Alan Hovhaness quotes

The greater the emotional intensity, the greater the simplicity. (Alan Hovhaness)

My purpose is to create music not for snobs, but for all people, music which is beautiful and healing. To attempt what old Chinese painters called 'spirit resonance' in melody and sound.

Alan Hovhaness

We are in a very dangerous period. We are in danger of destroying ourselves, and I have a great fear about this...The older generation is ruling ruthlessly. I feel that this is a terrible threat to our civilization. It's the greed of huge companies and huge organizations which control life in a kind of a brutal way...It's gotten worse and worse, somehow, because physical science has given us more and more terrible deadly weapons, and the human spirit has been destroyed in so many cases, so what's the use of having the most powerful country in the world if we have killed the soul. It's of no use.

Alan Hovhaness

I've always regarded nature as the clothing of God.

Alan Hovhaness

I did all kinds of things in order to earn a living.

Alan Hovhaness

I was much more interested in the orchestra than the piano, but I did become fairly proficient as a pianist and my teachers felt I had talent and wanted me to become a good concert pianist and earn my living that way.

Alan Hovhaness

I think that of my 21 symphonies, each has its own place.

Alan Hovhaness

I propose to create an heroic, monumental style of composition simple enough to inspire all people, completely free from fads, artificial mannerisms and false sophistications, direct, forceful, sincere, always original but never unnatural. Music must be freed from decadence and stagnation. There has been too much emphasis on small things while the great truths have been overlooked. The superficial must be dispensed with. Music must become virile to express big things. It is not my purpose to supply a few pseudo intellectual musicians and critics with more food for brilliant argumentation, but rather to inspire all mankind with new heroism and spiritual nobility. This may appear to be sentimental and impossible to some, but it must be remembered that Palestrina, Handel, and Beethoven would not consider it either sentimental or impossible. In fact, the worthiest creative art has been motivated consciously or unconsciously by the desire for the regeneration of mankind.

Alan Hovhaness

I was born in Somerville, but I don't remember very much about it because we moved from there to Arlington when I was five years old, and it was in Arlington that I spent most of my childhood.

Alan Hovhaness

There is nothing like practice.

Alan Hovhaness

This is not to say that the Scots are not fine people, but they were all sort of... well, my grandfather was a minister and sort of Protestant, and this was rather depressing to me. (Alan Hovhaness)

It's hard for me to think of others because I'm not particularly in sympathy with the music of this century.

Alan Hovhaness

My mother's background was Scottish. She came from an old family, some of whom lived in upper New York State and some of whom had come over from Scotland.

Alan Hovhaness

There were periods when I sometimes made fires in a large, open fireplace that lasted about two weeks, which was how long it took to burn my compositions. So there has been an awful lot that I have destroyed.

Alan Hovhaness

I found a greater identity with my own emotions in the Armenian culture as I grew older, as well as from the beginning, although I didn't know anything about it.

Alan Hovhaness