Search Results for: Howard hanson

“Serenade for Flute, Harp, and Strings”: Howard Hanson’s Musical Marriage Proposal

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“To Peggy.” This is the simple inscription which appears on the title page of Howard Hanson’s Serenade for Flute, Harp, and Strings, Op. 35. In the summer of 1945, the 50-year-old Hanson (who had been a lifelong bachelor) met Margaret Elizabeth Nelson while attending the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York. The Serenade was written as a kind of musical marriage proposal. The couple was married a year later on July, 24. Hanson’s Serenade floats into a colorful, …

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Howard Hanson’s “Nordic” First Symphony: A Majestic, Neo-Romantic Soundscape

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At one time, twentieth century American composer Howard Hanson (1896-1981) was dismissed as a hopelessly conservative musical renegade. In the 1950s and 60s, at a time when atonality was dominant among the academic establishment, Hanson’s music embraced a warmly melodic, Neo-Romantic sound world. Born in the small prairie town of Wahoo, Nebraska to Swedish immigrant parents, Hanson wrote music which grew out of the austere harmonic language and dark, brooding orchestration of Scandinavian …

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Howard Hanson and the Sounds of the Wide Open Prairie

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More than any other composer, Aaron Copland is credited with establishing the virtual soundtrack of the American West. Listening to Copland ballet scores such as Rodeo and Billy the Kid, or his music for the film The Red Pony, instantly evokes images of wide open prairie spaces and the rough and tumble adventure of a mythical frontier. These associations have been re-enforced by countless film scores which generously borrowed Copland’s sound (the opening of Elmer Bernstein’s score for The …

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Howard Hanson, America’s Neglected Romantic

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This Wednesday, May 7, the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor Michael Christie will be performing at Carnegie Hall as part of the final Spring For Music festival. Since 2011, Spring For Music has showcased North American orchestras and innovative programming. After this year the festival will end due to lack of funding. The RPO’s decision to present a concert performance of twentieth century American composer Howard Hanson’s opera, Merry Mount, is significant. Hanson (1896-1981) was the long-time director …

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Hanson’s Symphony No. 2, “Romantic”: Gerard Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony (Concert Recording)

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During his 26-year tenure as music director of the Seattle Symphony (between 1983 and 2011), Gerard Schwarz championed a segment of the orchestral repertoire which remains somewhat neglected. It is the mid-twentieth century symphonic music of American composers such as Howard Hanson, David Diamond, Paul Creston, Walter Piston, and Alan Hovhaness. When Schwarz came to Richmond a few seasons ago, I let him know that a handful of his recordings, featuring this …

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Hanson’s “Romantic” Second Symphony: A Cinematic, Cyclic Journey

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The American composer, Howard Hanson, was born in 1896 in the small Nebraska prairie town of Wahoo. Hanson served as the director of the Eastman School of Music for 40 years, beginning in 1924. In the middle of the twentieth century, his influence was so great that he was hailed as the “Dean of American Composers and spokesman for music in America.” At a time when formalism and atonality ruled, Hanson’s warmly melodic, Neo-romanticism …

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Two Hanson Pastorales

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American composer Howard Hanson’s Pastorale for Oboe, Harp, and Strings, Op. 38 begins with a plaintive oboe call. It’s a sound which carries faint nostalgia, evoking ancient connotations of shepherds on hillsides and the serenity of the pasture. But there’s also a hint of anxiety lurking under the surface in this music, which Hanson wrote in 1949 and dedicated to his wife, Peggy. Perhaps an “anxious pastorale” was the only kind possible in the …

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