The piano works of Raymond Hanson: discovery, exploration and reflection

Raymond Charles Hanson (1913-1976) was a highly gifted, prolific Australian composer whose music has fallen into relative obscurity. His career spanned a diverse and complex era in Australian music history. A largely self-taught creative visionary, his career was negatively impacted, among other factors, by the lack of support given to Australian composers in the first half of the century. Nonetheless, he became the leading lecturer in composition at the New South Wales Conservatorium of Music in the 1960s, and appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in his later years, finally receiving a degree of official recognition. The body of work he composed for the piano is unique and unparalleled in the twentieth-century Australian piano repertoire. This exegesis accompanies a creative work in which Hanson’s complete piano works are presented for the first time as an audio recording. Since no complete recording of his works or comprehensive research into his piano compositions previously existed, it has not been possible to conduct a meaningful discussion of his contribution to the twentieth-century Australian piano repertoire. As an audio document, this creative work fills a significant gap and enables critical engagement with Hanson’s work, which in turn makes possible the primary aim of my research: to present a comprehensive, nuanced understanding of this composer as seen through the lens of his piano music, shed light on his musical legacy and allow future scholars and listeners to experience this important body of piano music in its entirety. My exegesis aims to debunk generalisations and myths which have risen up around Hanson as a result of limited first-hand experience of his music, and difficulty in accessing its primary sources. Using an innovative hybrid methodology, I have combined interview perspectives, archival research findings and an immersive exploration of his piano works. The triangulation of these has informed and illuminated my creative work, resulting in a contemporary interpretation of Hanson’s piano compositions through a twenty-first century lens. By providing a recorded body of work and critically re-evaluating and expanding on what is known about Hanson, my research contributes to a relatively unexplored aspect of Australia’s music history. This research challenges existing assumptions and provides fresh perspectives about twentieth-century Australian piano music. It throws open the field to further research into music of the recent past and how it impacts upon contemporary piano practice and the emergence of new interpretive paradigms for artists in the twenty-first century.