Alan Hovhaness and Morris Graves

This lecture tonight is the most difficult lecture. It's impossible to give this lecture. It's impossible. It's just it's not even conceivable. And it's just utter hopelessness on my part to be able to think that I could give the lecture. The two individuals are the most phantasmal people. They did not want to be corralled or seen in any particular way. They wanted to be just kaleidoscopic individualists and go off and do their own thing which they did for a long time. And as a consequence one can find almost no information on them. There have been two books published on Morris Graves and I have both of them. There have been no books published on Alan Hovhaness and I thought that I would garner some referential information for you. So I went to the Brand Library in Glendale which is the music specialty library here in Los Angeles and I thought I would write down some references so that you can go and investigate Hovhaness and I found nothing. Nothing. One cheap little dictionary had a paragraph on Hovhaness. The major dictionaries of 20th century music don't mention him. Biographies of American composers don't mention him. And yet he is far and away our greatest composer. He's probably the greatest composer since Bach or Mozart. He was born in 1911 in Somerville, Massachusetts which is a suburb of Boston for all intents and purposes. And Morris Graves was born in 1910, Hovhaness in March of 1911, Graves in September of 1910. So they're very close in terms of their coming into this world. Both were born about the time of the close of the careers of William James and Henry Adams. So there's a continuity there especially with Hovhaness coming into the Boston of 1911. The Boston of 1911 was still recognizably a part of the great tradition that had carried on from the days of Emerson and Hovhaness by the time he was five was precociously writing music already. He was just a natural. He was an incarnation that came fully gifted. He knew what he wanted to do. He never styled himself as a composer. He said I don't want to be a composer. I want to write music. And that's all I want to do. And from the age of five he began writing compositions. He began writing compositions for piano solo and he would win prizes. And people would say this is a very talented individual, let's sponsor him. So finally after some consideration they put him in with the reigning musical giant in the Boston area - Converse. Frederick Converse who taught at the New England Conservatory of Music. And Converse thought that Hovhaness was just absolutely a genius. So he gave him free reign and Hovhaness of course continued, wrote a tremendous number of compositions just poured them out. He won a scholarship to Tanglewood. And at that time the Czechoslovakian folk composer Martinu, Bohuslav Martinu was teaching at Tanglewood. So Hovhaness studied with him and suddenly got the idea that all of these compositions that he was doing and working on were coming out of his own imagination dream world. And with Martinu he suddenly realized that the true roots of music go back to folk music - the people the land. So he began to inquire of his own background. His mother was Scottish; his father was Armenian. So in this odd crisscross of genetic and cultural background Hovhaness began exploring all kinds of folk music and folk traditions and he got curious about the use of musical instruments. Why did certain countries have certain musical instruments? Why did the sound or the timbre or the pitch of those instruments affect the people of that ethnic group or that geographical location in such and such a way? So began a lifelong study of mastering exotic musical instruments. He learned to play them. He learned to think in their terms. He learned to score them. And then the Second World War came and Hovhaness, like every sensitive mystic experiencing the absolute turmoil of the world, realized that he had not put the very first beginnings into his music which was the world of the spirit. So he destroyed all of his compositions. He burned them. Some people say apocryphally probably that they numbered about a thousand. So he started from scratch in 1942 and from 1942 until his death in the very late 70s, 78 79, he wrote about 300 compositions, 21 symphonies, operas, magnificats, oratorios, incredible ranges of works that don't even have a name. Works that could never fit in any particular genre. And as he developed he kept the themes, made the spirit the basis, made the folk origins and instruments the stems and made the expression usable for the entire world. And so all of his music, all of his compositions follow into this flow. Now there are no books at all on Hovhaness. There are 1 or 2 articles. Kenneth Rexroth tried to write an article one time on him. I remember talking to him in the, in 1960 up in Sequoia National Park and he said it was impossible to approach Hovhaness. He didn't want to be known in these terms. The way that he wrote his music is he would have individuals sponsor a piece and he would write them on commission from an individual just like in the old Renaissance court only instead of having some grand patron who would patronize you he would have individuals who would save their funds and they would commission them. Later on, of course, a lot of famous people commissioned Hovhaness. One of his most famous pieces was commissioned by Leopold Stokowski called Mysterious Mountain. And Stokowski commissioned it for the opening of the Houston Symphony in 1955 and it was received so well it was broadcast coast to coast by NBC that Stokowski took it to Europe with him and wherever he played in Moscow or Kiev Hovhaness's music just drew rave reviews. And as Hovhaness lived and grew he would travel to these various countries. He would learn their music, he would learn their musical instruments. He would work those instruments into his compositions so that the longer he lived after the Second World War the more incredible became the confluence of musical types and modes. And he would go back and he would take, say, a medieval mode and put Japanese and East Indian instruments in it and then give it an Armenian theme and then play it in Seattle. And so he began to weave and mix the most incredible potpourri of music instruments and traditions together. The only thing that exists really are these records. These are the only evidences of Hovhaness having lived and composed in this country and gone on just before he died. When he was still in Seattle as the director of the Seattle Orchestra he founded the Poseidon Society and they, all the records record Hovhaness's music and they have on the cover this archaic room of an early Armenian church because for Hovhannes the primordial religious experience for him was Christianity and in Christianity the experience which profoundly moved him as he learned of it having gone back to old Armenia he recovered the origins of Christianity in Armenia. And I have to tell you a little bit about this so that you can see some of the significance. Armenia was the first country, the first empire to be declared Christian. It was declared Christian yet 20 years before Constantine declared it for the Roman Empire and it was declared on the strength of the conversion of the king who had gone insane and who was cured of his insanity by a Christian monk. It's very peculiar. The monk's name was Saint Gregory - Saint Gregory the Illuminator. Not Saint Gregory of Nyssa but Saint Gregory the Illuminator. Gregory the Illuminator had gone to Armenia. I think he was probably about 30 or 35. He'd been born around 240. Plotinus was still alive. He had gone to Armenia, Cappadocia and had been thrown into a pit and the pit was covered over and food was thrown in but nothing else and for 15 years Gregory was alone in the dark in the pit. By some happenstance in some tantrum of the king's madness the image of this exile in this black pit came to him probably as the thing he most feared coming out of his own psyche and when he heard that the man was still alive he had him brought forth to the court and Gregory the Illuminator came and was penetratingly kind, devastatingly silent. And the monarch of course was just leaning on every inch of the man's physique to see how could he do it. I have been the king and look at me I'm falling apart. This man has had nothing except darkness and loneliness and look at him. And Gregory the Illuminator was able to bring the king through his madness. And the king became - his name was Tiridates the third. Tiridates the third. So he declared Armenia as a Christian kingdom. So the Armenian Church considers itself epochal. It considers itself the forerunner of Roman Christianity the forerunner of Greek Orthodox Christianity. They consider themselves the pioneering spirit and the conversion of the world to the message of the doctrine of individual salvation. So when Hovhannes heard this and realized this and I think he was taken aside by some old Armenian monks he began to use this symbol of the first old Armenian Christian church, the ruins of it, as an emblem for his society to record his music. I have a slide of it later. You can see it. His early works from the 40s. The mid 40s are run like this: The Flute Player of the Armenian Mountains, or Love Songs of Hafiz Hafiz - who's a great mystical poet - and so forth. Lullaby of the Lake, Avak the Healer. And he wrote some words to go with Avak the Healer. Listen to the words. Hovhaness's words. It's in six parts. The first is an Overture and then the second is Dawn and his description of the music. Dawn radiance. Bell towers. Tall slender long stemmed and flower like. Streaming from heaven raining blessedness over the rooftops of the world. He has come from the skies like a bird and from the earth like a dance. Alleluia. The bird and the dance meeting. I only learned the third part. He strikes the bells. He strikes the bells on the high altar tops and fills the worlds with glory. The walls between the worlds grow thin and brightness pierces through. Alleluia. Then there's a processional. And then the fifth part is called Strangeness, Strangeness: Strangeness by day strangeness by night. Visions walk the earth a fiery hand outstretched. Strangeness in the heart. Strangeness in the eyes. Alleluia. And then the sixth, He Touches the Broken Heart: He touches the broken heart. From secret sorrow. Springs a tree of light. The roots deep in darkness. The branches of flaming fire. The leaves a thousand blazing torches. Hallelujah. Well you can see in the imagery the profound background of the experience of Gregory the Illuminator as a prototype as a basic structure of the way in which the confusion and the chaos of the world prepares a fruitful ground and the experience of the individual of the darkness the solitude the disembodiedness as preparing one to become focused inside. And so the roots are in the darkness but the branches are always out into the light. And so themes of a lot of Hovhaness's early works are concerned that the Saint Martin Symphony. Saint Martin was an Armenian martyr of the early church, Upon Enchanted Ground, Hovhaness's doing that and I have some, I have about two minutes of Upon Enchanted Ground on the cassette player. We'll have Khaldis, Khaldis is named after the Jordan or Armenian god of the universe, the pre-Christian god of the universe. Volcanic intensity is built upon subtle rhythmic and polyphonic foundations. Its strength is vitality of idea within severe contrapuntal discipline and again in this work the trumpets take the place of the human voice and the symphonic background that of the general multitudes and consistently in Hovhaness's compositions. After the Second World War the strings form a kind of a pizzicato mysticism and the rest of the orchestra comes into play and will play a theme and it will be melodic. It will be rhythmic beautiful almost romantic. Then will come an episode where it is scored to be freestyle but the notes must not be slurred together so the entire orchestra is playing as it chooses for a minute or so and all is chaos and then out of this chaos the single instrument the timpani the flute the trumpet will sound a winding theme of clarity and all the orchestra will resolve back into its mystic pizzicato and from there back into the rhythm back into the melody and so on again. The experience of Gregory the Illuminator is like a prototype of form for achievement for expression coming to light so consistently. We have Hovhaness writing this type of music. Here's another one called Arivaca. Iko Iko Iko means the coming of the sun, the daybreak in Armenian. Several concertos and then in 19, in the 1950s he began writing large works. This is the Magnificat. I didn't like the plain album so I put an album on about 20 years ago myself. This Magnificat is quite excellent and I hope that one of these times we'll be able to put them on cassettes and just put the whole cassettes in the library and at your leisure you can listen to them. I'll play you a little bit in a moment of Hovhaness so you can hear what's going on. His early works as I say, the symphonies and so forth, the song cycles finally reached a pitch with the release of Mysterious Mountain in 1958. It's being commissioned in 1955 by Stokowski and then issued his record and it has sold indefinitely. Every year it's reissued and RCA has kept itself Mysterious Mountain the composer notes. The first and last movements are hymn-like and lyrical using irregular metrical forms. The first subject of the second movement, a double fugue, is developed in a slow vocal style. The rapid second subject is played by the strings with its own countersubject and with strict four voice canonic episodes and triple counterpoint episodes. In other words the incredible musical sophistication of Hovhaness is that he is able in a ten minute piece or so to bring in 25 different types of musical knowledge and piece it together so that it isn't just a collection but is an incredible new form working with a worldwide scope of knowledge and learning. Hovhaness incidentally was very tall. He was about 6 feet very very thin and had tremendously long fingers. And I have a couple of slides later on this evening which I'll show you portraits of him. Someone once described him saying that he looked like an El Greco figure who had just stepped out of mystic Spain as if the centuries had made no difference whatsoever to him. He had the same psyche and the same build and the same intent to sing God's praises and the most mystical way possible. He would take a piece that he had written years ago and some new situation would come up and he would go back and rewrite the piece or he would add on to it. He finally redid a series of them. He began with an Ave Maria. Orchestrating Ave Maria and then he added a Christmas ode and then he added a Christmas and Easter cantata so that there's a whole triptych then by Hovhaness. In 1957 he wrote a work which was finally performed in 1960 in Japan. Hovhaness has lived in Japan, he lived in India, all over the world really and it was called Meditation on Orpheus and it's been recorded just recently a few years ago by, was it Andre Castellanos? Yeah. But I think that the Japan Philharmonic Orchestra really did the best version. So I have made a record on the cassette recorder of the entirety of the Peace Meditation and Orpheus. It's about 13 minutes and I hope we'll have a chance towards the end of the evening perhaps just to go down to the library and just listen to it there. Maybe we can close with it that way. The Meditation on Orpheus contains all of the exquisite innovations of Hovhaness in one single piece. I once found a photo of Hovhaness' hand in a magazine and I pasted it on the back of this album because it seemed to me to express the essential nature of the man. As soon as you hear the music just 1 or 2 tones you'll see what I'm saying. It'll all fit together. He of course was commissioned by institutions as well as by individuals and he took Gandhi's great book All Men Are Brothers and made a Symphony. Symphony no. 11. I made this cover for it because again it was just a bland cover. These were days when I was not so bland. And so All Men Are Brothers. And then within a couple of years he was writing 7 or 8 symphonies in the period. He wrote a great Symphony number 15 called The Silver Pilgrimage and it was recorded by the Louisville Orchestra. And of course the Louisville Kentucky Orchestra records American classical music by small composers and they usually sell only through subscription. I at one time was subscribing and so I got this The Silver Pilgrimage and I've recorded about 4 minutes or 5 minutes of The Silver Pilgrimage. I've taken Upon Enchanted Ground. I've taken a little bit of the Gregory Hymn from the Armenian Rhapsody. I've taken a little bit from Mysterious Mountain and then a little bit from Silver Pilgrimage and put them together into a run so that you could hear the development of his musical form as close as I could approximate it with 4 or 5 selections. I think I ended with a piece that he did in 1977 called Sunrise so that you have five selections in about 20 minutes I suppose. Silver Pilgrimage has four parts and just listen to the titles and you'll get the style of the international cosmicness of Hovhaness's mind. First movement titled Mount Ravana - Ravana of course from the Ramayana - Marava Princess, River of Meditation, Heroic Gates of Peace. And it was commissioned by a foundation in 1963 that I had never heard of - the Whatmore Foundation. The fourth movement. Hovhaness writes of his own composition The Heroic Gates of Peace suggests the spirit of the peaceful reign of wisdom wherein harmony is achieved between heaven and earth. Principles suggest gagaku in the spirit of Tang Dynasty China. Renaissance counterpoint and long melodic lines are all combined in a universal world hymn. Gagaku is usually thought to be Chinese or Japanese music very strict musical form. In fact the Japanese gagaku have an orchestra here in town. I had them play in my living room one time years ago and it took 14 or 15 goes just to be able to hear it. It's very eerie music. It's like the musical background for no drama. There is no recognizable musical form at first. There's a contrasting between pitch and screech that gives you a sense of form emerging. Very very difficult to follow. But again Hovhaness when he was living in Japan couldn't resist all these instruments and he would buy them and learn how to play them. And pretty soon he had quite a huge collection. Symphony no. 19 is called Vishnu. And then he wrote a great orchestral work called Fra Angelico. And I'll have this later on. Here's a photo of Hovhaness on the back and you can see the incredible seriousness and dignity of the man. He had nothing else on his mind other than to scour the world for themes and instruments and put them together and make spiritual music. Many times he would write choral works or works for a solo voice like Lady of Light which is a complete mystical of great is the power of love. Dancing on mountain peaks of heaven. Floating. Dance love. Dance dance of oneness. We are dancing to the sun. All are dancing. All are one. Dancing on mountains of heavenly bliss. Great is the power of love. Fire is my dance. Fire is my soul. Ring of fire is my love. Wings of fire. Fly my soul to heaven. Sorts of words and lyrics that Hovhaness was continuously writing. He had written an opera called Etchmiadzin in 1946 and then 24 years after the fact he saw the theme in his musical imagination a new way. So he turned it into his 21st Symphony and in this work it also is combined with Mountains and Rivers Without End so it has this Chinese cover but it's amazing in here because of the organization of his work. We're used to thinking of a symphony in four movements and actually Hovhaness began experimenting quite a bit. In fact he has a symphony later on that was in 24 movements. He wrote a symphony called Saturn and then as if he hadn't scoured the world enough he took the songs of the Humpback Whale and created an orchestral work, And God Created Great Whales, where he worked the whales and not just putting them into beautiful juxtaposition with a piece he had already written but he understood the musical nature of the songs of the Humpback Whale and worked it in as a spiritual Odin. Of course they played this and they found that the whales actually responded to this music. Very strange. Then Symphony number 23 Arnie was written in 1972. And the music of nature and the gods, all kinds of material here. We just don't have enough time to go through. I guess I won't read all of this. His lyrics are just incredible, almost as the music. Towards the end of his life he came back and wrote an Odysseus symphony which was recorded and he also was not above going. He went to a high school in New Jersey and trained the high school band to record one of his pieces. He said he could train anyone. That you didn't need to have huge orchestral pieces. He was trying to get across the message that music literally is of the people and belongs to the people. Very late in his career Andre Castellanos recorded the music of Alan Hovhaness together. Hovhaness had set the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam into a musical form with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. doing the narrating. Just a gorgeous work. And then on this of course they put in God Created Great Whales, Fantasy on Japanese Woodprints, The Floating World, Meditation on Orpheus, and Sunrise. So there we have Alan Hovhaness. And if I could while it's still fresh give you just a few minutes of Hovhaness and you have to forgive the tiny little speaker but it's better than nothing. And this will give you some way to approach Hovhaness. The first minute or so is from Upon Enchanted Ground written in the 40s. The second section in there comes from his work on the Armenian Rhapsody with Gregory's Prayer worked into it. The third is from Mysterious Mountain. The fourth is from the Silver Pilgrimage and the closing of it is from Sunrise and it spans 30 years of his work. And I've tried to take pieces that would show a development of his musical mind. Let's try it and see what happens. And now the Armenian rhapsody Gregory. The Mysterious Mountain - an excerpt about three minutes. The Silver Pilgrimage Much imitated style. You can tell. This is now Silver Pilgrimage, about 15 years later. And one final try at the end of his life with Sunrise. Thank you. Well I told you it was impossible. We gave it a try. And we'll take a break and then we'll have some of Graves. But I think Hovhaness really is a someone to look into. And when they say the United States doesn't have composers like they can listen. But the theme again and again in Hovhaness is that truth holds power in its palm and it isn't power and force that structure the world but it's toughness and it's the presence of the spirit that finally reaches through the veil with its light and everything is transformed. Well let's have a break and then we'll have some more. Growing up in this country contemporary with Hovhaness is Morris Graves. And also at the same time of course Andrew Wyeth, William Faulkner. We've really, we've had a tremendous renaissance in this country and no one seems to know anything about it. This is a work by Graves. Graves was born in the northwest, Pacific Northwest. Seattle has always loved Seattle. He's lived everywhere in the world, Japan, Ireland and so forth. He's always going back there. He grew up sort of an ordinary child except that he was a visionary and a painter but never knew it. He became an ordinary sort of a child. An ordinary high school student signed up for the merchant marine. Went on some voyages. Was in Japan and suddenly discovered that the images pierced clear through him and he started sketching and realized he was an artist too. A very profound artist. So he came back to the United States. He spent some time in Los Angeles lived on Sunset Boulevard on The Strip for a while in the basement until the women landlords who had said that he could not cook were because they were running a furrier shop up above. And Graves said one day he was cooking onions. This was in the depression and the only customer they'd seen in a decade came in and was driven out by his onions and he said he was out within an hour. He wanted to draw attention to himself so he would make these incredible great Dali-esque type paintings and he painted one. It was like a screen maybe 3 or 4 feet like Japanese screens. I think it was Dalmatians and Great Danes. He had it set up in the living room of Katharine Hepburn and she saw it and had it thrown out. And then also it burned in a fire years later and Graves was really sorry about it. He is a character. He's an oddball but his art, very much like the music of Hovhaness, manages to bring the universal flavor for it in some mysterious way. This is called Chalice. Chalice and the luminescence of the body of that small bird or the luminescence of that form very reminiscent of this image which is becoming a symbol for our time. The unity of large scale structure was not quite there. It is there it is. So Graves' work has a universal appeal in this one. There's a fish in here in this tumult of the ocean, the mysterious ocean of life. This is a primordial image, a dream image, the incredible flux of time-space and above it the only stability, the imposed constellation upon the universe, the net of stars. You talk about that more in the summer solstice program on Saturday but it's against this net of stars that would trap us forever with this mysterious order if we did not have some liaison like the sun heroically coming to shine in displays with unity the multiplicity of the heavens long enough for us to get used to the idea of unity in ourselves and then to take our place among the stars later and not be trapped by the net but to use its order to build. This is Graves as a young man very very tall. Somebody said he looked like two D.H. Lawrence's on top of each other. He's had a number of great friendships. John Cage, the American musician, lifelong friend of his. His greatest supporter was Charles Laughton who would buy a lot of Graves' work. And this photo was taken by Imogen Cunningham. Any of you who know about photography, you know about the great 90 year-old photographer of the Pacific Northwest in work clothes and in the garden he would, he built a… Every time he would get money he would try and go and buy some little piece of wilderness. And he bought a rock cliff and he called it The Rock. And he built a house on the very top of it, a house out of a silvery old barn wood. He said he didn't like new lumber. He liked to see the lumber that had the lichen on it and the old wood grains and so forth. And so he built this sort of a handmade cabin right in the nest of this peak. And one window would open up and there would be maybe a 1000 foot drop or something. And to brush up on his aesthetic he and a Japanese painter would wrestle big boulders all day and then they would sit there far into the evening staring at them trying to see what they had done with the relationship and so forth. Graves went through a period of many years where he was awake at night. So many of his works in the 40s actually have the night flavor because he would wake up at sundown and he would paint in the moonlight and the starlight trying to get the right feel of work. He became very close friends with Mark Tobey and Tobey's White Writing affected Graves quite a bit. But Graves used it as a matrix within which to set mysterious symbols like birds and so forth. Graves very taken with Zen philosophy. And of course he would have, having awakened to his artistic persona in Japan. And he would go back to Japan again and again. This piece is entitled Wounded Scooter. Very often Graves is concerned with a theme similar to the one of Holland's, how we seem to be so naive and naturalistic and exposed to the world and the way in which the jungle-like, thorn-like quality of the world today would grind us up would displace us. That when we emerge through a threshold of wisdom and understanding we come out transformed and we have all kinds of protective qualities with us which later on become transformed into mystical light patterns. This famous work, Little Known Bird of the Inner Line, one of the many owned by Charles Martin. Martin died and his estate went up for auction in 1966. His painting sold for about $26,000. Then I went naively with a couple of friends to see if we couldn't buy this thing. And I think we took $600. It shows you the scale. This one is called Moon Mad Crow in The Surf. Graves spent one year in the US Army and they let him out. Finally. Immersive. Immersive Yes. Graves got out because he did nothing. He didn't make a mess. He didn't make a scene but he did nothing. Completely anesthetized by the entire situation. And follow the yellow line. Not the yellow brick road. The yellow line. What's your name? And so forth. So when he got out of the US Army he made this painting Moon Mad Crook and loved it. I think Graves was once seen dancing on this ledge above the steep canyon. And everybody was fearful for him. And he made it. And he came back and they said why did you keep on dancing? I said while dancing that's the only way I could get across that ledge. I said I would fall if I tried to walk. The mystical meeting and the threshold that is reached. Blind Bird Number 1. He did two Blind Birds. Alfred Barr the Metropolitan Museum of Art was working on Graves and Tobey to do some work so that they could buy. And Graves chose as his theme here the bird. Of course you can say it's a symbol of the spirit that this is the condition of the spirit of that mysterious tremendous, that quality of ultimate anxiety where we were simply in our time-space form literally shook out of focus. And yet and yet even with that incredible dissociating energy experience we still have our roots in that mysterious dust. We are still here. It still goes on. There is some order. And so we have wine. Bird Number 1 his feet in the luminescent mystery of life coating the rock of certainty even though he can't see it and doesn't believe that he's still on it, quivering, blind he is still positioned there. Shorebirds in the Surf, done about the same time. This would be about 1940. The huddling together surge of the surf. The interface between the nature of the birds themselves their form their volumes and the nature of the water itself in its volumes and the way in which ocean and surf seem to be the same fabric of different clusters of forms that are changing. In Blind Bird number two a little bit different version same theme same treatment a little bit different presentation. The feet are the mountains. Graves was taken with an essay that he wrote that he read by the great East Indian art historian who was at Harvard for a while. Ananda Coomaraswamy wrote an essay called Three Types of Space. That there is phenomenal space like the space of the dimensions of this room, there is mental space which is the psychological dimension, then there is spiritual space which has no coordinates whatsoever. This title is Fish Reflected On Outer and Mental Space. Interfacing between the two first spaces. Ecstatic gander again as in chalice or in the Andromeda Galaxy. We have that central egg like luminescence and the rest of the natural form is splayed ecstatically around that form. He went through a phase of dealing with Chinese ceramics and bronze pieces transforming themselves into living entities usually birds looking back upon their own origins upon their own transformations. Here's one example. And this is a secondhand a newspaper clipping from a 1948 issue of time magazine that featured one of these enlivening bronzes. And the title of the article was The Fields of Obscure Meadows. That was it. Obscure Meadows, because Graves, they mishandled the Graves."Graves said that spirituality flourishes and the meadows of obscurity." The Gander. And he did a series of guardian spirits. And this was one of them. We'll see another one later on. Notice again that on the breast of the bird here instead of the luminescent white now we have the black. Notice the talons. It has made a transformation, is capable of protecting them. This is the cover of the first book and it's the first of the two published by the University of California Press. It was an art catalogue which Cal Press published. This is the only rendition of this work in color so I used the cover of the book. The title of the painting is Each Time You Carry Me This Way. In Each Time You Carry Me This Way there's the spirit bird, a protector known as the guard. The talons and so forth. But the minnow has become a symbolic image of the nascent spiritual self still unable to fend for itself. So it has to have a spirit protector, a guardian angel as Plotinus would have said. Here's this spirit just emerging into the light unbelieving and yet knowing that it's cool. Well true. Early sketch by Gaves that I put in here. The coating of physical reality with a kind of Translucent blue everything becoming distorted phenomenal space becoming distorted by mental space impositions so that phenomenal space seems to melt under Dali's melting watches. That sort of artistic expression here to the power corrosive power at times of mental space to dissolve phenomenal form to make a caricature of it and the ability of spiritual space to reinstate the forms back to their natural position. Here again the same thing mental space deforming phenomenal objects so that they are caught enmeshed masticated by power needing to be redeemed or saved by spiritual vision for what to be restored back to their phenomenal, this spirit bird entering into this tremendous anxious reign of light and becoming transformed. These kinds of thoughts are universal. Exists on the largest and the smallest levels of apperception. The theme of transformation restated again when he was in Ireland. He was doing a lot of hibernation things the curled up hedgehogs and so forth. Hibernation and the transformation through spiritual light. And so the superimposition of those two modes. He is familiar with Chagall. Chagall has the same imagery for the creation of man in his great 1954 painting The Creation of Man. He has God holding man and in behind the angel creating man bringing his form to earth. It's this vision of God being this kind of a world and their universal themes. Gardening. This entire garden. That's why evil is always so anxious to accrue power. Because they somehow sense that they're going to need it. The guardian angels of a very complete Completely incompetent. If you remember the lecture on Henry Adams about Michael Jackson and some needs to come down a little bit can we lower that Yeah. There he is. Is that assuming it's like sumi ink. Yeah you can see. You can see Graves complete mastery of the subject matter and the technique. And yet he brings it into play with a completely western hand. Absolutely incredible. If you need a mandala to get yourself through some tough times here you go. He will take care of it. And we'll put him on a banner. Put him out here in the studio here. This is Alan Hovhaness. I've got a few shots in here. I have only found three photographs of him in 23 years of searching. And then a slide of the original visionary church in Romania. I gave him a whole. We need not so much a myth for ourselves although that's helpful. We need to have some central vision, some place, some presence of understanding, to base ourselves so that our understanding rotates and radiates around that central understanding. The vision begins to construct a world through humans. The discovery of that church in Armenia did and a shot of Hovhaness near the end of his life. I think he was in his 60s at this time directing the Seattle Symphony. He often directed his own works. Yeah it's close but I think if one thing has emerged through this series you can see that we have enjoyed quite a distinguished history right up into our own time. Individuals representing us in all the arts, all of the levels of civilization that are important. And so, music too. I'm going to close next week with Black Elk, close the series because I think we should come back to the Indians began to come back to a great statesman. But I have Hovhaness's Meditation On Orpheus that I'd like to play for those of you who would like to stay. It's 13 minutes. I think we should hear it in the library with the lights low. And if you'd like we can go down now and listen to it. Otherwise, hope to see you for the Summer Solstice program Saturday. One more. One more picture in here. Morris Graves standing in his garden looking very mysterious. Very mysterious. He's still alive. He's still up there. This was recent. Is he still alive? He's still alive. Yeah. He doesn't want to be seen or known. He's busy. You can see. For those who would like we can go downstairs and listen to this piece by Hovhaness. Otherwise, hope to see you Saturday. Yes. About this piece that Hovhaness wrote. Meditation on Orpheus scored for full symphony orchestra, a single pianissimo, tam-tam note a tone from a solo horn, an evanescent pizzicato murmur from the violins. It has an Italian designation senza misura. These ethereal elements tinge the sound of the middle and lower strings at the work's beginning and evoke an ambience of mysterious dignity and sensuousness which continues and grows throughout the meditation. At intervals a strange rushing sound grows to a crescendo and subsides interrupting the flow of smooth melody for a moment and then allowing it to resume generally with a subtle change of scene. The senza misura pizzicato which is heard at the opening would seem to be the germ from which this unusual passage has grown for the rushing sound dynamically intensified at each appearance. It is produced by the combination of fast metrically unmeasured figurations usually played by the strings. The composer indicates not that these passages are to be played in two four three four etc. but that they are to last about 20s ad lib. The notes are to be rapid but not together and they produce a fascinating effect somehow giving the impression that other worldly significances are hidden in the juxtaposition of flow and mystical interruption. This is a theme with both Hovhaness and Graves as you can see. This is the old Orpheus. This is the unreconstructed Orpheus. This is archaic Greek religiousness. Yeah. Let's listen to it. Here we go. I think that this is a different ending from someplace, another recording. But the. The theme of the Meditation on Orpheus is that we need to engender a charmed brilliance of courage to raise up within ourselves to carry into this tumultuous whirlwind of dissolution that comes naturally from the growth of the mental and psychological capacity which would forever opaque us from the spiritual world if we were not able to breach it somehow to go through it. And that this whirlwind of the mental realm the psychological realm is not to be anesthetized or to be feared or polarized but to be entered into as if it were a cloud in the mysteries because only then are all of our capacities brought into play so that we may observe in the sparks of that encounter those elemental nuclear elements of reality which we need to be able to distinguish and characterize to enable us to exist in the spiritual realm so that Orpheus's songs. Are those which charm nature at its mystical level and not simply anesthetize. It at its animal level. So the animals love the songs but they love them because the ear is opened further inward. The same here with it. I think it takes 4 or 5 listenings to something of this quality and this depth of course to be able to hear just what is there but with these clues and with the comments that are available on cassette with this lecture I think you should in a reasonable amount of time be able to familiarize yourself. And I would suggest that an obviously with the lecture that Graves and Hovhaness belong together and they belong to our time so that they really speak to us in a very profound way. Well I hope that the Summer Solstice meets your specifications. I've written an original 20 page mystical poem for it which I will give copies to persons coming to the afternoon part of it. Mr. Hall saw it today and smiled from his red jacketed acclaim and said this looks like real old fine stuff. He said I hope it is. Have you ordered sunshine? We will have sunshine. Thank you, thank you.