Alan Hovhaness (1911 - 2000)
“Celestial Gate” (Symphony no. 6)

If you have never heard music of Alan Hovhaness, please expect to be surprised and moved.  Born Alan Vaness Chakmakjian in 1911 in Massachusetts to well-educated parents of Armenian and Scottish descent, he adopted the name Hovaness in 1930 because of the frequent mispronunciation of his name, changing the spelling in 1944 to Hovhaness. From a very early age, his ambition was a career as a composer and he was prolific from his teen-age years onward.

It is said that criticism from American serialist composer Roger Sessions, caused Hovhaness to destroy over a thousand manuscript pages of early works. Hovhaness was also ridiculed in 1940 at Tanglewood by Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein who caused him to angrily abandon a scholarship to that esteemed institution.  His rebuttal came in an application for a Guggenheim fellowship, “I propose to create a heroic, monumental style of composition simple enough to inspire all people, consequently free from fads, artificial mannerisms, and false sophistications, direct, forceful, sincere, always original but never unnatural. … It is not my purpose to supply pseudo-intellectual musicians and critics with more food for brilliant argumentation, but rather to inspire all mankind with new heroism and spiritual nobility.”  This admirable philosophy did not prevent Hovhaness from adopting some modern techniques in his later works, such as aleatorism and the use of twelve-tone rows.

Beginning at this time, his influences were Armenian and Asian-Oriental.  As well, flavours of the Middle East can be heard in much of his music beginning in the war years and are evident in Symphony no. 6.  His music is typically lyrical and contrapuntally rich.  He was inspired by Bach’s music, but, aside from the frequent use of fugue (also used in the symphony), the two composers have little in common stylistically.  Like Bach, Hovhaness was a prolific composer, writing over 500 works including 67 numbered symphonies.

Celestial Gate is a dreamy one-movement symphony for small orchestra composed in 1959 and inspired by a painting of the same name by Italian mystic artist Hermon di Giovanni.  The symphony’s virtues are its melodic and harmonic richness and simplicity.  Not to be mistaken for mood music; Hovhaness is taking us somewhere on a spiritual journey and his destination is a place of peace and tranquility, even if the voyage is interrupted along the way by some very brief and agitated dissonance.