The Wandering Armenian

"I am interested," says Alan Hovhaness, "only in serenity of the mind." In his search for it, Composer Hovhaness is traveling around the world, and during the trip--working in railway coaches, airplanes, steamy hotel rooms--he has serenely turned out four symphonies, one opera, a concerto and four piano pieces. Last week in Tokyo he displayed some of the fruits of serenity to warmly applauding Japanese.

In his 49 years, estimates Composer Hovhaness, he has probably written 1,200 pieces, including 16 symphonies. In 1943 he destroyed almost everything he had written up to that point--seven symphonies and packing cases full of shorter works with which he was dissatisfied--but he still remains a prolific and widely performed composer.

Much of his music, by his own testimony, "derives from a time and place different than ours--from ancient principles and ancient cultures. The study of Eastern music is my lifework." A largely self-taught composer, Hovhaness owes more to the ragas of India and the folk dances of his father's native Armenia than to the European modernists under whose influence most U.S. composers are reared. In the streets of India and the theaters of Japan, says Hovhaness, he heard oblique echoes of his own work.

Delphian Grandeur. The compositions of Alan Hovhaness, wrote one Japanese critic, "are like Japanese scrolls. As they are rolled out, they reveal new images and their message bit by bit. Western classical music in comparison is like a photographic print." Japanese audiences heard Hovhaness conduct several of his older works--Psalm and Fugue, the 28-minute Concerto No. 8--plus two brand-new works written in transit: Symphony No. 8, subtitled "Arjuna," after the name of a mythical hero from Indian folklore; and the choral piece Fuji (based on an 8th century Japanese poem beginning: "As I stepped out on the beach of Tago, I saw snow falling on Mount Fuji").

The Japanese were intrigued by Hovhaness' trancelike, tranquilly breathing music, with its long, curving melodic lines running side by side yet independent of one another, its use of Eastern dance patterns, its little swirling eddies of sound. So far, Japanese audiences have not heard the Hovhaness work most frequently played in the U.S.--Mysterious Mountain, a spacious, broadly flowing 17-minute work that conveys an almost Delphian sense of grandeur.

Nomadic Life. One reason that Hovhaness has been able to turn out so much is that he started at four--a year before Mozart--and has been hard at it ever since. A chemistry professor's son from suburban Boston (original family name: Chakmakjian), he studied briefly at the New England Conservatory, got his first taste of Eastern music from the colony of transplanted Armenians in and around Boston, promptly scrapped the romantic Sibelian-flavored music he had been writing and started over again. He now carries a note pad with him wherever he goes, finds that ideas are likely to "come tumbling out when I'm listening to speeches or riding on trains." As he left Japan this week, he was working simultaneously on two new symphonies (the 10th and 11th), planned to stop only briefly in the U.S. before wandering on to Switzerland. "At the moment," says Alan Hovhaness, "the nomadic life is a necessity. I want to be where I can see and hear."

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