September - 21st Century Music

In the early 1940's, he met the Boston painter Hyman Bloom,
who not only influenced Hovhaness's growing interest in
ethnic motifs but also introduced him to Yenouk Der
Hagopian, a troubadour Armenian folksinger. His other
important friend during this period was Hermon DiGiovanno,
a "clairvoyant" painter also known as Emalaus Ionidies, who
stimulated Hovhaness's continuing interest in extrasensory
phenomena. From such different artistic experience would
inevitably come musical compositions contrary to the common
run.
Thanks to 1944 Boston concerts sponsored by Armenian
organizations, Hovhaness produced several new compositions
reflective of Armenian music, including Lousadzak (1944), the
opera Etchmiadzin and Armenian Rhapsody No. 1 (which
incorporates a Der Hagopian melody), among others. He
collaborated with an Armenian student group in co-sponsoring
annual New York concerts of his music, beginning with one at
Town Hall in June 1945. The composer Lou Harrison, then a
music critic for the New York Herald-Tribune, came to review
it. Having an extra ticket, Harrison invited his friend John
Cage, also then a young composer.
As Harrison remembered it, "Here came this new name to us.
We sat through the first piece and were quite startled. It was
Lousadzak, which comes up from the cellos and then the piano
comes in. It was beautifully played. We said to each other that
the second one would start with an oompah, and it didn't. I
think it was Tzaikerk. During the intermission, we went out all
excited, because it was clear the music was going to go on
doing this. As I remember, the hall was absolutely full."
What Harrison found in the lobby "was the closest I've ever
been to one of those renowned artistic riots. The Chromaticists
and the Americanists were carrying on at high decibels. What
had touched it off, of course, was the fact that here came a
man from Boston whose obviously beautiful and fine music
had nothing to do with either camp and was, in fact, its own
very wonderful thing to begin with." And it has been that way
ever since.
Harrison's review was laudatory, identifying Hovhaness as "a
composer of considerable interest and originality." Harrison
also recalls, "There was a beautiful innocence about Alan.
There always has been, but it was very pronounced in those
days." Cage introduced Hovhaness around artistic New York
and wrote favorably about his work in the June 1946 issue of
Modern Music. Unable to survive financially in New York,
Hovhaness returned home, where in 1948 he began three years
of teaching at the Boston Conservatory of Music, the smaller
music school in his home city. Aside from three years at
Eastman (Rochester) summer school in the mid-1950's, that
was his last regular teaching position.
Around 1953, his work received greater professional
recognition. The Guggenheim Foundation awarded him the
first of two successive fellowships. Martha Graham
commissioned a score for her dance company, and the
Louisville Orchestra another piece for its own premiere
concert series. Hovhaness met the conductor Leopold
Stokowski, who had been programming Hovhaness
composition since 1942; and the conductor commissioned the
composer's Mysterious Mountain (1955) for an inaugural
concert with the Houston Symphony. "He asked me first to
write a fanfare for brass to be played to introduce the concert,
but when he saw I'd written a fanfare to a mysterious
mountain, he asked me to write a big piece."
In 1959, in his own late 40's, Hovhaness began the second
phase of his musical education. He received a Fulbright
Research fellowship to study Karnatic music in South India.
He visited Japan for the first time, giving well-received
concerts of his own works, and returned in 1962-63 to study
gagaku music, which he describes as "the earliest orchestral
music we know; it came from China and Korea in the 700s."
He learned to play Japanese instruments, such as the oboe-like
hichiriki and the complex mouth organ sho, and even
performed with a gagaku group. By 1965, Hovhaness could
sharply distinguish himself from his contemporaries by
writing that his principal musical preferences were "7thcentury
Armenian religious music, classic music of South
India, Chinese orchestra music of the Tang Dynasty, Ah-ak
music of Korea, gagaku of Japan, and the opera-oratorios of
Handel."
The composer was tall and slender, with doe-like brown eyes
and a broad mustache over a wide mouth. A scraggly gray
beard framed his slender, essentially handsome face, and skin
once mottled from acne had, amazingly, become clear. His
wavy hair had turned gray, and he wore it long enough to fluff
out from the back of his head. He had always looked
physically frail; but when I saw him then, recovering from a
broken hip, he looked no less frail than before. The last of
several wives, Hinako (HEE-na-ko) Fujihara is short, slight,
and dark-haired, perhaps a quarter-century younger than her
husband; they have been together for 15 years. As she is also
very efficient at finding papers related to his career, it is not
for nothing that their personal publishing company and record
label are both called Fujihara.
16