A COMPOSER ECHOES IN UNEXPECTED PLACES
By LARRY ROHTER
The New York Times
Nov 4 2011
AT home one day in 1956 George Avakian, then one of the top executives
and producers at Columbia Records, received a telephone call from
the classical music composer Alan Hovhaness, who told him, “There’s
a terrific musician from India who is here, and you should meet him.”
His friend was so adamant, Mr. Avakian recalled recently, that a few
minutes later Hovhaness was knocking on the door, with Ravi Shankar
in tow.
The consequences of that encounter were many, starting with Mr.
Shankar, who at that time had no recording contract in the United
States, making a series of American albums, one with liner notes
written by Hovhaness. But within a decade Mr. Shankar was also giving
sitar lessons to George Harrison and playing at the Monterey Pop
Festival – events that encouraged an entire generation of rock and
pop musicians and listeners to look eastward for new inspiration.
This year is the centennial of Hovhaness’s birth, and for the occasion
Delos Records just released a commemorative CD of some of his most
important orchestral and chamber works, called “American Mystic:
Music of Alan Hovhaness.” But as Mr. Avakian’s account suggests,
Hovhaness’s most lasting legacy may be not in the realm of symphonic
music but in of the sphere of popular music, particularly jazz and
what has come to be known as “world music.”
Born near Boston to an Armenian father and a Scottish mother, Hovhaness
(pronounced ho-VON-iss) gravitated from the very beginning to music
outside the European tradition. His first contact with Mr.
Shankar came during a United States tour by the Shankar family dance
troupe in 1936, but from childhood Hovhaness had been immersed in
the work of Komitas Vartabed, an Armenian priest and musicologist
of the late 19th century who specialized in the medieval liturgical
and folk music of his homeland in the Caucasus. In the world of
mainstream American classical music, however, Hovhaness, who died
in 2000, was -and remains -an outlier. At a time when dissonance,
serialism and other styles were in vogue and many of his colleagues
were writing works meant to be both modern and specifically American,
Hovhaness embraced tonality and also showed a fondness for archaic
elements like the polyphony of Renaissance music and the counterpoint
of Baroque fugues.
“Alan was a composer who was not really interested in being
contemporary, and he didn’t look to Western Europe as his only
inspiration,” said Dennis Russell Davies, a conductor who has long
championed the music of Hovhaness, first as music director of the
American Composers Orchestra and the Brooklyn Philharmonic and now at
the Bruckner Orchestra in Linz, Austria. “He wasn’t concerned with
trends. He had a vision of what he wanted his music to sound like,
and he just responded to that inner voice.”
As Hovhaness’s initial fascination with Armenian music expanded,
his curiosity led him further and further afield, first to India,
where he lived in 1959 and 1960, then Indonesia, and finally to Japan,
China and Korea. Those influences all worked their way into his music.
“American Mystic” includes a “Gamelan in Sosi Style” recorded by the
Shanghai Quartet, and he also wrote pieces he described as “ghazals,”
the name given to a genre of classical sung poetry popular in India
and Pakistan.
“To me the hundreds of scales and ragas possible in Eastern musical
systems afford both discipline and stimuli for a great expansion of
melodic creations,” Hovhaness once said in an interview. “I am more
interested in creating fresh, spontaneous, singing melodic lines
than in the factory-made tonal patterns of industrial civilization
or the splotches and spots of sound hurled at random on a canvas of
imaginary silence.”
The two most common complaints against Hovhaness are that his work is
“exotic” and that he was simply too prolific. There is some basis
to both criticisms. He wrote more than 400 pieces, among them 67
symphonies of varying quality. Some compositions, like “The Rubaiyat
of Omar Khayam,” included on the centennial collection CD with a
narration by Michael York, or the symphony “And God Created Great
Whales,” can veer toward kitsch.
But his music could also be deeply spiritual, a quality on display
in well-known works like his Symphony No. 2, called “Mysterious
Mountain,” and his “Prayer of St. Gregory,” both of which feature
soaring trumpet and meditative string parts. He also complained of
“the tyranny of the piano” in classical music, and, to combat it,
wrote pieces featuring Middle Eastern stringed instruments like the
oud and kanun, and other compositions mimicking wind instruments like
the Armenian duduk and the oboes and flutes used in Japanese gagaku
music, one of Hovhaness’s favorite styles.
At the time he was experimenting with all of this it may indeed have
seemed exotic. But such sources and techniques are now widely used
in both popular and classical music. As Mr. Davies noted, Arvo Part
and Giya Kancheli “are two composers who in their own way have done
a similar thing” by drawing on medieval liturgical music and feeling
“at home using tonality and expressing spirituality.”
Hovhaness’s career started promisingly and conventionally enough. When
the BBC Symphony Orchestra performed his first symphony, called “Exile”
in recognition of the genocide Armenia had suffered under Turkish rule,
Leslie Howard, the conductor of the ensemble, described Hovhaness,
then still in his 20s, as a “young genius.”
But at Tanglewood one summer in the early 1940s Leonard Bernstein
and Aaron Copland publicly attacked Hovhaness, with Bernstein going
to the piano to play chords mocking his style, which he derided as
“cheap ghetto music.” Hovhaness withdrew to regroup, earning his
living as an organist at an Armenian church and destroying many of
his scores. But he returned after World War II with an even stronger
commitment to writing melodic music that featured nontraditional
scales and instrumentation.
An innovative 1945 work, a concerto for piano and orchestra called
“Lousadzak,” used elements of aleatory music, with instruments
repeating phrases in random, uncoordinated fashion. That technique
impressed John Cage and Lou Harrison, two fellow composers who became
Hovhaness’s friends and supporters; the growing individuality of his
music may also help explain his considerable appeal to jazz musicians
over the years.
In 1947 the saxophonist Sam Rivers studied orchestration with
Hovhaness, who at the time was teaching at a conservatory in Boston,
and cites Hovhaness as an important early influence on his development
as a musician.
“In a way you could say Hovhaness was the start of free music,” Mr.
Rivers said last month, referring to a style practiced by John
Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and others in the 1960s. “Jazz didn’t come
up in his course, although Armenian and Asian music did. But he always
talked of trying to go beyond the limits, of following your own path,
not the traditional composers, and challenging the whole structure
of music, and that had a big impact on me.”
The jazz pianist and harpist Alice Coltrane, who played in the quartet
of her husband, John, was also known to be an admirer of Hovhaness,
and when the guitarist Carlos Santana was in his jazz phase in the late
1970s and early 1980s and occasionally working with her, he recorded a
version of the second movement of “Mysterious Mountain” for his album
“Oneness.” The jazz bass virtuoso Jaco Pastorius recorded and often
improvised live on “Mysterious Mountain,” and Wynton Marsalis has
recorded “Prayer of St. Gregory.” But among current jazz figures
influenced by Hovhaness the best-known is probably Keith Jarrett,
who recorded “Lousadzak” in 1989.
It was in the early 1970s, when Mr. Avakian was managing Mr. Jarrett,
that the pianist seems to have first expressed interest in Hovhaness’s
music. Mr. Avakian’s wife, the violinist Anahid Ajemian, who played or
recorded many Hovhaness works beginning in the 1940s, gave Mr. Jarrett
scores and recordings to study and not long after began detecting
the results in the early piano solo albums that made Mr. Jarrett an
international star.
Mr. Davies was the conductor when Mr. Jarrett recorded “Lousadzak,”
which means something like “dawn of light” in Armenian. He too sees
a strong connection. “Both Hovhaness and Lou Harrison have been
very influential in a direct way on Keith,” in part because “they
have a melodic and harmonic language that is very close to him,”
Mr. Davies said. “When Keith was forming his improvised music, these
two composers had already written a lot of that, so he felt at home
there, that it was part of his musical language.”
Eventually Hovhaness settled in Seattle, which seems appropriate in
view of his interest in the civilizations on the other side of the
Pacific Rim. So the next time that “Norwegian Wood” or “Paint It,
Black” comes on the radio; or a mash-up of bhangra with hip-hop, house
or reggae is played at a club; or someone like Michael Brook releases
a CD collaboration with Djivan Gasparyan, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan or U.
Srinivas, it might be appropriate to remember that Hovhaness was
already occupying a similar musical space before any of those involved
were born.
“Hovhaness’s own music may have been too idiosyncratic for others
to copy, but his embrace of other cultures has been influential
in general,” said Gerard Schwarz, musical director of the Seattle
Symphony Orchestra, which regularly features the Hovhaness repertory.
“He opened that world to other composers, the way they were influenced
harmonically by Debussy and rhythmically by Stravinsky. Would they have
heard it anyway? Who knows? But certainly Hovhaness was there first.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/arts/music/american-mystic-marks-alan-hovhanesss-centennial.html