Alan Hovhaness - Early Life

Early Life

He was born as Alan Vaness Chakmakjian in Somerville, Massachusetts, to Haroutioun Hovanes Chakmakjian (an Armenian chemistry professor at Tufts College who had been born in Adana, Turkey) and Madeleine Scott (an American woman of Scottish descent who had graduated from Wellesley College). When he was five, his family moved from Somerville to Arlington, Massachusetts. A Hovhaness family neighbor said his mother had insisted on moving from Somerville because of discrimination against Armenians there. After her death (on October 3, 1930), he began to use the surname "Hovaness" in honor of his paternal grandfather, and changed it to "Hovhaness" around 1944. He stated the name change from the original Chakmakjian reflected the desire to simplify his name because "nobody ever pronounced it right". However, Hovhaness' daughter Jean Nandi has written in her book Unconventional Wisdom, "My father's name at the time of my birth was 'Hovaness', pronounced with accent on the first syllable. His original name was 'Chakmakjian', but in the 1930s he wanted to get rid of the Armenian connection and so changed his name to an Americanized version of his middle name. Some years later, deciding to reestablish his Armenian ties, he changed the spelling to 'Hovhaness', accent on the second syllable; this was the name by which he later became quite famous."

Hovhaness was interested in music from a very early age, writing his first composition at the age of four after being inspired by hearing a song of Franz Schubert. His family was concerned after this first attempt at composition, a cantata in the early Italian style, for his late-night hours spent composing and possibly for his financial future as an artist. He decided for a short time to pursue astronomy, another of his early loves. The fascination of astronomy remained with him through his entire life and composing career, with many works titled after various planets and stars.

His father took great pride in his son's precocious composing, and set up his first piano lessons with a neighborhood teacher. (He also learned violin, and earned a small income for a short time teaching violin to a neighbor's child.) His father helped to support him long into young adulthood through many difficult years, and when recognized by Alan from the stage of his successful Boston Symphony Orchestra concert in Symphony Hall under their regular conductor, the renowned Serge Koussevitzky, who conducted the orchestra from 1924 to 1949 and was a major sponsor of many contemporary composers worldwide, broke into tears.

He continued his piano studies, first with Adelaide Proctor and then with Heinrich Gebhard, a student of Theodor Leschetizky, who was a student of Carl Czerny whose teacher was none other than Ludwig van Beethoven, making Hovhaness a fourth-generation student of Beethoven. By age 14, however, he decided to devote himself to composition. Among his first and most important influences were the recordings of Gomidas Vartabed, an eminent Armenian composer who had survived the Armenian genocide. He composed two operas during his teenage years which were performed at Arlington High School, and the composer Roger Sessions took an interest in his music during this time. Following his graduation from high school in 1929, he studied with Leo Rich Lewis at Tufts and then under Frederick Converse at the New England Conservatory of Music. In 1932, he won the Conservatory's Samuel Endicott prize for composition with a symphonic work entitled Sunset Symphony (elsewhere entitled Sunset Saga). In July 1934, with his first wife, Martha Mott Davis, he traveled to Finland to meet its greatest composer, Jean Sibelius, whose music he had greatly admired since childhood. The two continued to correspond for the next twenty years.

In 1936, Hovhaness attended a performance in Boston by the Indian dance troupe of Uday Shankar (with orchestra led by Vishnudas Shirali), which inspired his lifelong interest in the music of India. During the 1930s (until 1939), he worked in FDR's federal WPA's Federal Music Project.

Hovhaness married six times; the first marriage was around 1934, the last 1977. The daughter from his first marriage (his only child) was named Jean Christina Hovhaness (born June 13, 1935) and named after Jean Christian Sibelius, her godfather and Hovhaness's friend until his death at 92 in 1957.