Alan Hovhaness (;"Hovhaness". Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. born Alan Vaness Chakmakjian; March 8, 1911 – June 21, 2000) was an American composer. He was one of the most prolific 20th-century composers, with his official catalog comprising 67 numbered symphonies (surviving manuscripts indicate over 70) and 434 opus numbers.The number of opus numbers was identified as 434 by Kenneth Page in a review in Limelight magazine (Australia), May 2007, p. 55. The true tally is well over 500 surviving works, since many opus numbers comprise two or more distinct works.
The Boston Globe music critic Richard Buell wrote: "Although he has been stereotyped as a self-consciously Armenian composer (rather as Ernest Bloch is seen as a Jewish composer), his output assimilates the music of many cultures. What may be most American about all of it is the way it turns its materials into a kind of exoticism. The atmosphere is hushed, reverential, mystical, nostalgic."Richard Buell, "Sinfo Nova remembers Hovhaness", The Boston Globe, February 2, 1987.
Early life and education He was born Alan Vaness Chakmakjian ()Julia Michaelyan, "An Interview with Alan Hovhaness", Ararat 45, v. 12, no. 1 (Winter 1971), pp. 19–31. Reprinted on The Alan Hovhaness Website. in Somerville, Massachusetts, to Haroutioun Hovanes Chakmakjian (an Armenian chemistry professor at Tufts College who had been born in Adana, present-day Turkey) and Madeleine Scott (an American of Scottish descent who had graduated from Wellesley College). When he was five, his family moved from Somerville to Arlington, Massachusetts. A Hovhaness family neighbor said his mother had insisted on moving from Somerville because of discrimination against Armenians there.Martin Berkofsky "An Interview with Jack Johnston" (transcribed 2008), Alan Hovhaness International Research Center
Hovhaness was interested in music from a very early age. At the age of four, he wrote his first composition, a cantata in the early Italian style inspired by a song of Franz Schubert. His family was concerned about his late-night composing and about the financial future he could possibly have as an artist. He decided for a short time to pursue astronomy, another of his early loves.Richard Howard, "Hovhaness Interview: Seattle 1983", The Alan Hovhaness Website, 2005 (Accessed 23 February 2010). The fascination of astronomy remained with him through his entire life and composing career, with many works titled after various planets and stars.
Hovhaness's parents soon supported their son's precocious composing, and set up his first piano lessons with a neighborhood teacher. Hovhaness continued his piano studies with Adelaide Proctor and then Heinrich Gebhard. By age 14 he decided to devote himself to composition. Among his early musical experiences were Baptist hymns and recordings of Gomidas Vartabed, an eminent Armenian composer. He composed two operas during his teenage years which were performed at Arlington High School, and composer Roger Sessions took an interest in his music during this time. Following his graduation from high school in 1929, he studied with Leo Rich Lewis at Tufts and then under Frederick Converse at the New England Conservatory of Music. In 1932, he won the Conservatory's Samuel Endicott prize for composition with his Sunset Symphony (elsewhere entitled Sunset Saga).
In July 1934, Hovhaness traveled with his first wife, Martha Mott Davis, to Finland to meet Jean Sibelius, whose music he had greatly admired since childhood. The two continued to correspond for the next twenty years. In 1935, Hovhaness named his daughter and only child from his first marriage Jean Christina Hovaness after Jean Christian Sibelius, her godfather and Hovhaness's friend for three decades.
Name After his mother's death (on October 3, 1930), the composer began to use the surname "Hovaness" (in honor of his paternal grandfather) in place of his original surname, Chakmakjian. He explained this name change variously that it either reflected the desire to simplify his name because "nobody ever pronounced it right,"Lynn Johnston, "Alan Hovhaness: An Interview with a Master Composer", The Arlington (MA) Advocate (July 5, 1984), and The Armenian Mirror-Spectator, vol. 52, no. 1, issue 2843 (July 21, 1984). Available on CD (copyright 2000) at Robbins Library, Arlington, MA, and at the Library of Congress. or that he didn't like the meaning of the name (which translates as "gunsmith"), because "I've always hated anything to do with the military, and so somehow that name always bothered me." However, Hovhaness's daughter Jean Nandi states in her book Unconventional Wisdom that "my father's name at the time of my birth was 'Hovaness', pronounced with accent on the first syllable. His original 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. Some years later, deciding to re-establish his Armenian ties, he changed the spelling to 'Hovhaness', accent on the second syllable; this was the name by which he later became quite famous."The Armenian surname Chakmakjian (Չաքմաքճեան, deriving from the word Turkish çakmak, meaning "flintlock"), meaning "gunsmith," was given to one of Haroutioun Hovanes Chakmakjian's ancestors who had been skilled in creating finely engraved and decorated firearms. This name change probably took place in or slightly before 1944, when he first used "Alan Hovhaness" to register multiple unpublished works, including "Aravod louso".Library of Congress, Catalog of Copyright Entries: Musical compositions, Part 3: Musical compositions (Nos. 7-12) (1944), p. 1377
Destruction of early works During the 1930s and 1940s, Hovhaness famously destroyed many of his early works. He later claimed that he had burned at least 1,000 different pieces, a process that took at least two weeks; elsewhere he claimed to have destroyed around 500 scores totaling as many as a thousand pages.Cole Gagne, Soundpieces 2: Interviews with American Composers (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1993), p. 121. . In an interview with Richard Howard, he stated that the decision was based primarily on Sessions' criticism of his works of that period, and that he wanted to make a new start in composition.
Musical career
"Armenian Period" Hovhaness became interested in Armenian culture and music in 1940 as organist for the St. James Armenian Apostolic Church in Watertown, Massachusetts, remaining in this position for about ten years. In 1942, he won a scholarship at Tanglewood to study in Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů's master class. During a seminar in composition, while a recording of Hovhaness's first symphony was being played, Aaron Copland talked loudly in Spanish to Latin-American composers in the room; and at the end of the recording Leonard Bernstein went to the piano, played a melodic minor scale and rebuked the work as "cheap ghetto music". Apparently angered and distraught by this experience, he left Tanglewood early, abandoning his scholarship and again destroying a number of his works in the aftermath of that major disappointment.
The next year he devoted himself to Armenian subject matter, in particular using modes distinctive to Armenian music, and continued in this vein for several years, achieving some renown and the support of other musicians, including radical experimentalist composer John Cage and choreographer Martha Graham, all the while continuing as church organist.
Beginning in the mid-1940s, Hovhaness and two artist friends, Hyman Bloom and Hermon di Giovanno, met frequently to discuss spiritual and musical matters. All three had a strong interest in Indian classical music, and brought many well known Indian musicians to Boston to perform. During this period, Hovhaness learned to play the sitar, studying with amateur Indian musicians living in the Boston area. Around 1942, Bloom introduced Hovhaness to Yenovk Der Hagopian, a fine singer of Armenian and Kurdish troubadour songs, whose singing inspired Hovhaness.
In one of several applications for a Guggenheim fellowship (1940), Hovhaness presented his credo at the time of application:
I propose to create a heroic, monumental style of composition simple enough to inspire all people, completely free from fads, artificial mannerisms and false sophistications, direct, forceful, sincere, always original but never unnatural. Music must be freed from decadence and stagnation. There has been too much emphasis on small things while the great truths have been overlooked. The superficial must be dispensed with. Music must become virile to express big things. It is not my purpose to supply a few pseudo-intellectual musicians and critics with more food for brilliant argumentation, but rather to inspire all mankind with new heroism and spiritual nobility. This may appear to be sentimental and impossible to some, but it must be remembered that Palestrina, Handel and Beethoven would not consider it either sentimental or impossible. In fact, the worthiest creative art has been motivated consciously or unconsciously by the desire for the regeneration of mankind.
Lou Harrison reviewed a 1945 concert of Hovhaness' music, which included his 1944 concerto for piano and strings, entitled Lousadzak: There is almost nothing occurring most of the time but unison melodies and very lengthy drone basses, which is all very Armenian. It is also very modern indeed in its elegant simplicity and adamant modal integrity, being, in effect, as tight and strong in its way as a twelve-tone work of the Austrian type. There is no harmony either, and the brilliance and excitement of parts of the piano concerto were due entirely to vigor of idea. It really takes a sound musicality to invent a succession of stimulating ideas within the bounds of an unaltered mode and without shifting the home-tone.Lou Harrison, "Alan Hovhaness Offers Original Compositions", New York Herald Tribune (June 18, 1945), p. 11. However, as before, there were also critics: The serialists were all there. And so were the Americanists, both Aaron Copland's group and Virgil [Thomson]'s. And here was something that had come out of Boston that none of us had ever heard of and was completely different from either. There was nearly a riot in the foyer [during intermission] — everybody shouting. A real whoop-dee-doo.
Lousadzak was Hovhaness's first work to make use of an innovative technique he called "spirit murmur", an early example of aleatoric music inspired by a vision of Hermon di Giovanno. The technique, essentially similar to the 1960s ad libitum aleatory of Lutoslawski, involves instruments repeating phrases in uncoordinated fashion, producing a complex "cloud" or "carpet" of sounds.
In the mid-1940s, Hovhaness' prestige in New York City was helped considerably by members of the immigrant Armenian community who sponsored several high-profile concerts of his music. This organization, the Friends of Armenian Music Committee, was led by Hovhaness's friends Dr. Elizabeth A. Gregory, the Armenian American piano/violin duo Maro Ajemian and Anahid Ajemian, and later by Anahid's husband, pioneering record producer and subsequent Columbia Records executive George Avakian. Their help led directly to many recordings of Hovhaness' music appearing in the 1950s on MGM and Mercury records, placing him firmly on the American musical landscape.
In May and June 1946, while staying with an Armenian family, Hovhaness composed Etchmiadzin, an opera on an Armenian theme, which was commissioned by a local Armenian church.
Conservatory years In 1948 he joined the faculty of the Boston Conservatory, teaching there until 1951. His students there included the jazz musicians Sam Rivers and Gigi Gryce.
Relocation to New York City