On
28 December 1896, Howard Hanson was born in Wahoo, Nebraska.[1]
There he grew up without siblings.[2]
His parents, Hans and Hilma, were Lutherans from Skåne, Sweden.[3]
Allen Cohen, musicologist and assistant professor of music at Fairleigh Dickson
University in New York,[4]
noted in his Hanson biography: “As a boy Hanson considered a career in the
Lutheran ministry. . . . Religious ideals and images are prominent in his
writings and speeches, as well as in his compositions.”[5]
Recalling his childhood, Hanson once said, “The music of the [Lutheran]
chorales is pretty serious material, and this impressed me very greatly.”[6] As a child, Hanson was first taught to
play the piano and cello by his mother and later played cello in the high
school orchestra, which he occasionally conducted.[7] He later took lessons at Wahoo’s Luther
College with A. O. Peterson who taught him music theory in addition to cello
and piano performance.[8]
An Ambitious Student
A diligent student, Hanson once confessed, “I
didn’t want to be second or third in the class—I wanted to be the first in the
class, and I always was. I wanted
to be the best pianist around [Luther College], not the next best. That was a kind of an ambition that
probably helped me in professional life later on—that I was driving myself a
little bit, probably, all my life.”[9] Hanson’s drive to perform better than
his peers helped him to graduate at the top of his high school class.[10]
