Howard Hanson - Discography

Composer, born in Wahoo, Nebraska, USA. He was awarded the American Prix de Rome in 1921, and after three years' study in Italy became director of the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY, a post he held until 1964. Under his leadership, the School became one of the most important centres of American musical life. His compositions, firmly in the tradition of 19th-c Romanticism, include an opera, The Merry Mount, and seven symphonies.

Howard Harold Hanson (October 28, 1896 – February 26, 1981) was an American composer, conductor, educator, music theorist, and ardent champion of American classical music.

Hanson was born in Wahoo, Nebraska to Swedish parents, Hans and Hilma (Eckstrom) Hanson.

That same year, Hanson got his first full-time position as a music theory and composition teacher at the College of the Pacific in California, and only three years later, the college appointed him Dean of the Conservatory of Fine Arts in 1919.

Hanson was the first recipient of the American Academy's Prix de Rome, awarded by the American Academy in Rome, in 1921, for both The California Forest Play and his symphonic poem Before the Dawn.

Upon returning from Rome, Hanson's conducting career took off, making his premiere conducting the New York Symphony Orchestra in his tone poem North and West. 1, and this brought him to the attention of George Eastman, inventor of the Kodak camera and roll film, who chose Hanson to be director of the Eastman School of Music. Hanson held that position for forty years, turning the institution into one of the most prestigious music schools in America. Hanson offered a position to Bartok teaching composition at Eastman, a position that Bartok declined as Bartok did not believe that one could teach composition. Bartok placed Hanson in a difficult position as he wished to teach piano at Eastman - Eastman had a full staff of piano instuctors at the time and Bartok's piano technique fell far short of the quality that Eastman students demanded.

In 1925, Hanson established the American Composers Orchestral Concerts. Hanson made many recordings with the Eastman-Rochester Symphony Orchestra, not only his own works, but also those of other American composers such as John Alden Carpenter, Charles Tomlinson Griffes, John Knowles Paine, Walter Piston, William Grant Still, and other, lesser known, composers.

To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Serge Koussevitzky commissioned Hanson's Symphony No.

Hanson's opera Merry Mount is credited as the first American opera, since it was written by an American composer and an American librettist on an American story, and it was premiered with a mostly American cast at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, in 1934.

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.

Hanson and Walter Piston were part of the committee that awarded the 1941 Prix de Rome to Harold Shapero.

After he composed the Hymn of the Pioneers to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the first Swedish settlement in Delaware, Hanson was selected as a Fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy in 1938.

In 1944 Hanson was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Symphony No.

Hanson met Margaret Elizabeth Nelson at her parents' summer home on Lake Chautauqua in the Chautauqua Institution in New York.

In 1946, Hanson was awarded the George Foster Peabody Award "for outstanding entertainment programming" for a series he presented on the Rochester, New York radio station WHAM in 1945.

From 1946 to 1962 Hanson was active in UNESCO .

In 1953 Hanson helped to establish the Edward B.

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 and is one of Hanson's most frequently recorded works.

In 1960 Hanson published Harmonic Materials of Modern Music: Resources of the Tempered Scale, a book that would lay the foundation for musical set theory.

Hanson took the Eastman Philharmonia, a student ensemble, on a European tour from 1961 to 1962, which passed through Paris, Cairo, Moscow, and Vienna, among other cities.

Hanson was on the Board of Directors of the Music Educators National Conference from 1960 to 1964.

Even after his retirement from Eastman in 1964, Hanson continued his association with the school.

Hanson's Song of Democracy, on a Walt Whitman text, was also performed at the inaugural concert for incoming U.S. President Richard Nixon in 1969, an event Hanson proudly described as the first inaugural concert featuring only American music.

The Eastman Kodak company, in recognition of Hanson's achievements, donated $100,000 worth of stock to the school in 1976. Hanson stipulated that the gift be used to fund the Institute of American Music at Eastman.

Hanson continued conducting, composing and writing in his eighties, up to his death in Rochester, New York.

Discography

A boxed set of Howard Hanson conducting the Eastman Philharmonia in his symphonies, piano concerto, etc., is available on the Mercury label.