Venice,
his music draws its strength from the confluence of two strong currents in art,
and the net effect is splendidly Byzantine."
Arthur Cohn:
"Hovhaness has a unique status among all American composers, past and
present. No other person has identified himself so fully with Eastern music. .
. His picturesque ideas call for odd combinations and severely drawn
forms. . . No propaganda need be made for this solitary creator in
present-day music life."
Olin Downes: "The
oriental melisma inheres in Mr. Hovhaness' melodic line. But he writes also in
counterpoint that is not academic and that is based upon other scale forms than
our major and minor. His utterance is by turns mystical, fiery, prophetic, and
always of a lofty character."
Rudolph Elie: "A
conviction I have long held, which is that Alan Hovhaness stands almost alone
today among Americans as a composer born with the mantle of genius, was
reinforced on a nearly transcendental level yesterday afternoon. . . It is
a highly personal expression. . . It is the musical expression of a man of
enormous integrity and enormous talent."
New York Herald Tribune:
"This tall, timid man whose Lincolnesque stoop gives an impression of
wisdom and gentleness, gets exactly what he wants from his players. All the fire
in his nature, and there is much, seems to be withdrawn from his person and
given forth in a message of great repose and purity, witha kind of passion of
the mind."
Virgil Thomson: The whole
is as leisurely as a church service
and every bit as impressive. Nor does its extension pall, so subtle is its
variety, so intense its communication. That communication is both ritual and
rhapsodic. . . transported the listener far from the concert circumstance, set
him down in some evoked Armenian holy site, rested and refreshed and wholly in
tune."
"No other writer of music today can so quickly
transport one to a pastoral scene. The locale of this scene might be Biblical,
or it might be classical Greece. . . He makes music at once ancient and
modern, music with sweetness of sound. . . with a great power to
transport."
Alan Hovhaness Suggested recordings: -
-
CRYSTAL RECORDS CD
801 Symphony No 11 etc
-
CRYSTAL RECORDS
CD804 Fra Angelico etc
-
CRYSTAL RECORDS
CD805 Symphony No 19 'Vishnu'
-
CRYSTAL RECORDS
CD806 Lady of Light - Oratorio
-
CRYSTAL RECORDS
CD810 Music of Alan Hovhaness
-
DELOS
3137
Symphony No 50 & Symphony No 22
-
Mount St Helens and City of Light
-
RCA/VICTOR 09026 69572 Symphony No 2 'Mysterious
Mountain'
-
Fritz Reiner & Chicago Symphony Orchestra
-
-
Many of the above are also conducted by Alan
Hovhaness whilst most of these titles should be available from
Amazon.com. To order from them, visit their site and click on Music and then
Classical and then Alan Hovhaness - follow the link here: Amazon
OR
There is an excellent and far more extensive site
entirely dedicated to Alan
Hovhaness by Marco Shirodkar with links to Amazon from there. To visit this
site follow the link here: Hovhaness
You may like to read my article SOME MUSINGS ON
ANAHATA NADA which also features Alan Hovhaness' music. Click
HERE
©
Copyright by Frank Perry 2000. All rights reserved.
©
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