Alan Hovhaness: Composer of Two Worlds?

Alan Hovhaness is among the lesser known of America's "East West" pioneering composers who emerged in the post-war years, but should perhaps be better known.  Of the same generation as Harrison and Cage he too was a fearless explorer of world music traditions and incorporated them into music over a period of half a century.  Much of his mature work is as much a product of Eastern traditions as Western. Rather aptly, he was of Scottish and Armenian descent, and his first mature works of the 1940s exhibited a strong Armenian flavor, apparently with Indian inluences too.  Later he got to visit India (1959), Japan and South Korea (early 1960s), and channeled these diverse influences into a unique syntax of East and West whilst remaining highly popular with audiences.  His music employs Near Eastern, Indian and Japanese scales, as well as his own modal amalgams where these overlapped.

Although, like Harrison, he experimented with 12-tone rows, he was fundamentally a melodist and never embraced the full-blown avant garde tendencies of, say, John Cage.  Like Henry Cowell, Hovhaness often employed traditional Western counterpoint (such as fugal and hymn-like writing) alongside his more exotic writing, but unlike Cowell he could merge these techniques into the same piece - and somehow it nearly always works!  In this respect he certainly achieved a true fusion of east and west without sounding trite.  A good example of such fusion might be his Fantasy on Japanese Woodprints, an entertaining and popular marimba concerto. The Hovhaness biography page also points out that he was an unusually prolific composer, reaching several hundred opuses, as did Henry Cowell, and this excludes early bonfires of music he was not satisfied with.
Another aspect of Hovhaness's individuality was his apparent invention of a technique called senza misura (literally 'without measures') whereby different instruments would repeat their own short lines without synchronous playing to the rest of the group, receiving only start and stop signals from the conductor.  This technique was (probably independently) taken up by others in 1960s Europe.