Alan Hovhaness: Biography from Answers.com Mobile

Alan Hovhaness

(born March 8, 1911, Somerville, Mass., U.S. — died June 21, 2000, Seattle, Wash.) U.S. composer. He started to compose as a child. Studies at the New England Conservatory led him to pursue an interest in non-Western music, which began to influence his own work only after he destroyed his early compositions. Affected by the music of his Armenian heritage and his own lifelong mysticism, he composed some 500 works in addition to the 1,000 or more early pieces he destroyed in 1943. His compositions included some 60 symphonies and many other orchestral works, often on sacred themes, sometimes incorporating aleatory or natural sounds, as in And God Created Great Whales (1970).

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