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Hovhaness was of Armenian and Scottish families, a native of the Boston area who studied at the New England Conservatory and also Tanglewood. He was born Alan Vaness Chakmakjian but took the name Hovanes (his paternal grandfather’s surname) which he later spelled Hovhaness. His daughter attributed the change partly to the fact that people couldn’t pronounce Chakmakjian. Hovhaness was a precocious composer but apparently destroyed many of his earlier compositions, following criticism from Copland and others. But still he was quite prolific, with over 400 opus numbers, including 67 symphonies.
I discovered his works in a round-about way. I heard Thomas Picker’s lovely, melancholy piece, “Old and Lost Rivers” on the radio and immediately ordered the CD, which included John Williams’ “Five Sacred Trees” and Hovhaness’ “Mysterious Mountain” (Symphony #2). Taken with that symphony, which I'd never heard before, I subsequently found Hovhaness' “Shepherd of Israel” and “Psalm and Fugue for String Orchestra” on another CD, and went from there. And I also love “Alleluia and Fugue,” “The Prayer of St. Gregory,” his “Celestial Fantasy” and “Magnificat,” and other symphonies.
At the classical.net website, Robert Clements writes that Hovhaness was “stylistically a maverick, whose music reflects a love of Western counterpoint and a personal fascination with by Indian, East Asian and Armenian music more obviously than any contemporary musical thought.”
He continues: “Hovhaness's mature style was first revealed in a work for piano and string orchestra entitled "Lousadzak" ("Dawn of Light"; 1944); which introduced Hovhaness's quasi-aleatoric Senza Misura technique (often called "Spirit Murmur") to a wider audience. In this technique, individual sections of the orchestra are instructed to continuously repeat a cycle of melody without temporal reference to other members of the ensemble. Most obviously, this technique (one of the most common components of the "Hovhaness style"), creates a gorgeous sense of rhythmic mystery from which (in "Lousadzak") the solo piano slowly emerges… at other times, the technique clearly foreshadows the work not just of modern minimalists such as Terry Riley and John Adams but also the entire Ambient/New Age school of composition…. Extensive travel throughout India and Asia casts an obvious shadow over much of his music from the fifties and sixties, coloring but not disguising the composer's distinctive palette … while the works of his ‘retirement’ (from the early seventies onwards) have tended to return more to Western models…
“The basic characteristics of the ‘Hovhaness sound’ are easier to recognise than define; but one of the most obvious ‘markers’ is the strong mystic/religious ‘feel’ to all his works. Another is Hovhaness's distinctly ‘vocal’ style (rather like Chopin, oddly) – even his orchestral work tends to sound as if it's being "sung"… an effect accentuated by Hovhaness's regular use of exposed solo lines over transparent string continuo….Hovhaness' music uses consonant harmonies, organised modally or chromatically rather than tonally; and balances out the rhythmless sound of Senza Misura …with an almost riotous love of counterpoint. …”
Here's the double fugue from "Mysterious Mountain": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KqnvkR8kN0
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