Yerevan Concert honours Jean Nandi,
Hovhaness' daughter – 1 April 2005

On 1 April 2005 the Alan Hovhaness Chamber Orchestra of Armenia, conducted by its Artistic Director Merujan Simonian and post-graduate student Susanna Jamkochyan, gave a concert dedicated to Jean Nandi, daughter of Alan Hovhaness, at the city's Komitas Chamber Music Hall.

The concert began with a rare performance of a most appropriate work by American composer Gordon Rumson. His In Memorium: Alan Hovhaness is a heartfelt work composed in June 2000 as a personal response to the death of Hovhaness that same month. The score's dedication reads simply: "To the memory of a Great Artist". Another rarity to be heard was in the arrangement of Prayer of St. Gregory, whose trumpet solo was here convincingly transferred to clarinet. The complete concert program was as follows:

• Gordon Rumson: In Memorium: Alan Hovhaness
• Hovhaness: Prayer of St. Gregory (clarinet soloist Suren Khorozyan)
• Sibelius: Impromptu
• Hovhaness: Avak The Healer (soprano soloist Seda Odabashyan)
• Hovhaness: Lousadzak (concerto for piano and strings, soloist Martin Berkofsky)
• David Sakoyan: The Music (this piece was dedicated to the orchestra)

Avak the Healer performed in Yerevan, Armenia by the Alan Hovhaness Chamber Orchestra with soprano soloist Seda Odabashyan

Jean Nandi, daughter of Alan Hovhaness ...

Born in Cambridge MA in 1935, the daughter of Martha Mott Davis and the composer, Jean Christina Hovaness (later Nandi) was named after her godfather the composer Sibelius, whom her parents had befriended in 1935. However, her parents divorced in 1938 and she came to know her father again only in the 1950s.

She graduated from the University of Californina at Berkeley, graduating in Zoology and later teaching and researching in endocrinology until 1968. In Berkeley she met and married (in 1957) Satyabrata Nandi, a brilliant East Indian biologist and cancer researcher who was to become a full Professor at the University.

Jean's early and ongoing interest in music persisted, aided and abetted by her father. Ill health forced her to cut back on physical activities, and eventually retire to her home where she could teach and practice the harpsichord, which she found possible to do despite a life-long, slowly progressing muscular dystrophy.

By the 1980s, now a wheelchair user, she became a powerful advocate for disability rights in her community, using her teaching skills to help other disabled people.

Although distanced from her father by geography and circumstance, she and Alan Hovhaness remained fast friends throughout the remainder of his life. He had written music for his only daughter since her childhood. They performed together at a concert in Berkeley in 1978.

She is the author of many harpsichord teaching books and also her autobiography Unconventional Wisdom, a book once described as "a testimony of triumph ... a true model of human achievement".

Because of her extensive humanitarian work for the handicapped, she was honoured by the city of Berkeley's dedication of an entire month in her name.