Alan Hovhaness

   American-Armenian composer Alan Hovaness (Alan Vaness Chakmakjian) was born on March March 8 1911 in Somerville, Massachusetts to Haroutioun Hovanes Chakmakjian (an Armenian chemistry professor at Tufts College( born in Adana, Turkey) and Madeleine Scott. The family of the composer moved from Somerville to Arlington, Massachusetts when he was five.
   Hovhaness was interested in music from a very early age, writing his first composition at the age of four after being inspired by hearing a song of Franz Schubert.
   By age 14, Hovhaness decided to devote himself to composition. Among his first and most important influences were the recordings of Gomidas Vartabed, a great Armenian composer who witnessed and survived in the Armenian Genocide. He composed two operas during his teenage years, which were performed at Arlington High School.
   Following his graduation from high school in 1929, he studied with Leo Rich Lewis at Tufts and then the New England Conservatory of Music, under Frederick Converse. In 1932 he won the Conservatory's Samuel Endicott prize for composition, for a symphonic work entitled Sunset Symphony (elsewhere entitled Sunset Saga).
   Hovhaness became interested in Armenian culture and music in 1940, as the organist of the St. James Armenian Apostolic Chruch in Watertown, Massachusetts, remaining in this position for approximately ten years. The next year he devoted himself to Armenian subject matter, in particular using modes distinctive to Armenian music, and continued for several years, achieving some renown and the support of other musicians.
   Beginning in the mid-1940s, Hovhaness displayed strong interest in the Indian classical music and invited many famous Indian musicians to Boston to perform. During this period, Hovhaness learned to play the sitar.
   Lousadzak was Hovhaness's first work to make use of an innovative technique he called "spirit murmur" — an early example of aleatoric music that was inspired by a vision of Hermon di Giovanno.The technique involves instruments repeating phrases in uncoordinated fashion, producing a complex "cloud" or "carpet" of sounds.
   In the mid-1940s Hovhaness' stature in New York was helped considerably by members of the immigrant Armenian community who sponsored several high-profile concerts of his music. In particular, by the assistance of the Friends of Armenian Music Committee many recordings of Hovhaness' music were made in the 1950s on MGM and Mercury records, placing him firmly on the American musical landscape.
   In May and June 1946, while staying with an Armenian family, Hovhaness composed Etchmiadzin, an opera on an Armenian theme, which was commissioned by the local Armenian church.
   In 1948 he joined the faculty of the Boston Conservatory, teaching there until 1951.
In 1951, Hovhaness moved to New York City, where he took up composing full-time and began working the Voice of America, first as a script writer for the Armenian Section, then as Director of Music, composer, and musical consultant for the Near East and Trans-Caucasian section. Beginning at this time, Hovhaness branched out from Armenian music, adopting styles and material from a wide variety of sources. In 1953 and 1954 he received Guggenheim Fellowships in composition. In 1954 he wrote the score for the Broadway play The Flowering Peach by Clifford Odets, a ballet for Martha Graham (Ardent Song, 1954), and two scores for NBC documentaries on India and Southeast Asia (1955 and 1957). Also during the 1950s, he composed for productions at The Living Theatre.
   His biggest breakthrough to date came in 1955, when his Symphony No. 2, Mysterious Mountain, was premiered by Leopold Stokowski in his debut with the Houston Symphony. The idea that Mysterious Mountain was commissioned for the Houston Symphony is a common misconception. That same year, MGM Records released recordings of a number of his works. Between 1956 and 1958, he taught summers at the Eastman School of Music.
From 1959 through 1963, Hovhaness conducted a series of research trips to India, Hawaii, Japan, and South Korea, investigating the ancient traditional musics of these nations and eventually integrating elements of these into his own compositions. During his study of Carnatic music in Madras, India (1959-60), he collected over 300 ragas. While in Madras, he learned to play the veena and composed a work for Carnatic orchestra entitled Nagooran, inspired by a visit to the dargah at Nagore, which was performed by the South Indian Orchestra of All India Radio Madras and broadcast on All India Radio on February 3, 1960.
   He compiled a large amount of material on Carnatic ragas in preparation for a book on the subject, but never completed it.
   He studied Japanese gagaku music in the spring of 1962 with Masatoshi Shamoto in Hawaii, and a Rockefeller Foundation grant allowed him to conduct further gagaku studies with Masataro Togi in Japan (1962-63). In recognition of the musical styles he studied in Japan, he wrote his famous Fantasy on Japanese Woodprints, Op. 211 (1965), a concerto for xylophone and orchestra.
   In 1963 he composed his second ballet score for Martha Graham, entitled Circe. In 1965, as part of a U.S. government-sponsored delegation, he visited Russia, Georgia and Armenia (then in the structure of the Soviet Union), the only time during his life that he would visit his ancestral homeland. While there, he donated his handwritten manuscripts of harmonized Armenian liturgical music to the Yeghishe Charents State Museum of Arts and Literature in Yerevan.
   Hovhaness was inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters(1951), and received honorary D.Mus. degrees from the University of Rochester (1958), Bates College (1959), and the Boston Conservatory (1987). He moved to Seattle in the early 1970s, where he lived for the rest of his life. 
   Hovhaness died on June 21, 2000. His wife, soprano Hinako Fujihara Hovhaness, administers the Hovhaness-Fujihara music publishing company. His daughter is the harpsichordist Jean Nandi).