Daily Inspiration Quote by Alan Hovhaness

Quiet confidence is doing most of the work here. Hovhaness isn’t bragging about having 21 symphonies; he’s refusing the brutal hierarchy that usually governs how we talk about “a canon.” In a classical-music culture that loves to sort composers into one masterpiece plus a long tail of “minor” works, his line is a gentle rebuke: stop asking me to crown a winner.

The phrasing matters. “I think” softens what is, at heart, a firm aesthetic stance. It’s the modesty of someone who knows how quickly ambition gets punished as ego. Then comes “each,” an insistence on individuality over brand. Hovhaness wrote in a voice that often sidestepped mid-century modernist orthodoxy, drawing on Armenian liturgical sounds, Indian raga, and a kind of mystic, luminous tonal writing that didn’t fit the reigning narratives of progress. When you’re positioned as an outsider to the “serious” mainstream, you learn to defend your output not as a ladder but as a landscape.

“Has its own place” is the key phrase: it suggests ecology, not competition. These symphonies aren’t attempts to outdo one another; they’re stations in a long devotional practice, each serving a different spiritual or sonic need. The subtext is also practical: audiences, critics, and institutions tend to want a single entry point, a tidy recommendation. Hovhaness pushes back, asking for a broader kind of listening - one that allows a large body of work to be understood as a life’s architecture rather than a highlight reel.