Lousadzak
Lousadzak, Op. 48, is a 1944 concerto for piano and string orchestra by the American-Armenian composer Alan Hovhaness. Duration of the piece is about 18 minutes. The work is known for its use of aleatory that is said to have impressed fellow composers Lou Harrison and John Cage, and anticipated "many soon-to-be-hip" aleatory techniques.
History
Shortly before composing Lousadzak, Alan Hovhaness had received a severe reprimand from Aaron Copland and, as a result, destroyed a thousand earlier pieces before making a fresh start. While being a student under Fredrick Converse at the New England Conservatory, Hovhaness had already familiarized with Indian classical music and, later on, embraced music from different cultures such as Korean, Japanese, and Chinese music.Aleatory
The aleatoric technique used in the piece is what Hovhaness called a “humming effect.” It occurs several times throughout the piece in the string section. The string players are instructed to play several pre-composed motives at a free tempo throughout various measures to achieve the effect. The aleatory nature of the technique was also controversial. In Arnold Rosner and Vance Wolverton’s writing on the piece: “… is hardly aleatory, since exact pitches are carefully controlled and any two performances will be substantially the same.”Lousadzak was Hovhaness's first work to make use of an innovative technique he called "spirit murmur," an early example of aleatoric music inspired by a vision of his close friend, the mystic painter Hermon di Giovanno. The technique involves instruments repeating phrases in uncoordinated fashion, producing a complex "cloud" or "carpet" of sounds. In an early program note for Lousadzak, Hovhaness described this and similar passages as " the
potential sounds out of which melodies are born."