Chanelling Howard Hanson?
Posted on Dec 7, 2006
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Filed under: Conrad Susa, Howard Hanson, Misterium Tremendum, Other People\'s Music, Past Work, Sibelius (composer), Teachers
Among several CDs I picked up on a recent Amoeba Records binge, I think I’ve stumbled across a musical ancestor. This 1989 Seattle Symphony recording of Howard Hanson‘s Symphonies 1 and 2 was sitting there staring at me from the clearance bin, so I idlely grabbed it, thinking ‘what the heck’.
Having never paid any attention to Hanson before, I listened to it for the first time with great interest. About two thirds of the way through the final movement of Symphony No. 1, I heard something that made me stop and rewind.
Keep in mind that I’ve never heard this Hanson symphony before in my life, and check this out. It’s an excerpt from my 2000 orchestra piece Misterium Tremendum.
It’s funny to me, because a review of a 2003 performance of Misterium picked on it for ripping off Sibelius, and I actually wasn’t familiar with Sibelius when I wrote the piece. I eventually got to know and love Sibelius, partly thanks to that review (which was actually quite fair and astute).
Turns out I was ripping off Hanson without realizing it. Hanson, I found out from the liner notes, was a Sibelius fan himself. What’s particularly interesting is the news that one of Hanson’s students was William Bergsma who taught my last teacher, Conrad Susa. I suppose that makes him a musical great-grandfather of sorts.
Well, maybe, but I hear it as tapping into the lydian flat 7 energy, so popular in the past 100 years. But you’ve gotta admit, there is some similarity. Not enough to make his heirs come after you for plagiarism.