Alan Hovhaness wrote music which was both unusual and communicative—one of our working definitions of an "Other Mind." In his work, the archaic and the avant-garde are merged, always with melody as the primary focus. His farflung borowings of medieval melody, baroque harmonizations, traditional Armenian liturgical monody and modes, the musics of Asia, and his flare for unconventional but richly inspiring instrumental combinations, has given enormous pleasure to those who are devoted to his music. By the mid-Forties he was one of the first Western composers to return to a kind of deliberate tonality which later was embraced by the Minimalists as well as the New Age set. Virgil Thomson described his work in 1947 thusly: "Each piece is like a long roll of hand-made wall paper. Its motionless quality is a little hypnotic. There is a resemblance here to the early ceremonial pieces of Erik Satie . . . Its expressive function is predominantly religious, ceremonial, incantatory, its spiritual content of the purest." When he died in Seattle on June 21, 2000, at the age of 89, his catalogue of works exceeded 500, including over 60 symphonies.