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Born in 1896
Composer
Inducted in 1998
Howard Hanson is remembered not only as a communicative composer in the Romantic vein, but for his 40 year tenure as director of the University of Rochester's Eastman School of Music, during which he made that institution a citadel for the support and dissemination of American music. Following his graduation from Luther College in his home town at the age of 15, Hanson studied at the Institute of Musical Art in New York and completed his undergraduate work at Northwestern University, where he began his own teaching career at 18. He went to San Jose, California, in 1916 to teach theory and composition at the College of the Pacific and in 1919 became dean of that school's Conservatory of Fine Arts. Two years later his score for the ballet California Forest Play of 1920 brought him a Prix de Rome, and he was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome from 1921 to 1924; during that period he studied with Respighi and composed his First Symphony (the Nordic). In 1924, when he was still only 27, he received the historic summons to take up the directorship of the Eastman School, which had been founded only three years earlier. Hanson's conducting debut was made in 1924, when he introduced his tone poem North and West with Walter Damrosch's New York Symphony Orchestra. When he retired as director of the Eastman School, the creation of the Institute of American Music there enabled him to continue directing his annual festivals for several years; he continued also to tour as a conductor. His own most widely known composition, his Second Symphony was among the several works from prominent conductors of the time commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky in celebration of the Boston Symphony Orchestra's 50th anniversary in 1931. His Fourth (the Requiem) earned him one of the earliest Pulitzer Prizes awarded in music. Throughout his life Hanson gave as much productive attention to music education as to composition. He was active in the creation or the activity of such organizations as the National Association of Schools of Music, the Music Teachers' National Association and the Music Educators National Conference, and he was a founder and president of the National Music Council. In addition to the honors already mentioned, Hanson received the Ditson Award; the George Peabody Award; membership in the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and no fewer than 36 honorary degrees.