This year, long after music critics were calling him one of the most prolific composers of the Western world, Alan Hovhaness completed his 51st Symphony. No composer since Joseph Haydn has written more symphonies than he has. He’s done 10 more than Mozart, 42 more than Beethoven. Yet his name, an Armenian name pronounced Hoe-VON-niss, is about as familiar to Americans as those of Sir Granville Bantock or Havergal Brian, two English composers of the 20th Century whose work Hovhaness considers' “tremendous” and hopes to see revived. Brian wrote 32 symphonies, most of them after the age of 80. Hovhaness is 71 years old and shows no signs of slowing down. In the last nine years he has composed 27 symphonies (which averages three a year) and 60 other works, bringing his oeuvre into the neighborhood of Opus Number 360. When Hovhaness’ 2nd Symphony, Mysterious Mountain, was premiered in 1955, music critic Hubert Roussel wrote: “Hovhaness produces a texture of the utmost beauty, gentleness, distinction and expressive potential. The real mystery of Mysterious Mountain is that it should be so simply, sweetly, innocently lovely in an age that has tried so terribly hard to avoid those impressions in music.” Not all assessments have been so laudatory. A few years ago one New York critic deadpanned a work by Hovhaness for what he considered “exotic, Middle Eastern touches, splashy orchestral color and Hollywood sound-stage tinsel, all of it digestible, but hardly very nourishing.” Prolific as he has been, Hovhaness is no celebrity and has no intention of becoming one. He’s too hermetic. It would interfere with his work. Even so, his music has been celebrated, performed and commissioned at least as much as that of any other classical composer alive today. Choreographer Martha Graham commissioned one of his ballets. Leopold Stokowski commissioned and conducted Mysterious Mountain. The New York Philharmonic commissioned his 19th (Vishnu) Symphony. His music accompanied parts of Carl Sagan’s TV presentation, Cosmos. KING-TV of Seattle commissioned Hovhaness to compose music for a recent documentary on a group of Americans who tried to scale the north wall of Mount Everest and lost one climber. His Lousadzak Concerto, composed in 1944 and performed the following year in Boston with Hovhaness as conductor and pianist, has been revived by Keith Jarrett, who played it (“magnificently,” Hovhaness said) at Lincoln Center in New York last May. (Lousadzak means “dawn of light,” an awakening to a new spiritual vision of things.) Easier Than Writing Words Four or five years after his birth in a small town outside Boston, he tried his hand at composing, he said, producing a piece maybe ten bars long. But his mother couldn’t play it on the piano. So he lost interest until he was 7. Then he heard some music by Schubert and thought, “Perhaps I should write down the things I’m hearing in my head — because I thought everybody hears melodies in their heads, everybody’s composing all the time.” So he started composing at the age of 7, and never quit after that. “People ask me, ‘Well, how do you learn to write music?’ Or people come to me and say, ’I have music in my head but I can’t write it down.’ I don’t understand it, because it’s easier than writing words. It’s very easy. It’s the easiest thing in the world.... So nobody ever taught me how to write it.” By the time he was 8 years old, Hovhaness was studying under Miss Adelaide Proctor, whom he credits for really starting him off (“she was like a saint”) and later worked with pianist Heinrich Gebhard, who also instructed Leonard Bernstein. Ever since, Hovhaness has been busy transcribing the sounds that Alan Hovhaness has spent his life composing Music for the Sleeping World Story and Photos by MiChsel Brush pass through his head. “I sometimes say it’s a sickness, but I enjoy it — an addiction perhaps.” He likens the music he hears to “a fast-moving animal that goes so fast I have to catch it. I have to grab it.” In 1933 Hovhaness won the Samuel Endicott prize for a symphony he composed but later destroyed in one ’ m/iusic is a vibration, it's a way of IVIfeeling and hearing and thinking, it’s a way of transmitting thought.... Sometimes you have to strike the unconscious to really accomplish something. And I think music can do that." of several purges of his early works, which, so the story goes, totaled about 1,000 pieces. No one really knows how many were destroyed, no one but Hovhaness. He probably never bothered to count them all, and estimated the number as best he could. Even now, he says, he has no idea how many sonatas he’s written. It was in the Thirties that he became friends with another artist of Armenian descent, playwright and writer William Saroyan, while doing music for some of Saroyan’s productions. Saroyan nominated Hovhaness for his first major monetary award as a composer, $1,000 from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1952. Hovhaness lived in India in 1959-60 on a Fulbright Research Scholarship. Later he conducted performances of his own music on a tour of the U.S.S.R. Then he lived in Switzerland. And in 1966 he made his first visit to the Pacific Northwest, to appear with the Seattle Youth Symphony. Apparently he felt at home. He stayed in Seattle the next year as composer-in- residence under a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, and by 1972 he had settled in the Seattle area. The Sho in Renton At his split-level home in Renton, on a subdivided hill a half-hour south of Seattle, Hovhaness lives and sometimes performs with his wife of six years, Hinako Fujihara, a coloratura soprano to whom Hovhaness has dedicated many of his later works. He mentioned with affectionate pride that Hinako used to be a movie actress in Japan, a slice of personal history she shrugs off as something she did for three years, “and that was a long time ago.” During the final session of our interview, his wife was practicing in their dining room, climbing higher and higher on the musical scale. (A 36 Clinton St. Quarterly
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