Essential Hovhaness
"I've always listened to my own voice. I was discontented with the kind of music that everyone said I should write – all clever and dissonant, intellectualised. I wanted to write music that was deeply felt, music that would move people." Born in 1911 Alan Hovhaness was a prolific composer and a 'sacred minimalist' long before the term was even coined, a strong thread of mysticism running through his music.
Read more…Following early criticism of his work by Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland, Hovhaness turned away from the fashionable compositional genres of the time and sought a more personal musical language and mode of expression. He travelled widely – to India, Japan and Korea – and studied the music of Armenia (his father was Armenian), and the musical philosophy and idioms of these countries infuse his own music.
His best-known work, Symphony No. 2 ('Mysterious Mountain' written in 1955, demonstrates the other significant interest in Hovhaness's life: spirituality. While some of his works have explicitly religious themes, his music also explores the connection between the environment and the human spirit. 'And God Created Great Whales' (1970) includes pre-recorded humpback whale sounds, while his Symphony No. 50 (1983) culminates in a graphic musical depiction of the eruption of Mount Saint Helens volcano in May 1980.
Hovhaness was an unashamed lover of melody despite composing at a time when dissonant atonality was all the rage, and his music has a pleasing consonance. With an elegant simplicity drawn from Medieval and early Baroque music, Indian ragas, 'gagaku' (music of the Japanese court) and Korean percussion and strings, allied with a strong sense of spirituality, meditative serenity, exoticism, and nostalgia, his music is accessible to performers and listeners alike.