Celestial Fantasy, Op. 44 - by Alan Hovhaness

Celestial Fantasy, Op. 44 by Alan Hovhaness
Performed Sunday, October 15th, 2023 | First Christian Church
Conductor: Thomas Wilson
Audio/Video: Michael Lascuola
Program Notes: Jacob Pope
But for music, Alan Hovhaness may have become an astronomer. At the age of five, while living in Somerville, MA, a young Alan asked his father if the stars above were worlds like their own. This began a lifelong interest in the cosmos that inspired dozens of Hovhaness' works.
Hovhaness was a famously prolific and quick composer, at one point composing an entire Easter Cantata for CBS Radio and Television in just a single weekend, before the holiday. He also famously destroyed over a thousand of his own works after criticism from composer and musicologist Roger Sessions. Following this episode, Hovhaness rededicated himself to a style of composing that made use of modal scales and was based in his family's Armenian heritage. Today's Celestial Fantasy was written in the midst of this Armenian period, and is dedicated to the saint and poet Nerses Shnorhali, who led the Armenian Church in the early 12th century. It begins with an Armenian hymn that develops into a four-voice fugue before a powerful conclusion.