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Alan Hovhaness Makes the Right Connections
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19733 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1991 |
2,656 Words |
| Author
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Richard Kostelanetz
Richard Kostelanetz is a writer/composer living in New
York. His recent books include On Innovative Music(ian)s
(Limelight). His latest composition, Kaddish, was commissioned
by Westdeutscher Rundfunk. |
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.
-- By Alan Hovhaness
Alan Hovhaness has been a major American composer for nearly half a century now, a figure forever on the professional fringe, but always creating beautiful music; and it is perhaps fitting that he should celebrate his eightieth birthday with the recent CD release of two of his very best pieces, Symphony No. 2 (Mysterious Mountain) and Lousadzak. On the Musicmasters label (MMD 60204K), Dennis Russell Davies conducts the American Composers Orchestra, with pianist Keith Jarrett featured on Lousadzak.
These two pieces represent Hovhaness at 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.
I recently visited Hovhaness and his wife, the soprano Hinako Fujihara, in Seattle, where he's been living for nearly two decades, having previously lived in places as various as Boston, New York, and Lucerne.
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 emigrated 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 explains. "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 composer Frederick Converse. Soon after his mother's death in 1931, he changed his middle name to Hovaness (accented on the second syllable), which is
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