Art & Creativity Quote by Alan Hovhaness

A shrug disguised as a confession: Hovhaness makes his non-allegiance to 20th-century “music” sound like a personal limitation, when it’s really a quiet indictment of the era’s dominant tastes. “It’s hard for me to think of others” suggests the expected ritual of name-checking peers, schools, and influences - a composer’s polite way of proving they belong to the conversation. He declines that ritual. Not by attacking anyone outright, but by framing distance as temperament: “I’m not particularly in sympathy.”

That word choice matters. He doesn’t say the century’s music is bad, or corrupt, or unintelligible. He says he can’t feel with it. Sympathy is an emotional alignment, not an aesthetic argument, which lets him sidestep the gatekeeping logic of mid-century modernism - the assumption that progress means dissonance, complexity, rupture. Hovhaness, famously drawn to modal writing, spiritual calm, and non-Western traditions (Armenian liturgy, Indian and Japanese music), is signaling a different definition of “new”: not the newest technique, but a renewed sense of trance, devotion, and melodic directness.

The subtext is institutional. If you’re “not in sympathy” with the century’s music, you’re also not in sympathy with the conservatories, critics, and grant systems that treated certain avant-garde languages as the only serious ones. Hovhaness is staking out outsider status without romanticizing it: a composer refusing the century’s pressure to sound like history is happening in one direction.