An incredibly beautiful CD has arrived from OgreOgress productions over in Grand Rapids, Michigan, U.S.A.

I will light candles, I will burn incense… and it’s almost like a rite, a ceremony in celebration of the beauty that is possible within us and without us, when the unforced, unstrained focus is there, absentmindedly present, like the unguarded look in a child’s eyes as she is playing with leaves, the force from the universe without still flowing fully, in a display of spirit at the convergence with the force from the universe within, from that mystical core of life… and the gallant music of Alan Hovhaness dances like a whirlwind across the score as Christina Fong and Arved Ashby takes on the joyous challenge of interpretation.

This is the third in OgreOgress’s series featuring previously unrecorded works for violin|viola by well-known composers. This CD contains several world premiers, as well as the only available recording of most of Hovhaness’s works for violin|viola and keyboard.

As one has come to expect with OgreOgress, the meticulous care doesn’t stop at the recording process, but carries on into the design of the whole package; i.e. CD and cover. The cover is beautiful and refreshing, romantic with grace, i.e., without any sentimental tendency. The painting partly reproduced is Yoshiaki Yoshinari’s Orange (2000). The CD itself has artistic figures printed on the surface, supposed to picture the Urartian love goddess Saris (pre-Armenian culture), drawn by Kenneth Wells. Not too many record companies take this much care in designing their releases. I can only think of one who is on the level of OgreOgress; Traditional Crossroads in New York.
Of course the music is the most important, but the accessories add to the experience, and when someone goes to these lengths to make the package good-looking, you know they’ve already worked as hard with the music and the recording before that.
There is a silver lining around the productions out of OgreOgress. They take state of the art a little further.

Arved Ashby, the keyboard player on the CD, has also written a learned and informative (the two does nor necessarily have to exclude each other all the time…) text on Hovhaness and his music in the liner notes.

Hovhaness belongs to that select crew of completely independent souls, who has to follow their own route, their own artistic urge, without ever checking out what is viable in the surrounding society, making him quite inconvenient with the dedicated followers of the avant-garde as well as with the traditionalists. He knew, long before Dylan said it in Up To Me: “If I had paid attention to what others were thinking, this heart inside me would have died”… that he would have deteriorated if he didn’t just let out what rose in him. This is why his music is to be heard without too much dependence on period or tradition or cultural tendencies; it’s simply a voice to be heard, take it or leave it. In this aspect Alan Hovhaness is the kin of two Swedish composers; Claude Loyola Allgén and Allan Pettersson, who always stood their own ground – because they had no other choice! It’s a work of necessity that these independents do, and bless them for it! Out of their efforts direct connections to immense beauty is opened to the attentive listener, to the open ear and mind, without musical or cultural prejudice.
Hovhaness once stated: “It is best that no mention be made of my scholarships or education, because my direction is completely away from the approved path of any of my teachers – thus the responsibility will be inflicted on no one but myself” (filling out a survey for The American Music Center)

The above might suggest that Hovhaness lead a life of poverty and borderline psychological states, but to the contrary. He was soon taken aboard by personalities like Stokowski, Kostelantez, Hanson, Reiner and others, and he was a very prolific composer, with in excess of 400 surviving compositions. He was one of the few composers of art music who could sustain himself on his art.

Ashby gives an example of Hovhaness’s ingenuity and energy, describing one instance when the composer got a commission one day, wrote the piece the following day and presented the work to the public a mere two weeks later! You can listen to that work on this CD; Duet for Violin & Harpsichord.

Arved Ashby’s essay goes on to the quiet disdain with which Hovhaness regarded equal temperament, though he supposedly started each day playing a Bach chorale. Ashby says that Hovhaness loved the human voice and string instruments for their lack of frets, keys, valves and discrete tunings. He cites Hovhaness: “Human beings will use just intonation unconsciously, because it is the scale of nature; it is what any voice will sing”.

The first piece – Oror – was written early, in 1922/26, but the other entries were conceived between 1944 and 1962.
I will not dwell on the specific tracks, but rather spread some of my immediate impressions across this text as the music is playing and the incense is burning.
I hear some thoughtful, graceful gestures of someone standing in a field of waving grass, taking in the open landscape, and, as all good artists, transforming it into a spiritual experience, the way energy is just another aspect of matter and vice versa, as Einstein revealed to us westerners almost 100 years ago, but which is clear in eastern texts thousands of years old. This knowledge is reached through intuition, if not by science, and in the end – already these days – science and eastern frames of thought do merge. A new conception of the world is ever more clear to many people as the Age of Aquarius unfolds.

This music – so slenderly crafted by the composer and so wonderfully molded by the players – has a simple immediacy about it that can harm nobody, but rather make everybody feel at ease, letting go of unnecessary worries and first of all the static of the day, the horrendous interference and disturbance of contemporary life, wherein needless bits of information is cast upon us like tidal waves from hell… Yes, as I listen to Hovhaness’s beauty laid bare by Fong and Ashby I feel consoled, I feel less sad, I feel accompanied by the thoughts and impressions of this man and his music, a lone voice out of time, setting my tympanic membranes in sympathetic movement, causing this soothing current of electricity to rise into my brain, through which sparks of energy fall in a mimicry of the shooting meteorites of the Leonids, which the Earth wanders through on the very same night that I’m writing this.
I am moved by these works for violin, viola and keyboard, and an obvious question is why ever these wonderful compositions have not been recorded before. It is astounding. On the other hand, one might be glad that such skilled and intuitive interpreters as Christina Fong and Arved Ashby should be the ones to lift these pieces of music into the audible. I bow to them for the artistic and full-fledged joy and pleasure they have offered me in their interpretations. Such experiences are so important for contemporary man, elevating him into higher spheres of perception – and I don’t care in the least if I sound old-fashioned, like a contemporary of Goethe and Schiller… because I experience this feeling so clearly that I declare it the truth and nothing but!

Sometimes these pieces conjure up remembrances of long gone periods of art music, or long gone, long lost atmospheres of thought, and then again it sounds alien as the music of angels, completely austere, aloof, and still I find myself in that field of tall Armenian grass, bending in a wind full of sweet fragrances, and our bodies have vibrating auras of the colors of the rainbow against the snowcapped mountains…

I know this art of Alan Hovhaness talks directly to my heart past my intellect, and I’m taken by the hand and provided for, like the birds in the sky and the lilies on the ground…