Alan Hovhaness - Mysterious Mountain

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'MYSTERIOUS MOUNTAIN' (Symphony No. 2)
- by Alan Hovhaness (1911 - 2000)

By Christopher M. Wright
© 2005 Christopher M. Wright
All Rights Reserved

Listen while you read

'Mysterious Mountain' by Alan Hovhaness and Ralph Vaughan Williams' 'Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis' are like bookends for me - and I'm not the first one to draw a connection between the two works. Hovhaness picked up where Vaughan Williams left off, and evoked something of the same mood, albeit with modern chord changes (root movements of a third) and a fuller orchestra.

Modal writing and religious inspiration are common to both works. Vaughan Williams started with a Tallis theme avowedly written for religious purposes. Hovhaness was inspired by the beauty and religious significance of nature. "Mountains," he once said, "represent symbols, like pyramids, of man's attempt to know God. They are symbolic meeting places between the mundane and spiritual worlds." In fact, Hovhaness became known for his spirituality. According to the Los Angeles Times, he was the "spiritual mascot of the bohemian art and culture set that included mythologist Joseph Campbell" in New York in the 1950's.

Leopold Stokowski asked Hovhaness for a new work for Stokowski's first concert as conductor of the Houston Symphony in 1955. The result, 'Mysterious Mountain', became Hovhaness' best-known work.

The critics sneered. Virgil Thomson called it "interminable', i.e., a failed attempt to represent spiritual eternity. Another critic mocked the work with a reference to Shangri-la.

The problem was that Hovhaness was out of step with the avant-garde and the academy which remain to this day fixated on nonmelodic techniques, including the 12-tone serialism of Schoenberg. Hovhaness was an unabashed melodist, making him hopelessly retrograde to the cognoscenti.

Recommended CD
- Listen to Samples -

Hovhaness found atonality to be against nature. "Music without a center is fine for a minute or two," he said, "but it soon sounds all the same." (Amen to that.)

''I've used all techniques, including the 12-tone technique," Hovhaness said. "But I believe melody is the spring of music. The human voice was the first instrument, and I believe that all the different instruments are voices as well. So I want to give them melodies to sing. I think melodically, and without melody I don't have much interest in music.'' It's like what Leonard Bernstein said during his lectures at Harvard in the 1970's - the lure of tonality is just too strong; you can't escape it forever.

Other observers dislike the simplicity of Hovhaness' music. It is true that 'Mysterious Mountain' consists of simple harmonically static lines, but they are layered and enter and re-enter at different points so that a towering wall of sound is built up. Some credit Hovhaness with anticipating the minimalism of Philip Glass and Steve Reich. It is also said that Hovhaness' senza misura and ad libitum ('spirit murmur') innovations (where the instrumentalists repeat the same pattern at various, self-chosen speeds to produce pure texture) prefigured the avant-garde and chance-music of John Cage and Ligeti.

Then there is Hovhaness' sensibility - informed as it was by natural beauty and religious mysticism. Some find it too New Agey and cite Hovhaness' 'And God Created Great Whales' - an orchestral piece incorporating recorded hump-back whale vocalizations - in support of their argument.

Be that as it may, the sensibility was genuine. Hovhaness left New York and moved to Seattle in 1962 to be closer to nature. He heard a sonic boom from the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980 which inspired his Symphony No. 50. It could just as well be said that Hovhaness was 25 years ahead of his time, given how popular the green movement and alternative spiritual paths (e.g., transcendental meditation, yoga) became later.

Hovhaness was ahead in another way. He traveled extensively and crafted some of the first 'world music' by assimilating folk elements from Armenia, Arabia, India, China and Korea, among other places. "To me, the hundreds of scales and ragas possible in Eastern musical systems afford . . . stimuli for a greater expansion of melodic creations," he said in 1965. "I am more interested in creating fresh, spontaneous, singing melodic lines than in the factory-made tonal patterns of industrial civilization or the splotches and spots of sound hurled at random on a canvas of imagined silence."

Hovhaness may never have strayed far beyond the bounds of conventional tonality but, after all is said and done, he drew upon a pretty eclectic set of ingredients for someone who was supposedly just writing 'the pops'. He left over 500 works (symphonic, choral, chamber, solo piano, etc.), having burned a thousand others in the 1940's that were not up to his standards. If you don't know his music, an adventure awaits you.

Recommended CD Score Catalog Discography
- Listen to Samples -

Emmy Award-winning Documentary with original music by Hovhaness

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