An important 20th Century American composer whose music anticipated many future musical trends and aesthetic values. Rejecting the vogues of Americana, serialism and atonality, he pioneered contemporary development of archaic models and was amongst the earliest to integrate Western musical idioms with Eastern ones, making him a pioneer of East-West 'fusion' decades before the term 'World Music' had been coined.
Introduced 'ad libitum' or aleatoric counterpoint from 1944, almost two decades before the European avant garde. From the 1940s, his employment of incantatory melodies over static harmonies, plus use of rhythmic cycles, presaged the Minimalist vogue of the 1960s/70s.
The visionary and mystical nature of his work, often intoxicating in its directness and simplicity, rank him as the musical progenitor to the later, so-called New Age-ists and Spiritual Minimalists, such as Arvo Paert and John Tavener.
His significance remains overlooked by musical academia, partly due to his aloofness from the establishment, and also because scholars have not looked for radical developments in post-War music which is broadly tonal and deliberately appealing.
Which altogether meant a "Berufsverbot"!!
Alan Hovhaness' O Lord, Bless Thy Mountains, opus 276, for two pianos tuned a quartertone apart, was recorded in the CAMI Hall on June 14, 1991 in New York following its American Festival of Microtonal Music (AFMM) concert premiere that same day. The late composer wrote, While riding on a bus in Seattle and looking at the mountains, I composed the music as a religious hymn to the beauty and inspiration of these wonderful peaks.
Opus 276 was originally composed for the pianists, John and Thelma Dierks of Virginia.