September - 21st Century Music

Remembering Alan Hovhaness:
Making the Right Connections
RICHARD KOSTELANETZ
A sacred art, a pathway of life through a living
universe, merging East and West, heaven and earth,
addressed not to the snobbish few but to all people as
an inspiration in their journey through the universe. --
Alan Hovhaness
Alan Hovhaness was a major American composer for more
than a half century, a figure forever on the professional fringe,
but always doing beautiful music; and it is perhaps fitting that
he celebrated his 80th birthday nine years ago with the CD
release of two of his strongest pieces, Symphony No. 2
("Mysterious Mountain") and Lousadzak, the former recorded
by Dennis Russell Davies conducting the American
Composers Orchestra and the latter by the eminent pianist
Keith Jarrett accompanied by Davies' orchestra.
These two pieces represent Hovhaness as his best, with long
regal lines on modal scales reminiscent of Eastern music, full
not only of melodic energy but emotion unique to music,
which is to say his compositions seem full of feeling without
being programmatic with specific sentiments. It is beautiful
music that rarely becomes slick, ingratiating music that never
insinuates; it can be listened to again and again. That is one
reason why performers, at all levels of competence, like it.
About Jarrett's playing, he told me, "I think the performance of
the piano concerto marvelous -- Lousadzak (which he
pronounces "Lou-sa-DZAK"), the dawn of light, in other
words the coming of light, the coming of philosophy, the
coming of a new experience. Really good jazz musicians are
more aware of the Indian music and improvisational music
that were always an inspiration to me."
Shortly after this release, I found Hovhaness and his wife, the
soprano Hinako Fujihara, in Seattle where he had moved
nearly two decades previously, having lived before in places
as various as Boston, New York, and Lucerne, Switzerland.
No less slender and frail-looking than he was a decade before,
the last time I saw him, he greeted me at the door of his
handsome ranch house not on fashionable Mercer Island, say,
but banked into a hill near the airport in South Seattle. To the
background sound of the main highway below his windows,
while airplanes buzzed overhead, he showed me the panorama
that made him purchase that house, the view that he finds so
inspirational. "You can see the entire Cascade Mountains from
Mount Rainer in the south to Mount Baker in the north. It's
very much like Switzerland. This is a place I'm happy living
in." In the open space that runs from the end of the kitchen
around the bedroom was a piano, a work table, a television, an
audio console, and continuous windows, which is to say
everything this composer needs.
Seattle is quite distant from Somerville, Massachusetts, where
he was born March 8, 1911, Alan Vaness Chakmakjian, the
son of a chemistry professor who had immigrated to the
United States from Adana, Turkey. The composer's mother,
born Madeleine Scott, was of Scottish ancestry. When their
only child was five, the Chakmakjians moved to another
Boston suburb, Arlington, where young Alan attended the
public schools. "When I was four years old I wanted to be an
astronomer," he explained between sips of coffee. "Then I
heard a good piece of music -- the songs of Schubert. That was
the first time I heard something that wasn't a Baptist hymn."
After graduating from high school in 1929, he went to Tufts
University for two years, but then transferred to the New
England Conservatory of Music, where he studied with
Frederick Converse (1871-1940), a now-forgotten American
composer whose most noted piece, The Mystic Trumpeter
(1905), is an orchestral work based on Walt Whitman. Soon
after his mother's death in 1931, he changed his middle name
to "Hovaness" (accented on the second syllable), which is
Armenian for John or Johannes, in honor of his grandfather
whose first name it was. Then he decided to add another H to
his middle name and completely drop his last name, thus
producing his present professional name, Alan Hovhaness,
which is pronounced with the accent on the last syllable (Hovan-ESS).
He has no academic degrees, other than honorary
doctorates.
Unlike other American tonal composers of his generation,
Hovhaness never studied in Europe. "I was more interested in
Oriental music," he remembered. "Things like that were very
far from Paris." His first revelation came in 1936 when he
closely observed Vishnu Shirali, the North Indian musician
who had come to Boston with the dancer Ude Shankar (Ravi's
older brother). During the 1930's, Hovhaness made his living
playing the piano, mostly around Boston, for whomever would
hire him, including social gatherings of Greeks, Arabs, and
Armenians. He also worked as a jazz arranger on the Works
Progress Administration and as an organist in an Armenian
church, where he acquired a reputation for spectacular
improvisations on ancient modes. In 1940, the young Boston
composer destroyed nearly all the music he had written thus
far, including an undergraduate prize-winning symphony; he
wanted to start the new decade afresh.