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

performance, as a career path. However, he continued to play and later performed onoccasion as a solo pianist for his own works (Cohen, 2004).After leaving the Institute of Musical Art, Hanson attended NorthwesternUniversity. There, he was awarded a teaching fellowship and studied composition withPeter Christian Lutkin and Arne Oldberg. While at Northwestern, Hanson studiedmicrotonal music, experimenting by tuning two pianos a quarter-tone apart. Hansonconcluded from the experiment that he preferred the chromatic scale for his primarymusical palette (Cohen, 2004).At age nineteen, after graduating from Northwestern, Hanson was hired as atheory and composition teacher at the College of the Pacific in San Jose, California.Three years later, he was appointed Dean of the Conservatory of Fine Arts at the college.Hanson composed throughout this period, and was invited to conduct his own pieces withmajor symphonies, including Symphonic Rhapsody with the Los Angeles Philharmonicand Symphonic Legend with the San Francisco Symphony (Cohen, 2004).In 1 92 1 ,Hanson was the first American to win the Prix de Rome for hiscompositions Before the Dawn and The California Forest Play of 1920. The AmericanAcademy of Rome awarded the winning composer a three-year residency. While inRome, Hanson studied orchestration with Ottorino Respighi, who had been anorchestration student of Rimsky-Korsakov. Hanson's stay in Italy had a tremendousinfluence on his compositions, perhaps most notably on his 1957 Mosaics, based on themosaic art of Italy (Perone, 1993). There were no planned courses of study for Hanson inItaly; he pursued his own education through Respighi and other musicians. Hansontraveled through much of Europe while overseas, including his country of ancestry,