Ken Hunt News July 2000

Alan Hovhaness The composer and pianist Alan Hovhaness died at the age of 89 on 21 June 2000. Hovhaness composed for a myriad of contexts. He wrote prolifically, composing for symphonic settings, for full orchestra or chamber orchestra, for stage works including opera and ballet, for all manner of instrumental settings and for the voice in accompanied and unaccompanied choirs and for solo voices. For example, on his last album, Khaldis (Crystal Records CD814) named after the pre-Armenian, Urarduan god of the universe and released shortly before his death, there was a concerto for piano, four trumpets and percussion ("Khaldis, Opus 91"), "Mount Katahdin, Opus 405" played by the pianist Martin Berkofsky and the composer playing piano on his own "Fantasy, Opus 16". The first two pieces were originally Poseidon releases while Hovhaness's performance dated from the July before his death. Crystal Records (28818 NE Hancock Road, Camas, WA 98607, USA) was the label that did so much to raise and restore awareness about Hovhaness's compositions.

Alan Hovhaness was the name he went under for most of his creative life. Born on 8 March 1911 in Somerville, Massachusetts, he was christened Alan Hovhaness Chakmakjian and was of mixed Armenian and Scottish stock. He was largely self-taught but had a wonderful knack for soaking up non-conformist musical influences, both from western and non-western sources. In this way he was a similar spirit to his fellow American, the composer Henry Cowell. In the early 1930s Hovhaness studied at the New England Conservatory of Music after winning a scholarship there. He studied with Frederick Converse, a composer and figure in the arts whose work was receiving a fair degree of acclaim and attention during this period but whose work has been relegated to footnote status since. Around this time Hovhaness encountered a musical tradition that would cause him to adjust the tuning of his ears. This was Indian music. Its sonorities would not immediately colour his compositions. In 1936 he went to a performance by the dancer Uday Shankar. Among the people performing in his renowned dance company was the teenage Ravi Shankar, soon to be caught on the horns of a dilemma, namely whether to opt for a career as a dancer or a musician. Many years later, Hovhaness would write the sleeve notes for one of Ravi Shankar's US releases. Once he said that he was "writing Armenian music with an Indian slant"; either way both cultures profoundly informed his music.

Hovhaness had a bad experience in the early 1940s, when his compositions were criticised by Aaron Copland and Lukas Foss at Tanglewood. Hovhaness took stock of this criticism. During the early 1940s he would destroy much of his existing work. Armenian musical influences coloured his imagination. The orthodox Armenian Christian church in Watertown, Massachusetts played its part in his rethinking of music. Armenian art music has a modal heart and he concurrently nurtured an interest in the modal art music of his father's homeland and that of the Indian subcontinent. This was something quite unusual and typified his assimilation of the musics of other cultures. Similarly the work of the Armenian composer Komitas Vartabed (1869-1936) whose work was largely unknown outside Armenia. Hovhaness kept body and soul together by playing the organ at church and teaching music. But things improved.

During the 1950s he enjoyed some success, his works forming part of that American movement that wafted alternative ways of thinking around the world. Cage was experimenting. Cowell was experimenting. Hovhaness was experimenting too. In 1959 he received a Fulbright fellowship and travelled to India. Around 1960 Hovhaness's composing took yet another direction, as he embraced the 'otherness' of Japan and Korea and the music of those two cultures. Far Eastern music and the philosophies often implicit in those traditions fed his mind. The Japanese traditions of gagaku (a court music genre) and noh (a dramatic form) would lead to further ideas and applications in a western context. Reviewing his eighth symphony, "Arjuna", the Indian musicologist P. Sambamoorthy opined in The Hindu that it represented "a new fertile and untrodden field." Hovhaness delighted in the natural world too. His "And God Created Great Whales" from 1970 uses both orchestra and pre-recorded humpback 'music' (whales are notoriously given to stage fright on stage) in its performances.

The last words should go to a friend of mine. Writing to me about Alan Hovhaness in July 2000, the keyboardist and composer Tom Constanten said, "The time I met him, he seemed as imbued with the same serene spirituality that fills his music. That evening he (at the piano) and his most gracious Japanese wife [Hinako Fujihara] performed a few of his songs. It was exquisite." ??