World Music Movement Owes Much to Hovhaness

Alan Hovhaness, who died Wednesday in Seattle at age 89, lived a long life and wrote a lot of music, more than 500 pieces. He was, in fact, irrepressible. I once remember a conductor complaining that he had commissioned one new symphony from Hovhaness (who wrote some 70 of them), but Hovhaness had submitted two! A good deal--two for the price of one--you might think. But it meant learning twice as much new music, required the expense of extra rehearsal time and wreaked havoc with the orchestra’s programming. And there was, between the two symphonies, maybe one good one.

It is easy and common to dismiss Hovhaness as a music machine, a purveyor of pretty but slight pieces--which more often than not evoked a kind of sugary mysticism.

And that certainly has been the attitude of the Eastern establishment. For the liner note to Fritz Reiner’s Chicago Symphony recording of “Mysterious Mountain,” one of Hovhaness’ best known and most respected compositions, Chicago critic Robert C. Marsh wrote, condescendingly: “For me this is the mountain of the Blue Moon that soars above the Shangri-La of ‘Lost Horizon,’ the place where the world cannot intrude and beauty and reason prevail.” Virgil Thomson was harsh. He once wrote that if, like heaven, the music purported to be eternal, “for mortals it can also on occasion seem interminable.” In most histories of American music, Hovhaness is a minor character.

But he should not be underestimated either as a composer or as a significant influence upon how we think about and treat music in America today. He was as inherently musical as any composer this country has ever produced. Because of the enormous amount of music he wrote, and the fact that all of it has a religious theme or inspiration, there is the impression of a great deal of sameness. There is never any hurry in Hovhaness: His is music that patiently waits for illumination. Melodies linger; rhythms tread deliberately; harmonies can be blandly consonant; textures are ever transparent and instruments are made to glow. His soundscape is one in which harps and bells are either present or alluded to; wind choirs swirl like sonic halos, strings are asked to be specially luminous.

But there is also a tremendous, even unprecedented, amount of variety. In fact, Hovhaness was one of music’s great seekers. Growing up outside Boston, he got a traditional music education. But an interest in his Armenian heritage and coming into contact with Indian scientists at MIT led to a lifelong interest in Asian music long before it had pervaded the West.

Deeply involved in spiritual matters, Christian as well as Asian, and all things mythic, Hovhaness moved to New York in the early 1950s where he became something of the spiritual mascot of the downtown bohemian art and culture set that included mythologist Joseph Campbell, Living Theater co-founder Judith Malina, composers John Cage and Lou Harrison, choreographer Merce Cunningham and avant-garde filmmaker Maya Daren. He wrote music for the Living Theater and he improvised at parties when not spooked by what he felt was Daren’s witchcraft.

Had he remained in New York, it is likely that Hovhaness would have become an integral part of the scene. But New York was too insular and claustrophobic for him, and he moved to Seattle where, closer to nature and the Pacific Rim, he felt his imagination could be freer. And indeed, Hovhaness became a world composer, absorbing techniques and sounds from India, Japan, China and Korea. He explored the ancient music of Armenia. And his Christianity grew to be increasingly mystical and inclusive, finding room in it for ideas culled from all the world’s spiritual traditions.

And he wrote and wrote. He never had a fallow period, composing steadily from the age of 4 for 85 years. Thanks to the interest in recent years in consonant, spiritual music and world music, Hovhaness has developed a cult following, and there have been several recordings issued over the past decade. Moreover, it looks as though Hovhaness was a crucial figure in the whole development of the world and spiritual traditions now so much part of the musical mainstream. The 21st century may well count him as a major pioneer.

The numbers, though, are daunting. We require a Hovhaness scholar or maybe several to help separate out the better works. I suspect, there are a great many remarkable ones waiting to be heard, works that bring cultures together in meaningful ways. (I, for one, would like to hear some of the dozen or more operas, many of which have never been performed.) A wonderful musician produced these scores, and one who felt that he had a high purpose, and who doted on beauty and mystery.

We will surely miss him. That is, if we have the time. He has left so much of himself behind for us still to discover, it may hardly seem as though he is gone.