East of Bach

His teacher didn't like the piano piece that the eight-year-old boy had written. Said she, puzzled and reproving: "There's no music like this." Little Alan Hovhaness, who knew better, replied triumphantly, "Bach did it that way."

Since then, Composer Hovhaness, now a tall, cadaverous 37, has left Bach behind and discovered what he calls a "pathway to the lost music of the ancient world." In Boston he writes music that might have been composed 2,000 years ago in his father's native Armenia.

This week, Manhattan concertgoers heard his latest oddity--a piece called Shatokh. Against a low rich moan of the violin, the piano sounded like one of the ancient Armenian zither-and lute-like instruments (kanoon, saz) that Hovhaness likes to imitate: there was little else but pluck-like repeated notes, connected occasionally by eddying swirls of sound. Suddenly, when it was about to verge on monotony, Shatakh just ended.

There are no chords (in the Western sense) in Hovhaness' trance-like music. He hates chords. Says he: "It is a European sophistication ... to force melody to submit to the dictatorship of harmony." Hovhaness himself uses ancient Indian ragas, or what he calls "groups of associated notes" and tolas, groups of beats, rather than the conventional rhythms.

Not that he doesn't know conventional harmony, rhythm and form: he earns his living teaching at the Boston Conservatory of Music, playing the organ in an Armenian church for services, and for weddings and funerals. Occasionally, to pick up a little change, he has harmonized popular songs. A shy, serious man, he lives with his 18-year-old wife Serafina in Boston's grubby Field Street, rough equivalent of Greenwich Village.

Hovhaness has written eight symphonies, but now regards with contempt all the music he wrote up to four years ago. Says he: "Western music probably reached its peak with Mozart, and certainly with Beethoven. Since then, more & more it has become overloaded with superficial harmony; like some baroque building it seems about to collapse with ornamentation."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.