A.Hovhaness - the person with a real understanding of the East

 A composer who could write music from European, Central Asia, India, Korea, Japan, North Africa, South Asia tradition and where the local musicologists or musicians praise his understanding of the local culture. He could improvise based on Indian rag, performing with the ensemble of Japanese gagaku (court music). He was Alan Hovhaness (1911 – 2000), an American-Armenian composer. He was one of the most prolific 20th-century composers. His music was full of inspiration from the East.

I don't know him until recently. He did not catch any frame until his mid-composition career and lots of his early composition was destroyed by himself. It is hard to trace his music in his early period and give a solid conclusion of why his music did not catch public attention. At the time of the early-mid 20th century, the general composers in America didn't have a deep understanding of Eastern culture. The US composer either fellowed the traditional European tradition, jazz, or went experiential. Hovhaness's first symphony adopted the folk material form Armenian. When the symphony was played, Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein did not show any respect at all. Until his 40's, his Symphony No. 2, Mysterious Mountain, was premiered by Leopold Stokowski with the Houston Symphony, causing his major career breakthrough.

He had a close composer, Lou Harrison, by nothing surprise, they are composing with a similar approach, finding inspiration from Eastern culture. At the age before the internet, learning foreign culture was not easy, mostly the mean of traveling and books. They are the real pioneer of adopting foreign culture. However, their audiences did not follow tightly which restain his reputation from the classical canon.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Post-spectralism influence on tuning

According to Helmholtz (2011), a musical note is due to the fundamental frequency and the quality of a musical sound is due to the presence of upper partials. For traditional western music, pitch perception is mainly fundamental, rather than the frequencies in the spectrum which Teodorescu-Ciocanea (2003) describes as a “note proper” tradition. The spectralism composers shifted the domain from absolute pitches, intervals and chords to the spectrum. Spectral music is a complex approach to timbre, Teodorescu-Ciocanea (2003) classified 9 tendencies and their possibilities in spectral music. To conclude the techniques, tuning the frequencies according to the harmonic series is the major approach; while working with noise, generated digitally and/or extended techniques on instruments, is a sort of timbral dissonance which dilutes the pitch perception of a musical sound. Teodorescu-Ciocanea describes inharmonicity as the combination of frequencies that are not integral multiples of the funda
Read more

Haba's field shifting - and the expansion of traditional functional harmony

Image
Hába characterizes the quarter-tone gamut as separated into two fields, one half comprising the twelve conventional pitches, and the other half, shifting all the twelve notes by a quarter-tone, the twelve quarter-tone pitches. In harmony, Passages occur in which chords composed purely of conventional pitches alternate with chords composed purely of quarter-tone pitches. Two fields are not always rejecting each other when he equally divided a perfect 4th (5 semitones)into 2 equal intervals, equal 2.5 for each, the 0.5 quartertones always step into the other field. Sometimes, this fourth interval can be further divided into 2.5+2+0.5 or other permutations. This kind of splitting a fourth can be traced to ancient greek tetrachord, a scale of four notes, bounded by the interval of a perfect fourth. A chord across both fields, the chord spell like a flatter dominant 7th chord. the 7th harmonic on harmonic series is quite flat (-31cents). This chord combines both fields sounds better accordi
Read more

Temperament, Tuning, and Timbre -- the underrated trinity in music

 The trinity here is not about the Christianity faith, but similar to the idea of the Christian doctrine of it defines God as being one God existing in three coequal, the core and fundamental definition, temperament, tuning, and timbre (TTT) are the basic building blocks of music, yet, underrated and even neglected in our music education system. TTT correlates with each other. A note is played, it carries out a series of frequencies, the harmonic series. The series multiples from the fundamental frequency with a series of integers (1f 2f 3f 4f 5f 6f 7f 8f 9f 10f 11f 12f 13f...). The loudness of individual particles, and different patterns, creates different timbres. View the series in a different way, the combination of the integers creates intervals. The combination of the beginning of the series sounds more harmonious and vice versa; simple ratios sound pure and vice versa. The pure perfect 5th interval is based on the ratio of 2:3 (2nd and 3rd harmonics at the same time), Pytheogoro
Read more