Motherhood Quote by Alan Hovhaness

There is a deliberate plainness to Hovhaness's wording, and that restraint is the tell. He isn’t selling a dramatic immigrant saga or a grand pedigree; he’s locating a quiet origin point. “Scottish” arrives first, as a clean identity marker, then gets immediately tempered by geography: upper New York State, some from Scotland, some already settled. The repetition of “some of whom” reads almost like careful bookkeeping, a composer’s instinct to balance voices in an arrangement. Nothing is overstated, nothing embroidered.

The subtext is about legitimacy and inheritance, but not in a status-climbing way. “Old family” signals lineage, continuity, a sense of rootedness - useful for an artist often framed through ancestry and “influences.” Hovhaness, an Armenian-Scottish American composer who built a career on spiritual atmosphere and cross-cultural musical languages, is frequently interpreted through the lens of “where he came from.” Here, he’s managing that narrative: acknowledging the Scottish line without turning it into myth. It’s heritage as fact, not costume.

Context matters: 20th-century American classical music was obsessed with provenance - who your teachers were, what “school” you belonged to, what your bloodline implied about your sound. Hovhaness’s music could be treated as exotic, mystical, “other.” This biographical snippet subtly resists that flattening by making Scottishness both real and unromantic: part of a family map that spans a border and then dissolves into ordinary American settlement. Identity, in his telling, isn’t a dramatic banner; it’s a set of coordinates.