Алан Хованесс: Жизнь и творчество американского композитора армянского происхождения.

Armenian American composer (1911–2000)

Alan Hovhaness (/h//oʊ/'/v//ɑː//n//ɪ//s/; March 8, 1911 – June 21, 2000) was an American composer of Armenian ancestry. He was one of the most prolific 20th century composers, with his official catalog comprising 67 numbered symphonies (surviving manuscripts indicate over 70) and 434 opus numbers. The true tally is well over 500 surviving works, since many opus numbers comprise two or more distinct works. The Boston Globe music critic Richard Buell wrote: "Although he has been stereotyped as a self consciously Armenian composer (rather as Ernest Bloch is seen as a Jewish composer), his output assimilates the music of many cultures. What may be most American about all of it is the way it turns its materials into a kind of exoticism. The atmosphere is hushed, reverential, mystical, nostalgic."

He was born as Alan Vaness Chakmakjian in Somerville, Massachusetts, to Haroutioun Hovanes Chakmakjian (an Armenian chemistry professor at Tufts College who had been born in Adana, Turkey) and Madeleine Scott (an American of Scottish descent who had graduated from Wellesley College). When he was five, his family moved from Somerville to Arlington, Massachusetts. A Hovhaness family neighbor said his mother had insisted on moving from Somerville because of discrimination against Armenians there. After her death (on October 3, 1930), he began to use the surname "Hovaness" in honor of his paternal grandfather, and changed it to "Hovhaness" around 1944. He stated the name change from the original Chakmakjian reflected the desire to simplify his name because "nobody ever pronounced it right". However, Hovhaness' daughter Jean Nandi has written in her book Unconventional Wisdom, "My father's name at the time of my birth was 'Hovaness', pronounced with accent on the first syllable. His original name was 'Chakmakjian', but in the 1930s he wanted to get rid of the Armenian connection and so changed his name to an Americanized version of his middle name. Some years later, deciding to re establish his Armenian ties, he changed the spelling to 'Hovhaness', accent on the second syllable; this was the name by which he later became quite famous." Hovhaness was interested in music from a very early age. At the age of four, he wrote his first composition, a cantata in the early Italian style inspired by a song of Franz Schubert. His family was concerned about his late night composing and about the financial future he could possibly have as an artist. He decided for a short time to pursue astronomy, another of his early loves. The fascination of astronomy remained with him through his entire life and composing career, with many works titled after various planets and stars. Hovhaness's parents soon supported their son's precocious composing, and set up his first piano lessons with a neighborhood teacher. Hovhaness continued his piano studies with Adelaide Proctor and then Heinrich Gebhard. By age 14 he decided to devote himself to composition. Among his early musical experiences were Baptist hymns and recordings of Gomidas Vartabed, an eminent Armenian composer. He composed two operas during his teenage years which were performed at Arlington High School, and composer Roger Sessions took an interest in his music during this time. Following his graduation from high school in 1929, he studied with Leo Rich Lewis at Tufts and then under Frederick Converse at the New England Conservatory of Music. In 1932, he won the Conservatory's Samuel Endicott prize for composition with his Sunset Symphony (elsewhere entitled Sunset Saga). In July 1934, Hovhaness traveled with his first wife, Martha Mott Davis, to Finland to meet Jean Sibelius, whose music he had greatly admired since childhood. The two continued to correspond for the next twenty years. In 1935, Hovhaness named his daughter and only child from his first marriage Jean Christina Hovhaness after Jean Christian Sibelius, her godfather and Hovhaness's friend for three decades.

In 1948 he joined the faculty of the Boston Conservatory, teaching there until 1951. His students there included the jazz musicians Sam Rivers and Gigi Gryce.

In 1951 Hovhaness moved to New York City, where he became a full time composer. Also that year (starting on August 1), he worked for 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 Transcaucasian sections. He eventually lost this job (along with much of the other staff) when Dwight D. Eisenhower succeeded Harry S. Truman as U. S. president in 1953. From this time on, he branched out from Armenian music, adopting styles and material from a wide variety of sources. As documented in 1953 and 1954, he received Guggenheim Fellowships in composition. He wrote the score for the Broadway play The Flowering Peach by Clifford Odets in 1954, a ballet for Martha Graham (Ardent Song, also in 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 till then came in 1955, when his Symphony No. 2, Mysterious Mountain, was premiered by Leopold Stokowski in his debut with the Houston Symphony, although the idea that Mysterious Mountain was commissioned for that orchestra is a common misconception. That same year, MGM Records released recordings of a number of his works. Between 1956 and 1958, at the urging of Howard Hanson, an admirer of his music, he taught summer sessions at the Eastman School of Music long presided over by Hanson.

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. His study of Carnatic music in Madras, India (1959–60), during which he collected over 300 ragas, was sponsored by a Fulbright fellowship. 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 then studied Japanese gagaku music (learning the wind instruments hichiriki, shō, and ryūteki) in the spring of 1962 with Masatoshi Shamoto in Hawaii, and a Rockefeller Foundation grant allowed him further gagaku studies with Masataro Togi in Japan (1962–63). Also while in Japan, he studied and played the nagauta (kabuki) shamisen and the jōruri (bunraku) shamisen. In recognition of the musical styles he studied in Japan, he wrote 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. He and his then wife then set up a record label devoted to the release of his own works, Poseidon Society. Its first release was in 1963, with around 15 discs following over the next decade. Following their divorce, the wife was granted ownership of the label but then either sold or transferred rights to this catalog to Crystal Records. In 1965, as part of a U. S. government sponsored delegation, he visited Russia as well as Soviet controlled Georgia and Armenia, the only time he visited his paternal 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. In the mid 1960s he spent several summers touring Europe, living and working much of the time in Switzerland.

Hovhaness stated in a 1971 interview in Ararat magazine: The text consisted of a dozen of the English quatrains from the translation by Edward FitzGerald. Continuing his interest in composing for Asian instruments, in 1981, at the request of Lou Harrison, he composed two works for Indonesian gamelan orchestra which were premiered by the gamelan at Lewis & Clark College, under the direction of Vincent McDermott. Hovhaness was survived by his sixth wife, the coloratura soprano Hinako Fujihara Hovhaness (1932–2022), who administered the Hovhaness Fujihara music publishing company, as well as a daughter (from his first wife), harpsichordist Jean Nandi (b. 1935). He died in 2000.

Significant archives of Hovhaness materials, comprising scores, sound recordings, photographs and correspondence are located at several academic centers, including Harvard University, the University of Washington, the Library of Congress in Washington, D. C., the Armenian Cultural Foundation in Arlington, Massachusetts, and Yerevan’s State Museum of Arts and Literature in Armenia.

1984 – Alan Hovhaness. Directed by Jean Walkinshaw, KCTS TV, Seattle. 1986 – Whalesong. Directed by Barbara Willis Sweete, Rhombus Media. 1990 – The Verdehr Trio: The Making of a Medium. Program 1: Lake Samish Trio/Alan Hovhaness. Directed by Lisa Lorraine Whiting, Michigan State University. 2006 – A Tribute to Alan Hovhaness. Produced by Alexan Zakyan, Hovhaness Research Centre, Yerevan, Armenia.

1956 – Narcissus. Directed by Willard Maas. 1957 – Assignment: Southeast Asia. NBC TV documentary. 1962 – Pearl Lang and Francisco Moncion dance performance: Black Marigolds. From the CBS television program Camera Three, presented in cooperation with the New York State Education Department. Directed by Nick Havinga. 1966 – Nehru: Man of Two Worlds. From The Twentieth Century series; reporter: Walter Cronkite. A presentation of CBS News. 1973 – Tales From a Book of Kings: The Houghton Shah Nameh. New York, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Time Life Multimedia. 1982 – Everest North Wall. Directed by Laszlo Pal. 1984 – Winds of Everest. Directed by Laszlo Pal. 2005 – I Remember Theodore Roethke. Produced and edited by Jean Walkinshaw, KCTS Public Television, Seattle.