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The Gaggle Music Club: Alan Hovhaness's Symphony No. 2, "Mysterious Mountain"

This week's selection for The Gaggle Music Club is Alan Hovhaness's Symphony No. 2, "Mysterious Mountain" (Op. 132).

Commissioned by Leopold Stokowski for the Houston Symphony Orchestra in 1955, Hovhaness's composition acquired the name "Mysterious Mountain" much later. Incidentally, it wasn't Hovhaness himself who coined the name. However, Hovhaness himself often spoke of mountains as metaphors for spiritual aspiration and cosmic grandeur, and the name "Mysterious Mountain" did match the tone of the music rather well. The symphony captures the mountain as a sacred symbol: majestic, distant, eternal, serene--a place somewhere between earth and the heavens.

At the time of the composition, Hovhaness had been involved by then in a personal and artistic quest for spiritual music, outside traditional Western modernism.

The symphony has three movements:

The first movement, Andante con moto, opens with a serene, hymn-like theme. The orchestration is soft and glowing, featuring lush strings and gentle woodwinds. The mood, suggesting spiritual calm, gradually builds in intensity but remains fundamentally meditative.

The second movement, Double Fugue (Moderato maestoso), features two subjects: the first, comprising a long, solemn theme; and the second, a more lively and rhythmic theme. Hovhaness weaves the subjects together with Renaissance-like contrapuntal mastery. The fugue builds to a majestic climax.

The third movement, Allegro vivo, is faster and more dramatic. It features sudden shifts between turbulence and calm. There is a sense of struggle toward transcendence. The symphony ends quietly and mysteriously, without a grand, triumphant conclusion--true to the "mysterious" theme.

The influence of Medieval counterpoint (especially Renaissance polyphony) is easily discernible in the piece. So is the influence of British composer Vaughn Williams. Hovhaness’s "Mysterious Mountain" strongly resembles Vaughan Williams’s "Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis," both compositions' projecting a serene, mystical world.

With "Mysterious Mountain," Hovhaness achieved something of a breakthrough, gaining national and even international recognition. Before this, he was respected only in certain circles. In his early works, Hovhaness had been very personal, meditative and liturgical. His works were often not structured like normal symphonies, and were very different from the works of more mainstream American composers. "Mysterious Mountain," on the other hand, has three distinct movements, uses Western contrapuntal forms and offers more traditional orchestration.

Accessible to Western concert audiences, the symphony expressed Hovhaness's core ideals: Spirituality, love of nature and cosmic ideas and rejection of Western avant-garde modernism (atonality and the twelve-tone system).

"Mysterious Mountain" remains one of the few 20th-century American symphonies from outside the mainstream (Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein and Samuel Barber) that is part of the orchestral repertoire.

In this performance from 2024, Branden Muresan conducts the Southern California Philharmonic.

00:21:09
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Share all of your thoughts, comments and criticisms on the Live Chat.

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Monday Night At The Movies

Please choose which one of the following 8 movies you would like to have screened next Monday, Nov. 3.

The theme is "films that have audiences rooting for the villain."

Please continue to vote after Nov. 3, so that we can determine the runner-up. The runner-up will be screened on Nov. 10.

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January 21, 2023
More Leftie Than Thou
"Jacobin" Magazine Celebrates A Strike Against Ol' Blue Eyes

Here at "The Gaggle" we have very little time for the "more Leftie than thou" school of thought--that's the approach to life according to which the only thing that matters is whether you take the right position on every issue under the sun from Abortion to Zelensky. No one in the world meets the exacting standards of this school of thought; any Leftie leader anywhere is always selling out to the bankers and the capitalists. The perfect exemplar of this is the unreadable Jacobin magazine. 

The other day I came across this article from 2021. It's a celebration of trade union power. And not simply trade union power, but the use of trade union power to secure political goals. Of course (and this is always the case with the "more Leftie than thou" crowd), this glorious, never-to-be-forgotten moment on the history of organized labor took place many years ago--in the summer of 1974 to be exact. Yes, almost half a century has gone by since that thrilling moment when the working-class movement of Australia mobilized and prepared to seize the means of production, distribution and exchange. 

Well, not quite. Organized labor went into action against...Ol' Blue Eyes, the Chairman of the Board, the Voice; yes, Frank Sinatra. Why? What had Sinatra done? Sinatra was certainly very rich, and he owned a variety of properties and businesses. But if the Australian trade union movement were, understandably, searching for the bright, incandescent spark that would finally awaken the working class from its slumber there were surely richer, greedier, more dishonest, more decadent, above all more Australian individuals it could have discovered. Australia was never short of them. Rupert Murdoch immediately springs to mind. Why Sinatra?

 

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