coloratura soprano sings in the highest ranges of the human voice.) Suddenly a strangely discordant note intruded, followed by a long bellowing noise, like an animal in agony. “The baboons are at it again,” Hovhaness said, getting up from the sofa to stretch. It was some teenager from down the hill, one of the neighbors. The same family has even complained to police about “the racket” from the house above. Nor was this the first time they expressed their annoyance by hooting and howling while Hinako was practicing. She tries to accommodate the baboons by not singing after dusk. Evidently that didn’t appease them this Sunday afternoon. Set in the homogenized heart of America with look-alike houses all around him, a formica-topped table in his kitchen and standard living roomdining room furnishings, Hovhaness nevertheless remains removed in many ways from the culture he inhabits — like the stars and mountains and whales and deities his music so often reveres. “I’m always composing, and there’s always a lot of noise going on, and a lot of music which doesn’t appeal to me at all. So I block it out. I guess when I hear something interesting I listen. Otherwise I have this selfdefense of blocking it out entirely. So I can hear my own built-in orchestra playing anything I want it to.” He doesn’t listen to radio music. He doesn’t read the papers. He doesn’t go to the movies. He doesn’t drive a car. Although his music is frequently hymn-like and mystical, he doesn’t go to church. He doesn’t drink or smoke, but consumes coffee day and night and has an incurable weakness for chocolate. He doesn't know how to play a stereo, but he knows how to play eight instruments. He plays the piano primarily, the organ “badly,” he says. “But I played at other instruments,” namely: the Arabic oud, which is a lute; the saz, an Arabian string instrument; the vina, from south India; the ancient oboe, hichiriki, which came to Japan from China a thousand years ago; the sho, an ancient mouth organ from the Tang Dynasty which, he says, produces “the most beautiful sound in music, really the most celestial”; and the shamisen, a string instrument used in Bunraku doll theater that looks like a banjo. He has composed his own blend of Eastern and Western music for television, theater, documentary and art films, ballet, opera, solo instruments and voice, choral and chamber groups, band and orchestra. Shaking the Unconscious Alifelong student of esoterica, Hovhaness considers Sir Francis Bacon the greatest master of art, science and philosophy in recorded history. His research of the disguises, ciphers and symbols surrounding Bacon and Shakespeare convinced him that Bacon, in fact, created Shakespeare. It was Bacon, he says, who gathered together the best poets, writers and minstrels of the Elizabethan period to produce plays that would edify the people and civilize the world, all under the pen name of Will Shakespeare, derived from the Greek goddess Pallas Athena: “I will shake my spear at ignorance.” “I always had this tremendous attraction to Shakespeare, and often felt that whoever that is, that’s the most mysterious person in the whole world. Who is he? What was he? ... You feel this is a man who could do everything. He was a master of all styles and all thought.... When Ben Jonson says, ‘To my master, Will Shakespeare,’ he’s not talking about the legendary figure in Stratford. He’s talking about Bacon himself.” While shuffling through transcript and research materials, I listened over and over again to some of Hovhaness’ recorded music: two piano concertos, two symphonies, six other orchestral works and a ballet piece for three flutes, having already heard his 2nd Symphony, Mysterious Mountain, and Symphony No. 4 for Wind Instruments many times since I was introduced to Hovhaness’ music two years ago. In the course of listening, I heard all kinds of things in his music. It sounded medieval and courtly. It sounded vaguely Scottish (his mother was a Scot) with windpipe effects from the violins. It sounded like a western, with horns playing as the cowboy-Christ rides off into infinity on a horse whose hoofs never touch the ground. It sounded like a love scene from an old Biblical movie. It sounded like strands of urban jazz woven into that painting by Edward Hopper of the corner cafe at nighttime. It sounded extraterrestrial. It sounded lush and minimalistic and almost defiantly nonclimactic. It sounded like Tibet, full of Himalayas and wide-open spaces, cowbells in the distance, insects in the air, barefoot monks and goatherds following ancient paths. It sounded like a cathedral illumined by all the colors of light passing through stained-glass windows, with people in shadowy corners kneeling before votary candles. It sounded avant-garde and ages old. In a word, it sounded Shakespearean. While Hovhaness was reading over the transcript to make minor corrections, he wrote a note on the back of the final page. It said: “What does music do for the sleeping world?” I asked if he cared to answer that. He mentioned a book by Cyril Scott called The Secret Influence of Music Through the Ages, and said: "Music is a vibration. It’s a way of feeling and hearing and thinking. It’s a way of transmitting thought. The sleeping world is the unconscious world.... Sometimes you have to strike the unconscious to really accomplish something. And I think music can do that.” An interview Clinton St. Quarterly: Do you hum? Do you find yourself humming tunes? Alan Hovhaness: Well, I don’t think I hum. [Turning to his wife] Do I hum sometimes? [She nods.) I didn’t know that. [She says, “If he can’t get to a pen or paper, he hums in order to remember music he’s hearing.”] If I want to memorize something. Yes, Hefa l s ik te m ns o v t i h n e g m an ui s m ic a l h t e h a he t a g r o s e t s o s " o a fast I have to catch it. I have to grab it.” ’ «|\ lone of the old masters were I \ l ashamed to write popular music, it’s only in this damn century that such a separation has developed between so-called good composers and music for the ordinary person. I think a real master can do both." that’s right, especially if I hear it in my sleep and I want to memorize it.... But that happens under rather special circumstances. CSQ: The music through dreams? Hovhaness: Yes. Usually what happens is that I’m stopped in my work for some reason, and I’m very tired and I lay down. That hasn’t happened for many years, but it used to happen quite frequently. And when I’d lay down, I’d hear and see a particular scene going on, with some music. Then I’d wake up and I wasn’t tired at all, and I wrote it down. CSQ: You would both hear and see? Hovhaness: Yes. It wasn’t a usual thing. It was kind of a symbolic dream going on with this music. That was in connection with Mysterious Mountain, one particular place. I was working on the finale, and I suddenly got tired, and I lay down, and I had this dream of some kind of master who was leaving the earth and the trees were weeping — sort of symbolic. Two months later I was copying the parts, each one separately for the orchestra. I was writing this for [Leopold] Stokowski, and I’d given him the score, and I came to that particular passage when suddenly I felt tired. My eyes were tired, so I lay down again, and the whole dream came back again entirely. But I realized I’d left one bar out of every phrase. So I woke up and corrected it.... It’s interesting, because each phrase was four measures, and there were five four-measure phrases in the winds, with some starlight sounds going through them. The passage had a more mysterious quality. The correction made it 25 total, five times five. That’s a form John Cage likes very much, the square root form. Of course Cage wouldn’t have approved of that particular piece because it has a very lyrical quality, which he would consider old-fashioned. CSQ: Someone told me that a fluorescent lightbulb has the tone of A-sharp. Igor Stravinsky often drew his music from the sounds of animals, according to his biographer, Robert Kraft. Have you drawn your music from the environment: the hum of a refrigerator, the drone of an airplane, a dripping faucet? Hovhaness: I think the pastoral environment, or the spiritual equivalent of it, perhaps. Animals, yes. Animal consciousness is a great inspiration to me many times.... Of course, Tibetan music is entirely influenced by animal sounds.... It has the sounds of insects and the sounds of cows [imitating the moo of a cow], the Tibetan trumpets. It's a beautiful sound. I imitated that in my 17th Symphony, that kind of sound, the trombones, because that’s the only instrument we have that can do that. CSQ: When you experience sounds, and visions, passing through your mind that you try to transcribe, what kinds of shapes do they take? Is it a visual experience? Hovhaness: I don’t think I think visually when I’m writing music, unless it just happens, like in a dream. CSQ: What about colors? Hovhaness: It may be color. Vibrations are related to color, of course. But I’m not aware of it. I appreciate very much the colors of mountains. r Actually I’m here because I love the mountains. That’s the only reason I Clinton St. Quarterly 37
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