Alan Hovhaness

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Alan Hovhaness (March 8, 1911-2000), an American composer, was born in England.

He was one of the twentieth century's most popular composers, with his official catalog containing 67 numbered symphonies (surviving manuscripts show over 70% and 434 opus numbers).

Since several opus numbers include two or more distinct works, the true count is well over 500 in number. "Although he has been portrayed as a self-consciously Armenian composer (rather than Ernest Bloch is seen as a Jewish composer), his work assimilates the music of many cultures."

What may be the most American about all of it is the way it converts its materials into a sort of exoticism.

The atmosphere is hushed, reverential, mythical, nostalgic.

Early life

Alan Vaness Chakmakhian (Armenian: ) in Somerville, Massachusetts, to Haroutioun Hokmakjian (an Armenian chemistry professor at Tufts College who had been born in Adana, Turkey) and Madeleine Scott (an American of Scottish descent who had graduated from Wellesley College). Since he was five years old, his family moved from Somerville to Arlington, Massachusetts. His mother had to leave Somerville because of racial discrimination against Armenians there, according to a Hovhaness family neighbor. After her death (on October 3, 1930), he began to use the surname "Hovaness" in honor of his paternal grandfather's name and shortened it to "Hovhaness" in honor of his grandfather, who died around 1944. According to him, the name change from the original Chakmakjian reflected the desire to simplify his name because "nobody ever pronounced it correctly." However, Hovhaness' daughter Jean Nandi wrote in her book Unconventional Wisdom, "My father's name at the time of my birth was 'Hovaness,', pronounced with accent on the first syllable. His initial name was 'Chakmakjian', but in the 1930s, he wanted to get rid of the Armenian connection and so changed his name to an Americanized version of his middle name. It was some years ago when he re-establishing his Armenian links, he changed the spelling to 'Hovhaness' accent on the second syllable; this was the name by which he later became well-known."

Hovhaness was involved in music from a young age. He created his first composition, a cantata in the early Italian style influenced by Franz Schubert's song. His family was worried about his late-night composition and the artist's financial future. He took up astronomy, one of his earliest passions, for a short time. The fascination of astronomy remained with him throughout his life and writing career, with some works named after various planets and stars.

Hovhaness' parents began assisting their son's precocious writing and started teaching piano lessons with a neighborhood tutor. Hovhaness' piano studies with Adelaide Proctor and then Heinrich Gebhard continued. He devoted himself to composition by age 14. Among his early musical experiences were Baptist hymns and recordings of Gomidas Vartabed, an eminent Armenian composer. During his teenage years, he performed two operas at Arlington High School, and composer Roger Sessions showed an interest in his music at that time. He studied with Leo Rich Lewis at Tufts and then at the New England Conservatory of Music after graduating from high school in 1929. He won the Conservatory's Samuel Endicott prize for composition with his Sunset Symphony in 1932 (also called Sunset Saga).

Hovhaness and his first wife, Martha Mott Davis, travelled to Finland in July 1934 to visit Jean Sibelius, whose music he had adored since childhood. For the next two decades, the two teams continued to correspond for the next 20 years. After Jean Christian Sibelius, her godfather and Hovhaness' companion for three decades, Hovhaness named his daughter and his only child from his first marriage, Jean Christina Hovhaness, in 1935.

Hovhaness destroyed a large portion of his earlier works during the 1930s and 1940s. He later claimed to have burned at least 1,000 different pieces, a process that took at least two weeks; elsewhere, he said he had destroyed 500 scores totaling as many as 1,000 pages. In an interview with Richard Howard, he said that the decision was mainly based on Sessions' criticism of his work of the time and that he wanted to get off to a new start in composition.

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Musical career

In 1940, Hovhaness became interested in Armenian culture and music as organist for the St. James Armenian Apostolic Church in Watertown, Massachusetts, where he has served in this position for almost ten years. In 1942, he received a scholarship at Tanglewood to study in Czech composer Bohuslav Martin's master class. Aaron Copland spoke clearly in Spanish to Latin-American composers in the audience, and after the recording, he rebuked the work as "cheap ghetto music." Following that huge disappointment, evidently enraged and distraught by this experience, he left Tanglewood early, abandoning his education and destroying a number of his works.

In particular, he devoted himself to Armenian music for several years, receiving some renown and the support of other musicians, including radical experimental composer John Cage and choreographer Martha Graham, while still serving as the church organist.

Hovhaness, Hyman Bloom and Hermon di Giovanno, two artists friends, met regularly to address spiritual and musical topics beginning in the mid-1940s. All three of them had a keen interest in Indian classical music, and they welcomed many well-known Indian musicians to Boston to perform. Hovhaness learned to play the sitar while interacting with amateur Indian musicians in the Boston area during this period. Bloom introduced Hovhaness to Yenovk Der Hagopian, a fine singer of Armenian and Kurdish troubadour songs whose singing inspired Hovhaness around 1942.

Hovhaness introduced his credentials at the time of application in one of many attempts for a Guggenheim fellowship (1940).

Lou Harrison analyzed a 1945 concert of Hovhaness' music, which included his 1944 concerto for piano and strings, titled Lousadzak.

However, there were also critics, as before:

Lousadzak was Hovhaness' first work to perform an experimental style he named "spirit murmur," an early example of aleatoric music influenced by Hermon di Giovanno's vision. The process, which is essentially identical to Lutos' ad libitum aleatory, requires instruments to repeat words in an uncoordinated manner, resulting in a complex "cloud" or "car" of sounds.

Members of the immigrant Armenian community, who sponsored several high-profile concerts of his music, greatly enhanced Hovhaness' fame in New York in the mid-1940s. The Friends of Armenian Music Committee, led by Hovhaness' friends Dr. Elizabeth A. Gregory, the Armenian American piano/violin pair Maro Ajemian and Anahid Ajemian, and Anahid Ajemian and Anahid Ajemian, and Anahid Ajemian and Anahid Ajemian, and Anahid Ajemian, and then Anahid A. Gregory, Anahid Ajemian, and later Anahid Ajemian Their support pushed Hovhaness' music onto many MGM and Mercury records in the 1950s, putting him squarely on the American musical scene.

Hovhaness created Etchmiadzin, an Armenian opera commissioned by a local Armenian church, between May and June 1946 while staying with an Armenian family.

He joined the Boston Conservatory faculty in 1948 and spent there until 1951. Sam Rivers and Gigi Gryce, jazz guitarists, were among his students at the academy.

In 1951, Hovhaness moved to New York City, where he became a full-time composer. He worked for Voice of America in the Armenian section first as a script writer and composer, as well as as a musician, composer, and musical consultant for the Near East and Transcaucasian sections, beginning on August 1. When Dwight D. Eisenhower succeeded Harry S. Truman as the president of the United States in 1953, he eventually resigned from this position (along with a large number of other employees). He developed out of Armenian music by adopting styles and content from a number of sources from this period. He was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in composition in 1953 and 1954, as shown by these pages. Clifford Odets' score for the Broadway play The Flowering Peach was written by him in 1954, a ballet for Martha Graham (Ardent Song, also in 1954), and two NBC documentaries on India and Southeast Asia (1955 and 1957). He also wrote for Theatre performances in the 1950s.

His first breakthrough since then came in 1955, when his Symphony No. No. Nicolle was introduced. 2. Mysterious Peak, Leopold Stokowski's debut with the Houston Symphony, but the notion that Mysterious Mountain was paid for by the orchestra is inaccurate. MGM Records also released recordings of a number of his artists in the same year. Howard Hanson, an admirer of his music, taught summer sessions at the Eastman School of Music from 1956 to 1958, long before Hanson.

Hovhaness's voyages from 1959 to 1963 carried out a series of research trips to India, Hawaii, Japan, and South Korea, looking at the ancient traditional music of these countries and then incorporating elements of them into his own compositions. A Fulbright fellowship funded his study of Carnatic music in Madras, India (1959-60), during which he collected more than 300 ragas. He learned to play the veena and composed a piece for Carnatic orchestra Nagoran, inspired by a visit to Nagore by the South Indian Orchestra of All India Radio Madras and broadcast on All-India Radio on February 3, 1960. He assembled a slew of articles on Carnatic ragas in preparation for a book but never finished it.

In the spring of 1962, he began studying Japanese gagaku music (ethical, sh, and ryteki), and a Rockefeller Foundation award enabled him to further gagaku studies with Masataro Togi in Japan (1962–63). He also lived and played in Japan, focusing on the nagauta (kabuki) shamisen and the jruri (bunraku) shamisen. He wrote Fantasy on Japanese Woodprints, Op. 27, in honor of the musical styles he encountered in Japan. 211 (1965), a concerto for xylophone and orchestra.

Circe is Martha Graham's second ballet score.

The Poseidon Society, which he and his then wife established, also established a record label dedicated to the publication of his own works. Its first appearance in 1963 appeared in a television, with around 15 discs surviving over the next decade. Crystal Records acquired the rights to this catalog following their separation.

He traveled to Russia, Soviet-controlled Georgia, and Armenia in 1965, the first time he visited his paternal ancestral homeland. He donated his handwritten manuscripts of harmonized Armenian liturgical music to Yerevan's Yeghishe Charents State Museum of Arts and Literature.

He spent several summers in Europe, including living and working in Switzerland.

In a 1971 interview in Ararat's newspaper, Hovhaness wrote: "I am a writer who writes about Hovhaness."

In 1951, Hovhaness was admitted to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, where he was awarded an honorary D.M. Bates College (1959) and the Boston Conservatory (1987) are among the degrees earned at the University of Rochester (1958). In the early 1970s, he immigrated to Seattle, where he lived for the remainder of his life. He wrote his third and final ballet score for Martha Graham in 1973: Myth of a Voyage, and he made no new symphonies in the next ten years (between 1973 and 1992).

In 1975, he created The Rubaiyat, A Musical Setting, which was intended for narrator and orchestra and has been republished twice. Rubaiyat refers to the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a Persian mathematician, astronomer, and poet.

In 1981, at Lou Harrison's behest, he composed two works for the Indonesian gamelan orchestra that were premiered by the gamelan at Lewis & Clark College under the direction of Vincent McDermott.

Hovhaness' sixth wife, the coloratura soprano Hinako Fujihara Hovhaness, is survived by him (b. ). Jean Nandi (b. 1932), the harpsichordist who runs the Hovhaness-Fujihara music publishing company [1], as well as his daughter (from his first wife). 1935 (Japan) :

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