Alan Hovhaness ranks among the most intrepid of musical explorers in 20th century classical music. He was a widely recorded and lauded American composer in the 1950s and 60s, and since the 1990s continues to enjoy something of a revival on CD. Yet there is little scholarly commentary on Hovhaness despite the wealth of radical individuality in some phases of his six decades of creativity. This is somewhat surprising given that during the 1940s and 50s he was firmly entrenched within that maverick group of American composers (others included Henry Cowell, Jonn Cage and Lou Harrison) who spearheaded one of the great shifts in twentieth century American music, namely that of looking to non-Western cultures for creative renewal in art music. In particular, Hovhaness also spearheaded quasi-aleatoric texture as early as the 1940s.

With little published reference material on Hovhaness, when serious investigation is long overdue, this web site since 2001 has been the internet's leading resource on Alan Hovhaness and his music.

Hovhaness' huge output of around 500-odd works is somewhat uneven in quality (an inevitable characteristic shared by equally restless creators such as Villa Lobos or Henry Cowell) but as Leonard Bernstein remarked in 1960, “Some of Hovhaness's music is very, very good”. Half a century on, many of those works are still a well-kept secret from audiences and performers alike. Hovhaness’s best works stand shoulder-to-shoulder with those of America’s most lauded composers, and many are more original. This is not surprising given that Hovhaness was an outsider by temperament and choice, his artistic credo impermeable to musical fashion and his aesthetic intent often more in sympathy with the Orient than Occident.

Investigation of Hovhaness’s best music (1944 to c.1970) reveals a unique and thoroughly convincing assimilation of highly disparate traditions coming to the fore and receding over the course of his career (e.g. Renaissance polyphony, South Indian classical music, Japanese Gagaku music, Korean Ah-ak music). Of course, many 20th century composers flirted with such exotica, but in Hovhaness they find perhaps the most seamless alchemy of all because it was more than mere flirtation. It was a musical engagement on an aesthetic as well as technical level.