Alan Hovhaness (1911-2000): Prayer of St. Gregory

Notre Dame University sits just north of my home town of South Bend, Indiana. Though famous for the fighting Irish, for me its most important contribution was having the only classical music FM station in the berg. When I was in high school and started “discovering” classical music, the channel thereby lifted the cultural profile of the town for me from desert to oasis.

 

 

On Sunday afternoons, they took caller requests. A piece that almost always showed up was Alan Hovhaness’ Symphony Nº2 “Mysterious Mountain,” which he wrote in 1955, the year I was born. I found it entrancing, from the ethereal celeste to the lone horn to the driving and cascading strings.

 

Hovhaness’ father was a professor of chemistry at Tufts university. He was an Armenian born in Turkey, who moved to the US before the genocide, though many of his relatives were killed during that time. He first settled in Somerville, Massachusetts, but his family moved because of racism against Armenians in that town.

 

Alan started composing music at the age of 4, and his parents were concerned because he would stay up late at nights composing. Devoting himself to composition after studying piano, by the age of 14 he had written two operas and caught the attention of the composer Roger Sessions, who championed his work. College was at the New England Conservatory of Music, where he learned how to play the sitar and also explored eastern music from Armenia and Turkey. He wrote his Symphony No 1 “Exiles’ as a memorial to the Armenian genocide.

 

In 1942, he got a scholarship to Tanglewood. There he faced discrimination from no less luminaries than Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein. Here’s how wikipedia describes it:

 

“During a seminar in composition, while a recording of Hovhaness’ first symphony was being played, Aaron Copland talked loudly in Spanish to Latin-American composers in the room; and at the end of the recording Leonard Bernstein went to the piano, played a melodic minor scale and rebuked the work as ‘cheap ghetto music.”

 

It’s interesting to reflect that I first heard this son of an Armenian immigrant’s music on the radio station of an Irish (immigrant) university. My grandfathers were immigrants, Hungarian (paternal) and Belgian (maternal). South Bend was full of Eastern European immigrants who left what must have been intolerable conditions before the first world war, drawn by the industries which have turned the midwest into the rust belt. Worse, it’s alarming to contemplate the abject institutional and group racism which has become entrenched in the states since 1980. Our diversity which once made us strong and great has been used as a lightning rod to divide us into tribes fighting each other to keep our eyes off the true puppet masters who maintain the institutional racism.

 

I didn’t put a link to “Mysterious Mountain,” here for a reason. Recently I had the pleasure of hearing for the first time, Hovhaness’ “Prayer of Saint Gregory.” St. Gregory (the illuminator) is the patron saint of Armenia, having converted the King and his court to Christianity starting in 301 AD. The King had imprisoned him in a pit under a church for around 12 years because Gregory was the son of an enemy of the King. When the King went mad, Gregory was called forth and healed him, which is why he was treated favorably thereafter.

 

I cannot find any mention of the prayer of St. Gregory, though he must have prayed a lot in the pit. There is another St. Gregory (the great) whose prayer I did find. I find it fits well with the indigities Hovhaness had to endure.

 

 

Prayer of St Gregory (The Great)

 

Acclaim To The Suffering Christ

O Lord, You received affronts

without number from Your blasphemers,

yet each day You free captive souls

from the grip of the ancient enemy.

 

You did not avert Your face

from the spittle of perfidy,

yet You wash souls in saving waters.

 

You accepted Your scourging without murmur,

yet through your meditation

You deliver us from endless chastisements.

 

You endured ill-treatment of all kinds,

yet You want to give us a share

in the choirs of angels in glory everlasting.

 

You did not refuse to be crowned with thorns,

yet You save us from the wounds of sin.

 

In your thirst You accepted the bitterness of gall,

yet You prepare Yourself to fill us with eternal delights.

 

You kept silence under the derisive homage

rendered You by Your executioners,

yet You petition the Father for us

although You are his equal in Divinity.

 

You came to taste death,

yet You were the Life

and had come to bring it to the dead.

 

Amen.

 

 

https://youtu.be/SlbJhVQ6bws