Alan Hovhaness' Dawn Hymn is a calm, fragile preface to the thunderous drumroll of his Symphony No. 50 (1982), a work commissioned to commemorate a noisy event, the eruption of Mount St. Helens. The prolific Hovhaness, who wrote 67 symphonies before his death in 2000, was no stranger to music of reverence and wonder for nature and the spirit. Grounded in the inspiring mystery of the ritual music of his Armenian heritage, Hovhaness was open nevertheless to the music of many cultures, especially India and places east. Eventually, he worked with the music of the nonhuman fellow tenants of our world, composing And God Created Great Whales around recorded whale songs.
David Bohn will perform Dawn Hymn in an organ recital, along with other short works by Jean Sibelius, Robert Schumann, Samuel Barber, Edward Elgar, Ernest Chausson and Benjamin Britten. A UW-Milwaukee graduate who studied composition under Yehuda Yannay, Bohn has served as organist in Unitarian and Lutheran settings and is currently a music lecturer at UW-Parkside. Bohn's performance begins at noon, Sept. 9, at UW-Parkside's CommunicationArtsBuilding, Room D-118.
