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Armenian-American composer Alan Hovhaness was born in Somerville, Massachusetts in 1922. Hovhaness wrote over 67 symphonies. In 1940 his credo read: “I propose to create a heroic, monumental style of composition simple enough to inspire all people, completely free from fads, artificial mannerisms and false sophistications, direct, forceful, sincere, always original but never unnatural.”

Ives is surely the quintessential American composer. His music bursts at every seam with the idiom of our culture. Like America itself, Ives brimmed with all our contradictions and complexity, an amalgam of traditional roots and far-reaching vision. He was born and raised in Connecticut. The New England Transcendentalists’ belief in nature and self-reliance imbued…