Howard Hanson. Photo provided courtesy of Carl Fischer Music.
There is probably no composer more closely identified with Neo-Romanticism
as an ideology than Howard Hanson. A man of enormous energy, ambition,
and intelligence, driven by fervently held ideals, he devoted his long
and immensely productive career to realizing his vision of music in America.
Musicologist Joseph Machlis wrote of Hanson, "It may safely be said
that in the second quarter of the twentieth century, no individual in
the United States did more for the cause of American music than he."
As a composer, Hanson is known chiefly for one work, a symphony to which
he defiantly added the subtitle "Romantic." Achieving nationwide
acclaim while still in his twenties, he lived to see himself marginalized
during the last two decades of his life, because of his consistent adherence
to values and ideals, rooted in the piety of small-town life in "middle
America," that increasingly seemed "old-fashioned" and
authoritarian when seen against the hard-edged intellectualism, anarchic
radicalism, and sneering cynicism of the 1960s and 1970s.
(From Voices in the Wilderness, p. 111)
