Arts and Letters

Last winter he died in his home near Rochester, New York, that snow belt city with whose musical life the name of Howard Hanson is so irrevocably intertwined.

But Howard Hanson's influence and impact are hardly confinable to Rochester and the Eastman School of Music: he was a major national figure who dominated much of the musical life of this country in the early and middle decades of our century, perhaps more as an educator than as a composer. That is a verdict on which not all the returns are perhaps yet in, but whatever final role history will assign him as a composer, it is already clear that as an educator, and mentor, and organizational activist he critically affected the American musical landscape and environment of his time.

Not that everyone applauded his efforts at all times. Amongst the many species of twentieth-century musics and styles, his particular brand of romantic conservatism was not treated kindly by professional avant-gardists of various stripes, and thus even his educational policies and philosophies were considered, by some, tainted and compromised. And yet as the tides of conservatism and progressivism flow back and forth in their endless cycles, it is difficult to deny—if one were so inclined—that the Eastman School of Music was for decades a monument to the best in music training and education that our country was to produce. It still is one of the strongest, richest (in its diversity) music schools in the land, and that surely is traceable to those sturdy partly Scandinavian foundations upon which Howard Hanson began to erect a university- conservatory at the invitation of George Eastman in 1924.

It is not an accident that Howard Hanson and the Eastman School of Music became such untiring champions of American music. How could it be otherwise for someone born in Wahoo, Nebraska—as middle-American as you can get, I suppose, and not far from the geographic center and solar plexus of the United States? Whatever the reason, Hanson did try to teach us always that we were not only a viable nation musically, culturally, that could hold its head high amongst the 'mother continent' cultures, but that we already had a healthy, enduring heritage of our own of which to be proud. His recordings of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century American music, made in the early 1940s with the Eastman-Rochester Orchestra, opened many an ear to the abundant beauties of those pre-1920s composers who were the pioneers of our indigenous musical culture.

As a teenager, Hanson studied first at the local Lutheran College in his hometown, but soon found himself heading eastward to study at the Institute of Musical Art here in New York, eventually capping his early career with a Prix de Rome, there studying with Ottorino Respighi. In between there were stopovers at Northwestern University, to get a proper degree, and at San José College of the Pacific, to get his feet wet as a teacher. In the three years at the American Academy in Rome he appears to have worked out a way of reconciling the Nordic heritage of his parental background, epitomized for him by Sibelius and Grieg, with the lush orchestrational skills of Respighi. And when Koussevitzky in 1930 was scouring the world for composers with whose creations he might celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Boston Symphony, Hanson's Second Symphony, dubbed "The Romantic," became one of the more durable legacies of that great event.

What was important about Hanson's work as an educator at the Eastman School of Music was, on the one hand, that he seized fully the unique opportunity given him by a multimillionaire philanthropist—who didn't merely support the School but totally endowed it—to forge a new quality of musical training, whether for composers or instrumentalists; and on the other hand, by seizing this opportunity he made the Eastman School rather suddenly into a major competitor (along with the then also new Juilliard School) to the old-line conservatories of Oberlin, Peabody, and New England, serving notice on them that here was a fresh educational approach which was not only born of the twentieth century, but was also aware of American music as an integral part of a broader international music tradition. Hanson's American Music Festivals, begun in 1925 and perpetuated right up to his retirement from the Eastman School nearly forty years later (in 1964), not only produced over one thousand new works, but, beyond that, provided a kind of annual pulse-taking and barometer of the state of American music.

Twelve-tone and serial progressivists—myself included in my younger flaming liberal years—castigated Hanson for his stylistic conservatism and his rejection of the new postwar musical fashions, scoffed at the jingoistic side of his patriotism, and deplored the simplicities of his music with its alleged middle-America mentality.

But if one reads his book Harmonic Materials of Modern Music, one understands that Hanson had a pretty thorough grasp of the basic resources of contemporary music—though he didn't choose to use them all in his own works. Perhaps he is one of those figures, all too common in the arts, where one must look at the totality of the achievement in all its symbiotic relationships. And then one might agree that the total is greater than the sum of its parts. Founder of many still flourishing national organizations including the National Association of Schools of Music, the Music Teachers National Association, the Music Educators National Conference, and the National Music Council, Hanson had a sense of himself as not only a creative musician, but—as a conductor—a recreating performer, and—as a teacher—a keeper of the tradition and an advocate of fine music for a broad grass-roots public. Under the somewhat brittle and crusty exterior of the man, there was a relentless commitment to the notion that great music was a beautiful and ennobling human endeavor, and that it was every American's right to share in the pleasures that such efforts could afford. That seems to be a rather good starting point for an educational philosophy. We have all been touched by Howard Hanson's sense of the relationship of all these things to each other. His is a force gone out of our world, a force that we may not find so readily again in a world, too, that is no longer the one he believed in and understood.