The Armenian composer went back to his roots and actually got interested in Armenian music very late in his life. Alan never learned Armenian and didn’t communicate with Armenians. Alan Hovhannes’s Scottish mother was against that. Director of the Yerevan Chamber Orchestra Aram Gharabekyan remembers the first time he met Hovhannes.
“He looked like he was not from this world. He was totally into music.”
In order to attract the public eye, the Chamber Orchestra has taken the initiative of organizing a concert dedicated to the composer’s 95th anniversary and will play his “Lusatsag” (Dawn).
Alan Hovhannes has tried to include a little bit of Eastern and Western music in his compositions. He has taken the philosophy and elements of exotic music of the East to add a little flavor to Western music. Just like the great composer Komitas, Hovhannes has also collected and wrote his versions of Japanese, Indian, Korean and Chinese melodies and has achieved great heights in those countries. The turning point for Alan Hovhannes was when he started to listen to Komitas’s masterpieces.
After listening to Komitas, Hovhannes decided to get rid of his old creations and that is why we don’t have most of his early work,” says director of the Alan Hovhannes international research center Alexan Zakaryan. At the time, Komitas was at the psychiatric center in Paris and had lost self-consciousness. Alan Hovhannes was overjoyed with Komitas’s simple melodies and considered music higher than nationality and the period in which we live. He visited Armenia one time back in 1965. But he left with bad impressions of his Homeland.
“God is Satan and Lenin is God in Soviet Armenia.”
He rejected all invitations to come to Armenia after that. Despite his bad impressions, he has always said that he loves Armenia’s nature and mountains during his interviews.
“There is so much music just out there in the mountains. Even the silence of the mountains is music to my ears. I feel that each mountain has a soul,” he said.
Alan Hovhannes was amazed to see so many professional Armenian orchestras and would like to see Armenia’s culture be shown to the world. Armenian culture has served as a firm basis for Alan Hovhannes’s compositions. The Japanese simply referred to him as “Armenian” in Japan. Contemporary music has strong bases. Alan Hovhannes is a very fresh and contemporary composer and you can feel that just by reading the titles of his compositions-“Your hair is like basil”, “Armenian Rhapsody”, “To make pleasant noise” “Dance of the Macedonian mountains”, “The moon has a face”, “Symphony of Whales”.
The Alan Hovhannes center will open a museum soon featuring the composer’s recordings, notes and archive.