An Analytical and Educational Survey of Howard Hanson's Dies ...

13Compositional StyleHanson is widely regarded as a 20 thcentury Romantic composer. This observationis quite true, for while he experimented in his early compositional years with microtonalmusic, Hanson directed his writing away from the more disjunct style of contemporarycomposers and toward a more Romantic ideal. His compositional style was "loyal to theprinciples of tonality and uses dissonances to build climaxes" (Hansen, 1967, p. 343). Heused his own system of theory, explained in Harmonic Materials ofModern Music:Resources of the Tempered Scale. The central idea in the formulation of melody andharmony was intervallic relationships, that interval analysis and application could explainand organize tones. Hanson states:"[...] there are six types of interval relationship, if we consider such relationshipboth "up" and "down": the perfect fifth and its inversion, the perfect fourth; themajor third and its inversion, the minor sixth; the minor third and its inversion, themajor sixth; the major second and its inversion, the minor seventh; the minorsecond and its inversion, the major seventh; and the tritone, the augmented fourthor diminished fifth." (Hanson, 1960, p. 27)Projecting these intervals onto one another create scales or sonorities. The perfectfifth and minor second intervals, when projected, are the only intervals that include alltwelve tones of the chromatic scale. Hanson describes in detail the relationship ofintervals projected by perfect fifths. Most relevant to this study is the perfect fifth heptad:-o--&--omi-©g-o-IEx. 1 : Perfect fifth heptad