Alan Hovhaness

Alan Hovhaness (b Somerville, MA, 8 March 1911; d Seattle, 21 June 2000). American composer of Armenian and Scottish descent.

He began composing in early childhood and took a youthful interest in meditation and mysticism. In the early 1930s he studied with Converse at the New England Conservatory and was exposed to the music of India, then little known in the West, through musicians in the Boston area. His early, ‘first-period’ works show little of this influence but reflect that of Renaissance music, and, especially in works composed before 1936, employ a harmonic language reminiscent of late Romanticism. In 1943 Hovhaness rethought his style, influenced by his meditative activities and the disappointments he had experienced that summer at the Berkshire Music Center, where his music was criticized by Bernstein and Copland. He destroyed or suppressed many works and studied Armenian music – especially the works of the priest-composer Komitas Vardapet – which he had until then neglected. The music of this second period is more active rhythmically and contrapuntally, but it is significant that the stylistic attitude and the harmonic and melodic vocabulary remain more or less the same. Hovhaness attained a considerable reputation in the 1950s, a decade during which he travelled widely and embarked on a third stylistic period. This combined elements of the first two periods as well as various experimental and non-Western procedures. These international tendencies continued into a fourth period, beginning about 1960, in which East Asian elements, particularly Japanese and Korean, predominate. The fifth period, beginning about 1971, was marked by a return to Western influences; the works are particularly rich in scoring and chordal sonority, longer in duration than their predecessors, and generally more spacious and less active.

Although most of Hovhaness’s major compositions are instrumental, almost every work is religious in nature. This does not, however, inhibit stylistic and psychological variety; tranquility, fear, ecstasy, mystery and epic chaos find expression by means of divergent and ever-changing techniques. Hovhaness’s melodies are clear, often largely conjunct, and generally confined to the notes of a particular mode. The modes range from diatonic scales to exotic rāgas; the use of the rāga increased in the later periods. Wind Drum (1962), for voices and small orchestra, uses one six-note mode for the entire 35-minute work. His harmonies are often quite consonant, but progress modally or chromatically rather than tonally. In the works of his second and fourth periods long sections may be completely static chordally. Hovhaness also uses strong dissonances formed by adding semitone-removed pitches to a consonant chord. This collapses the functions of nonharmonic tones and of resolutions into one chord. A surprising harmonic fingerprint, found in the very early and very late works, but entirely absent from 1940 to 1970, is the traditional half-diminished chord (a diminished triad with an added minor 7th) elevated in some fifth-period works to a predominant role. In this Hovhaness acknowledged the influences of Wagner’s operas and the idiom of music for the shō, a Japanese mouth organ.

Hovhaness rarely used standard formal and motivic procedures, but he made frequent and rigorous use of counterpoint throughout his life. For example, the first period has many richly beautiful modal fugues (as in the Missa brevis), the second abounds in vigorous polymodal canons (‘St Vartan’ Symphony), and the fourth features slow dissonant canons at the unison (The Holy City). Rhythmic organization is equally strict, often including complex repeated metric patterns related to both Indian tāla and Western isorhythm. A variant of this procedure, which Hovhaness devised in 1944, assigns different short patterns, with pitches and rhythm specified, to several parts, with instructions that players perform the passages repeatedly at their own speed without coordination with the rest of the ensemble. The resultant blur is hardly aleatory, since exact pitches are carefully controlled and any two performances will be substantially the same. Hovhaness uses these sections, which he calls ‘rhythmless’, in many ways, ranging from gentle murmuring accompaniments (in such works of the second period as Lousadzak, 1944) to cataclysmic orchestral crescendos (as in Fra Angelico, 1967, of the fourth).

Despite his high mystical intentions, Hovhaness wrote quickly and produced many works of Gebrauchsmusik (Symphony for Metal Orchestra, for flutes, trombones, and percussion, 1963, was written for a metallurgical society’s convention). He sometimes reworked material for new works, a practice consistent with that of his favourite Western composers, those of the Baroque, especially Handel and Bach, and Renaissance. He was also concerned to make his works easily playable. Just as Hovhaness tended to avoid Classical and Romantic forms, he normally rejected traditional Western orchestration. Many works, particularly of the second period, use small orchestras, and keep instruments and instrumental groups clearly distinct. In later works requiring larger forces he tended to cultivate polyrhythmic or polymodal techniques so that tuttis, when they do occur, are accumulations of differentiated colours rather than homogeneous aggregates. There are exceptions in the third period, particularly in the symphonies of the 1950s, where Romantic tuttis can be found.

Among the most prolific composers of the 20th century, his surviving corpus of works numbers well over 400, despite his destruction of dozens of works. Age did not impede his productivity; in fact the years after his 60th birthday were the most productive of all, yielding over 30 symphonies. In 1977 he became a member of the Institute of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Hovhaness composed extensively for full orchestra, chamber orchestra and band. A capable pianist, he wrote many piano works and songs with piano accompaniment. His chamber works often use instruments of diverse types, occasionally including oriental instruments. The short chamber operas are suggestive of mystery plays and nō drama. Of his many choral works, the psalm settings have gained a permanent place in the repertory of many church choirs.