Alan Hovhaness 100th Anniversary special.
Hovhaness was born March 8, 1911, in Somerville, Massachusetts, was a piano prodigy by age four, began composing at age seven, and furthered his studies at the Boston Conservatory for Music. He began studying spiritualism and his Armenian heritage, examining modal composition and Armenian song form within the context of Western classical composition. He spent most of his life as an independent musician, working for paid commissions rather than a university teaching position. He found himself outside the mainstream classical community for his interests in Eastern music forms, especially when he went to Japan and Korea and began studying Gagaku composition and Korean songs, and adding those to his own compositions. He has the honor of causing a near riot in New York when his first piano concerto premiered in the 1940s. He finally began to get international recognition in the 1960s, with more recordings and performances of his music. He also had a great interest in nature, mountains, whales, and wilderness landscapes and created "tone poem"- based symphonies and orchestral works with these ideas in mind. Tune in for two hours of the music of Alan Hovhaness.
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