The Case for Conservatism

Howard Hanson is a musical conservative who has probably done more than any other American composer to promote new and experimental music. For 40 years, before his retirement in 1964 as director of the University of Rochester's Eastman School of Music, he supervised the premieres of nearly 2,000 pieces by more than 700-odd U.S. composers. Many of these compositions were in a harshly dissonant, far-out style for which Hanson himself had little liking. Nevertheless, he insisted, "Well-knit music that sounds like hell is still competent musicianship and deserves a hearing."

Hanson was content to make the case for conservatism in his own work. In keeping with his belief that the simple major chord "is to music what such words as God and love are to language," he stayed mostly within the bounds of traditional harmony, building up solid forms that were infused with ruddy Nordic vigor and romantic lyricism. Last week, conducting the New York Philharmonic in the world premiere of his Sixth Symphony at Manhattan's Lincoln Center, Hanson, 71, made his case again.

The 25-minute symphony, somewhat more linear and contrapuntal in texture than Hanson's earlier compositions, is based almost entirely on a short motif that is stated at the outset like a question. In the first movement, the probing woodwinds turn it over and over with melancholy reflectiveness, then pass it on in the following five movements to mocking, impatient percussion, urgently flowing strings and declamatory brass. In the end, after it has been explored, expanded, inverted and torn apart, the motif is reassembled not as a question but as an answer, and all the various strands of Hanson's piquant orchestration come together in a ringing climax.

At times the music offers too much development of too little substance, but it is nevertheless an impressive display of the composer's craft as well as his capacity for communication. Against this, the absence of startling innovation seems less important. After all, well-knit music that does not sound like hell deserves a hearing too.

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