Orchestrating the Self: Identity Construction in Howard Hanson's Seven Symphonies and "Symphony of Freedom"

American composer Howard Hanson (1896-1981) is often remembered as one of the most influential advocates for American classical music in the twentieth century. Yet despite his prominent institutional role and prolific compositional output, his music was ultimately sidelined in the development of the American canon. As mid-century critical and academic tastes turned increasingly toward modernism, Hanson’s commitment to romantic aesthetics and broadly accessible musical language came to be seen as conservative, reactionary, or even nationalistic in troubling ways. He has since been largely forgotten and dismissed as an ideologue whose artistic values were out of step with his time. This dissertation reconsiders Hanson not as a relic of American exceptionalism but as a composer whose symphonies function as dynamic spaces for negotiating a complex sense of self. Focusing on his seven numbered symphonies and his Symphony of Freedom (1949), this project analyzes how Hanson constructed and reimagined various forms of identity through his symphonic output. Rather than treating identity as fixed or singular, this study draws on theories of belonging, nationalism, and cultural hybridity to explore Hanson’s aesthetic, ethnic, spiritual, and national affiliations across his career. Each chapter investigates one mode of belonging as expressed through a particular symphonic pair, contextualizing Hanson’s musical language within broader historical, ideological, and biographical frameworks. Hanson emerges not as a static nationalist or conservative ideologue, but as a complex cultural agent whose symphonies reflect the contested and fluid nature of identity in the twentieth-century United States. His music resists easy classification, simultaneously embracing romantic aesthetics and modern techniques, Lutheran spirituality and universalist metaphysics, Scandinavian heritage and American exceptionalism. Through detailed analysis of the symphonies, alongside Hanson’s writings, public speeches, and institutional work, including materials consulted at the Howard Hanson Collection in the Sibley Library at the Eastman School of Music, this dissertation repositions him as a central figure in the construction of institutional musical life in the United States. It argues that Hanson’s symphonies function as sites of ideological negotiation, through which he continually orchestrated a sense of self in response to shifting cultural, political, and aesthetic conditions.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Music

Grantor dc:publisher

University of Kansas

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Anderson, Matthew

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Nedbal, Martin

• American Music
• Belonging
• Howard Hanson
• Identity
• Nationalism
• Symphony

Language dc:language.iso

en

Dc Identifier Other

https://www.proquest.com/LegacyDocView/DISSNUM/32238182

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/37708