VOLUME 2 - WINTER 2002 - NUMBER 2 - PAGE 2

BENITO FROM WAHOO AND BRIGHTON

By Betsy Brayer

Howard Hanson in 1928, the year that he moved from the city to a newly built house on Oakdale Drive in Brighton.

From the early 1890s on, for many and varied reasons, George Eastman wanted to build a music conservatory for Rochester. In 1918, he revised his will, adding a codicil that left his East Ave. mansion to the University of Rochester for use as a music school. That same year, a better opportunity presented itself. The Institute of Musical Art on Prince St. was bankrupt, and its director, Alf Klingenberg, appealed to Eastman for financial help. Eastman bought the school, presented it to the university, built a more grandiose setting for it, and kept Klingenberg on as director until the stubborn Norwegian pianist declared himself opposed to the crass concept of an attached movie theater raising funds to support the school and a civic orchestra. And so, Klingenberg was summarily fired.

With Klingenberg gone, a new director for the Eastman School of Music had to be found.

Albert Coates, an early director of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, along with Walter Damrosch, conductor for the New York Symphony, knew a young American conductor at the American Academy in Rome, the first to receive the Prix de Rome for conducting. In 1923 Coates and Damrosch both invited the 27-year old Howard Hanson from Wahoo, Nebraska, who had composed his first piece at age seven (“a short and sad work in three-quarter time”) to conduct his new Nordic Symphony with the Rochester and New York orchestras respectively. Coates was also not reticent in singing Hanson’s praises to Eastman.

A graduate of Luther College in Wahoo, Howard Hanson was a faculty member of the College of the Pacific at age 18, and by 21 the dean of the Conservatory of Fine Arts at that institution. In 1921, he was awarded the American Prix de Rome, which entitled him to three years in the Italian capital.

After the Rochester concert, Hanson was invited to 900 East Ave. to meet Rush Rhees, president of the University of Rochester, and Eastman. Not really knowing what was up, the young conductor found himself being grilled by the articulate 63-yearold college president and the taciturn 70-year-old industrialist. Hanson took “an instant liking” to Eastman about whom he’d heard only unflattering noises such as that he was cold and unresponsive. Instead, Hanson found him to be“reserved and businesslike.” Behind the reserve he detected “an inner warmth.” Rhees did most of the questioning but Eastman’s queries were “models of clarity and incisiveness” and his “ability to search out the heart of a problem with a minimum of words was both impressive and a little frightening.” Samples of the grilling the youngster got follow from his own memory of them:

Do you think it possible to build a first-rate professional music school under the “umbrella” of a university to train creators, performers, scholars, teachers, and administrators?

Can the worlds of the artist, the performer, and the scholar co-exist in administrative as well as tonal harmony?

What part should “general education” play in the training of professional musicians? As a graduate of both schools, do you prefer the administrative organization of New York’s Institute of Musical Art [now Julliard School of Music] or the School of Music of Northwestern University?

What is your impression of foreign conservatories? The music departments of “ivy league” universities such as Harvard?

Hanson agreed to write a multi-page brief on his opinion of the place of a professional music school in a university. Returning to his beloved Rome, Hanson soon found a cablegram on the doorstep of the American Academy offering him the directorship of the Eastman School of Music. But before that cablegram appeared, according to Raymond Ball, then treasurer of the university and later president of the Lincoln Alliance Bank, Eastman did have one doubt about Hanson. Why did he wear that goatee? Did it hide a weak chin? Ball was delegated to snoop. At the American Academy in Rome, Ball approached and swore to secrecy another American musician, Randall Thompson, later professor at Harvard. Thompson had no opinion on the configuration of Hanson’s chin, but certainly could attest that the conductor was in no way weak:

“My god,” said Thompson. “Howard is president of the student body. We call him ‘Benito.’”

And so on 15 September 1924, Howard Hanson—lanky, blond, six weeks shy of his 28th birthday, but supremely confident in his own abilities to do almost anything in the music line, arrived in Rochester. His Roman colleagues had tried to dissuade him, telling him it would cripple his composing but Hanson decided that he “had to have a job anyway, so I thought I might as well try my hand at this new school as opposed to being a teacher or professor in some college.” He brought along his invalid Swedish-immigrant parents whose sole support he was and with whom he would live on Oakdale Dr. in Brighton. He married in 1946. It was the beginning of a remarkable association between a young man and a young school which would bring worldwide distinction to them both.

“I didn’t realize the enormous job of developing a new school,” Hanson said in a 1972 television interview. “We had a wonderful faculty, very few students. No one knew about the whole problem of curriculum and developing the student body of a music school. It became a 24-hour-a-day job.”

Hanson emerged as benevolent dictator of the new school as Dr. George Whipple was emerging as benevolent dictator of the new medical center founded by Eastman and others. Long after George Eastman and Rush Rhees were gone, these two fiefdoms would operate independently of successive University of Rochester administrations—although President Cornelis de Kewiet did manage to separate Hanson from a hefty part of his endowment in the 1950s. Prior to that time, the school’s excellent financial position following Eastman’s death in 1932 enabled it to contribute $100,000 per year toward the survival of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra during the troubled years of the Great Depression.

Dr. and Mrs. Hanson at his retirement dinner in 1964.

“When you’re a pioneer, you have to take the bull by the horns,” Hanson said. “I make up my mind and I do it.”

And so Hanson created the Eastman School in his own image.

The students called him Uncle Howard behind his back. He knew all their backgrounds, called each by name, and heard every exam himself. He prided himself on being a teaching dean. He created the crackerjack student orchestra, the Eastman Philharmonia, which he took to Carnegie Hall yearly. Hanson introduced the Doctor of Musical Arts in creation or performance (previously only given for musicology). “A doctorate in piccolo playing?” sniffed a critic. “That’s right,” Hanson agreed, “but only for good piccolo players. At least we won’t make bad musicologists out of good performers which should be a boon to both musicology and performance.”

Unlike his predecessor, Hanson fell into line with Eastman’s pet idea of the movie theater supporting the philharmonic concerts. “Mr. Klingenberg was so antagonistic to the whole theatre enterprise that we were not able to get his cooperation but with Dr. Hanson it is entirely different,” Eastman wrote to Eric Clarke, manager of the Eastman Theatre.

Hanson understood Eastman: “He was essentially a simple man, but there were complexities, and severity was the armor of his shyness. Many people were afraid of him. While admiring the great music of the past, Hanson was a progressive educator whose special province was American contemporary music. “For personal enjoyment,” he said, with cheerful egotism, “Give me the music of Hanson.” And so, to the horror of many traditionalists, the new music crept in.

In 1925 Hanson initiated the annual Festival of American Music, which he conducted for 40 years, and when he died in 1981, Donal Henahan observed in the New York Times that he had made Rochester “a boom town for American music.” The festival introduced works by Roy Harris, Aaron Copeland, Russell Bennett, David Diamond (an Eastman graduate), Bernard Rogers, Randall Thompson, Wallingford Riegger, and Dominico Zeppato (another Eastman School graduate). The critics were right: Hanson probably sacrificed his composing career at least partially in fulfilling his administrative function but he still went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for his Fourth Symphony and watched his opera, Merry Mount, which was dedicated to Eastman, receive fifty curtain calls at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1934. Eastman knew of the dedication and was pleased, even though he did not live to hear it performed.

Howard Hanson in 1896 - 1981.

Eastman frequently attended the festival concerts, meeting with the increasing number of composers who brought new works to Rochester to be performed either at the theater or Sunday evenings at Eastman House. Hanson had been prepared to argue at his first meeting with Eastman that Americamust have writers as well as performers of music.He began to expound his own thesis of creative music: “Music has to be written before it can be performed, and if music is to be alive a century hence, someone must be writing it now,” he told Eastman. “If musical creation stops, music stops and is soon a museum piece.” Eastman let the young composer go on for quite some time before saying briefly but with complete understanding, “You’re right. It is self evident.” Eastman looked at his commitment to encourage young American composers as a long-term investment, much like the Research Laboratory at Kodak. When one impatient critic said carpingly, after a few series of concerts by American composers, that a Beethoven had not yet been produced, Eastman retorted: “If we produce one American composer approaching Beethoven in 50 years, I’ll think my money is well spent.”

Continued in the next issue

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