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For more information on Howard Harold Hanson, visit Britannica.com.
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(b Wahoo, ne, 28 Oct 1896; d Rochester, ny, 26 Feb 1981). American composer and conductor. He studied with Goetschius in New York and became director of the Eastman School (1924-64), where he was an influential teacher and founded the Institute of American music; he also promoted modern American music through his work as a conductor. His own music shows the influence of Sibelius, Grieg and Respighi (his teacher in Rome in the early 1920s). Among his works are seven symphonies, symphonic poems, choral pieces, chamber and piano music and songs.
| Biography: Howard Hanson |
Pulitzer Prize winner Howard Hanson (1896-1981), a major American composer and educator, founded the annual American Music Festival and directed the Eastman School of Music for 40 years.
Howard Hanson was born in October 1896 in Wahoo, Nebraska. He graduated from the Luther Academy and College in Nebraska in 1912, then studied under Percy Goetschius at the Institute of Musical Arts (later the Juilliard School) in New York City and under Arne Oldberg at Northwestern University in Evanston, IIIinois. In 1916 Hanson became an instructor at the College of the Pacific in California. His teaching and administrative talents soon became evident, and in 1919 he was made dean of the College of Music at the age of 23.
Hanson received an American Prix de Rome in 1921 and spent the next two years in Rome. His most important compositions in this period were the Nordic Symphony and The Song of Beowulf for chorus and orchestra, works which show his sober and highly expressive musical personality. Throughout his career, Hanson's compositions reflected the strong influence of the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius.
Among Hanson's significant compositions are an opera, Merry Mount, commissioned in 1934 by the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and seven Symphonies, of which the Third, the Romantic Symphony is perhaps the best known. In 1943 he received a Pulitzer Prize for his Fourth Symphony, Requiem. His Seventh Symphony was first performed in 1977. Other works include a Piano Concerto, Three Songs from Drum Taps and The Song of Democracy for chorus and orchestra, Concerto for Organ, Strings, and Harp, and the New Land, New Covenant, an oratorio for chorus, two soloists, orchestra, and narrator, commissioned for the 1976 Bicentennial.
In 1924, the founder of Eastman Kodak Company, George Eastman, asked Hanson to became director of the new Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y. Hanson accepted and held the post until his retirement in 1964. His energy and administrative skill made the Eastman School one of the most important conservatories in America.
Hanson became active in several national musical organizations. He was one of the founders, and later the president, of the National Association of Schools of Music, whose main purpose was to raise the standards of university and conservatory musical training. He also served as president of the Music Teachers' National Association, as a director of the Music Educators' National Conference, and as musical consultant to the U.S. State Department. One of Hanson's most significant achievements was the 1925 founding of the annual Festival of American Music, which featured the works of many American composers of all styles. In an era when European composers still dominated the music world, these festivals established the important fact that America had produced a large group of talented composers. In 1976, Hanson himself donated $100,000 to support the program.
Further Reading
Madeleine Goss, Modern Music-Makers: Contemporary American Composers (1952); Joseph Machlis, American Composers of Our Time (1963); For more recent works, see Donald J. Shetler In Memoriam Howard Hanson (1983); David Russell Williams, Conversations with Howard Hanson (1988); and James E. Perone, Howard Hanson: a Bio-Bibliography (1993).
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Howard Harold Hanson (October 28, 1896 – February 26, 1981) was an American composer, conductor, educator, music theorist, and champion of American classical music. Director for 40 years of the Eastman School of Music, he built a high quality school and provided opportunities for commissioning and performing American music. He won a Pulitzer Prize for one of his works and received numerous other awards.
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Hanson was born in Wahoo, Nebraska to Swedish parents, Hans and Hilma (Eckstrom) Hanson. In his youth he studied music with his mother. Later, he studied at Luther College in Wahoo, receiving a diploma in 1911, then at the Institute of Musical Art in New York City, where he studied with the composer and music theorist Percy Goetschius in 1914. Afterwards he attended Northwestern University, where he studied composition with church music expert Peter Lutkin and Arne Oldberg in Chicago. Throughout his education, Hanson studied piano, cello and trombone. Hanson earned his BA degree in music from Northwestern University in 1916, where he began his teaching career as a teacher's assistant.
In 1916, Hanson was hired for his first full-time position as a music theory and composition teacher at the College of the Pacific in California. Only three years later, the college appointed him Dean of the Conservatory of Fine Arts in 1919. In 1920, Hanson composed The California Forest Play, his earliest work to receive national attention. Hanson also wrote a number of orchestral and chamber works during his years in California, including Concerto da Camera, Symphonic Legend, Symphonic Rhapsody, various solo piano works, such as Two Yuletide Pieces, and the Scandinavian Suite, which celebrated his Lutheran and Scandinavian heritage.
In 1921 Hanson was the first recipient (along with Leo Sowerby) of the American Academy's Rome Prize, awarded for both The California Forest Play and his symphonic poem Before the Dawn. Thanks to the award, Hanson lived in Italy for three years. During his time in Italy, Hanson wrote a Quartet in One Movement, Lux aeterna, The Lament for Beowulf (orchestration Bernhard Kaun), and his Symphony No. 1, "Nordic", the premiere of which he conducted with the Augusteo Orchestra on May 30, 1923.
(It has been incorrectly stated that Hanson studied composition and/or orchestration with Ottorino Respighi, who studied orchestration with Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov. Hanson's unpublished autobiography refutes the statement, attributed to Ruth Watanabe, that he had studied with Respighi.)
Upon returning from Rome, Hanson's conducting career exspanded. He made his premiere conducting the New York Symphony Orchestra in his tone poem North and West. In Rochester, New York in 1924, he conducted his Symphony No. 1. This performance brought him to the attention of George Eastman.
Eastman chose Hanson to be director of the Eastman School of Music. Inventor of the Kodak camera and roll film, and business master, Eastman had become a major philanthropist. He used some of his great wealth to endow the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester.
Hanson held the position of director for forty years, during which he created one of the most prestigious music schools in America. He accomplished this by improving the curriculum, bringing in better teachers, and refining the school's orchestras. Also, he balanced the school's faculty between American and European teachers, even when this meant passing up composer Béla Bartók. Hanson offered a position to Bartók teaching composition at Eastman, but Bartók declined as he did not believe that one could teach composition. Instead, Bartók wanted to teach piano at the Eastman School, but Hanson already had a full staff of piano instructors.
In 1925, Hanson established the American Composers Orchestral Concerts. Later, he founded the Eastman-Rochester Orchestra, which consisted of first chair players from the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra and selected students from the Eastman School. He followed that by establishing the Festivals of American Music. Hanson made many recordings (mostly for Mercury Records) with the Eastman-Rochester Orchestra, not only of his own works, but also those of other American composers such as John Alden Carpenter, Charles Tomlinson Griffes, John Knowles Paine, Walter Piston, and William Grant Still. Hanson estimated that more than 2000 works by over 500 American composers were premiered during his tenure at the Eastman School.
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Serge Koussevitzky commissioned Hanson's Symphony No. 2, the "Romantic", and premiered it on November 28, 1930. This work was to become Hanson's best known. One of its themes is performed at the conclusion of all concerts at the Interlochen Center for the Arts. Now known as the "Interlochen Theme", it is conducted by a student concertmaster after the featured conductor has left the stage. Traditionally, no applause follows its performance.[citation needed] It is also best known for its use in the end credits of the 1979 Ridley Scott film Alien.
In some ways Hanson's opera Merry Mount (1934) may be considered the first fully American opera. It was written by an American composer and an American librettist on an American story, and was premiered with a mostly American cast at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1934. The Opera received fifty curtain calls at its Met premiere, a record that still stands. In 1935 Hanson wrote "Three Songs from Drum Taps", based on the poem by Walt Whitman.
The opening theme of his Third Symphony's second movement is one of the most haunting and memorable passages in American music. The Third was written 1936-38 and first played by the NBC Symphony Orchestra.
Hanson was elected as a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1935, President of the Music Teachers' National Association from 1929 to 1930, and President of the National Association of Schools of Music from 1935 to 1939.
From 1946 to 1962 Hanson was active in United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). UNESCO commissioned Hanson's Pastorale for Oboe and Piano, and Pastorale for Oboe, Strings, and Harp, for the 1949 Paris conference of the world body.
Frederick Fennell, conductor of the Eastman Wind Ensemble, described Hanson's first band composition, the 1954 Chorale and Alleluia as "the most awaited piece of music to be written for the wind band in my twenty years as a conductor in this field". Chorale and Alleluia is still a required competition piece for high school bands in the New York State School Music Association's repertoire list. It is one of Hanson's most frequently recorded works.
From 1961-1962, Hanson took the Eastman Philharmonia, a student ensemble, on a European tour which passed through Paris, Cairo, Moscow, and Vienna, among other cities. The tour showcased the growth of serious American music for Europe and the Middle East.
Hanson met Margaret Elizabeth Nelson at her parents' summer home on Lake Chautauqua in the Chautauqua Institution in New York. Hanson dedicated the Serenade for Flute, Harp, and Strings, to her; the piece was his musical marriage proposal, as he could not find the spoken words to propose to her. They married on July 24, 1946 at her parents' summer home in Chautauqua Institution.
Hanson's students include John Davison, John La Montaine, Samuel Jones, H. Owen Reed, Kenneth Gaburo, Donald O. Johnston, Martin Mailman, Gloria Wilson Swisher, Robert Washburn, Homer Keller, John White, and David Borden, Emma Lou Diemer.
Excerpts from his Symphony #2 were used to accompany several exterior sequences and the end credits in the original 1979 release of the movie Alien. They were removed from the DVD versions published later.
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