Alan Hovhaness- British obit.

Hallo Tuning Group folk, mathematical frequency-space theorists/practicians
and speculative+ musicians,
I thought you might like to read the Hovhaness obituary from the british
newspaper "The Independent", written by writer and journalist Martin
Anderson.
I know Alan wasn't a fervent tuning pioneer but he was writing "world music"
before anyone had even thought of the idea. Greetings from an currently
almost lurker.
best wishes
Lawrence Ball
composer,
director, Planet Tree Music Festival, London
maths tutor

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Alan Hovhaness

Alan Hovhaness was one of the most prolific composers in the history of
music, a man with a Baroque prolixity: music flowed from him as naturally as
leaves sprout on a tree. He leaves something like 500 compositions, most of
them large-scale --- not quite as astonishing, you might think, as the 700
or so of the Dane Niels Viggo Bentzon, who died at the end of April, until
you consider that in 1943 Hovhaness destroyed almost all of his earlier
works, generally estimated to have numbered over a thousand.
A composer with such a voluminous output is not going to be able to produce
a succession of faultless masterpieces: there will be rough with the smooth.
At worst, HovhanessÕ music seems to run on autopilot, to ramble on in an
Ancient-Mariner manner without bothering to engage the attention of the
listener. At best, it is transcendantly beautiful, spinning long, weightless
lines that enchant the ear --- often simplicity itself, but touching
something in the soul. And at all times, it sounds like no one elseÕs: its
synthesis of east and west is instantly recognisable.
Hovhaness was born in Massachusetts in 1911, to an Armenian father, who had
immigrated from Turkey, and a Scottish mother. He began to compose when he
was a mere four years old and devised his own system of notation (on an
eleven-line stave) when he was five. Forbidden to play his motherÕs
harmonium, he turned to astronomy, but music re-asserted itself when he was
seven. Although at eight he was allowed to take piano lessons, his parents
disapproved of his composing: he had written two operas by the time he was
thirteen, and yet, as he later admitted, "I was a secret composer all
through my teens". The subterfuge to which he was pushed took some
unpredictable forms:

My family thought writing music was abnormal, so they would confiscate my
music if they caught me in the act. I used to compose in the bathroom and
hide the manuscripts under the bathtub.

Another ruse --- writing at night --- developed into a lifetimeÕs habit: as
an adult Hovhaness generally slept until early afternoon when he would rise
and start to work, generally through the night.
Hovhaness studied at Tufts University, Boston, where his father was a
professor chemistry, from 1929 to 1932; his composition teacher there was
Frederick Converse. In 1942 he took composition lessons with the ŽmigrŽ
Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu at Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston
Symphony Orchestra. Although he held a handful of posts --- organist of the
Armenian Church of St James in Boston in the 1940s, member of the faculty of
the New England Conservatory from 1948 to 1951 --- his life was basically
given over to the writing of music, and later appointments were more
congenial: composer-in-residence at the University of Hawaii in 1962 and
with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra in 1966. He settled in Seattle in 1972.
The rejection of his early works in 1943 (influenced, Hovhaness guessed, by
that earlier parental censure) was triggered by a deep study of early
Armenian religious music, which permanently marked his style from then on.
He adopted elements from other musical cultures --- Indian, Japanese,
Chinese and Korean among them --- but it was the modal melos of Armenia that
dominated. And though he stuck with the forms of the western tradition ---
symphony, sonata, concerto --- he had little time for the developmental
struggles of the sonata-form archetype of the Classical and Romantic
periods; like the Renaissance composers he admired, Hovhaness preferred to
unfold his music. It is not for listeners in a hurry.
Hovhaness enjoyed some success in the 1950s, when Stokowski and Reiner took
up his music, before the stylistic monopoly of modernism pushed it to the
sidelines. He stuck to his guns; for him atonality was "against nature":

There is a center in everything that exists. The planets have the Sun; the
Moon, the Earth. The reason I like Oriental music is that everything has a
firm center. All music with a center is tonal. Music without a center is
fine for a minute or two, but it soon sounds all the same. IÕve used all
techniques, including the 12-tone technique, but I believe melody is the
spring of music. The human voice was the first instrument, and I believe
that all the different instruments are voices as well. So I want to give
them melodies to sing. I think melodically, and without melody I donÕt have
much interest in music.

Those melodies, though, were often expressed in exotic scales, and were
combined with the canonic, imitative and fugal techniques of Baroque
counterpoint; Hovhaness also brought in modernist devices, such as
tone-clusters and aleatory --- indeed, one favourite trick was the gradual
imposition of metre on a rhythmically free passage to create the impression
of order emerging from chaos.
From the 1980s onwards, as the serialist strangehold was loosened, Hovhaness
had the satisfaction of seeing his music win widespread approval, his
mystical vein touching the new-age aspirations of the day as the Estonian
Arvo PŠrt and Pole Henryk G—recki did some years later. He was soon one of
the best-known of all American composers.
Hovhaness was a tall, gaunt figure, whose long fingers gave him
considerable fluency at the keyboard; he often conducted his own music, too.
In spite of his shyness, he was married six times, although his marital
history became a source of embarrassment when he finally found happiness
with the Japanese soprano Hinako Fujihara, whom he wedded in 1977. He could
be voluble in private; the composer Arnold Rosner, who wrote his PhD thesis
on HovhanessÕ music, found him obliging but distant:

When I needed a manuscript or recording from him, it was always there for
me. When I compiled a chronological catalogue of works, his aid was there,
too --- though his own sense of accuracy and dating was more a source of
frustration and confusion than clarification.
He was usually a man of few words, beginning almost any sentence with "oh,
yes", in a basic Boston-American tone that showed no trace of the Armenian
ethnicity in his blood, or any of the other ethnicities he loved, studied
and visited. His own comments on his music seemed strangely detached, often
fixated largely or entirely on matters of phrase length and count.

The sheer volume of HovhanessÕ output takes some believing. When the
English composer Havergal Brian died in 1972, with 32 numbered symphonies to
his credit, he was then the most prolific symphonist since Haydn. Hovhaness
caught up with Brian in 1977 and went on to compose no fewer than 67
symphonies. He also wrote oratorios, operas, ballets, songs, scores for film
and stage, and chamber, choral and instrumental music. His tally of opus
numbers stops at 434, but since many of the works donÕt carry opus numbers,
no one is yet sure what his total number of compositions might be ---
estimates of the compositions for chamber orchestra alone range between 100
and 200. Before a final figure can be known, some stubborn researcher will
have to plough through the stacks of manuscripts piled up in his basement
(his publishers couldnÕt keep up with him).
Part of HovhanessÕ spiritual make-up involved a strong identification with
nature. His home in Seattle faced the Cascade Mountains, and his nightÕs
work of composing would generally continue until he could watch the sunrise
over the peaks. His orchestral piece And God Created Great Whales
incorporates recordings of singing cetaceans. The titles of others of his
works betray his pantheist leanings: Mysterious Mountain, The Celestial
Gate, Star Dawn, Visionary Landscapes. But for all the cosmic ambition
suggested by these labels, his compositional outlook was very simple:

My purpose is to create music, not for snobs, but for all people, music
which is beautiful and healing, to attempt what old Chinese painters called
"spiritual resonance" in melody and sound.
MARTIN ANDERSON

Alan Hovhaness (Alan Vaness Chakmakjian), composer, born Somerville,
Massachusetts, 8 March 1911; died Seattle, 21 June 2000.