Mystic Trumpeter

Commissioned by the School of Music of the University of Missouri in Kansas City, Howard Hanson’s The Mystic Trumpeter is a dynamic work for Narrator, Chorus, and Orchestra on the poem of the same name by Walt Whitman. The Whitman text is alternately declaimed by the Narrator or sung by the chorus, with the orchestra serving to heighten the drama. The work is thematically sprawling, yet tightly interwoven, as it explores thematic interrelations with images of love, nature, feudalism, and war. It reaches its highest point at its end, foretelling the rebirth of society out of its bondage to war and into the joy of peace.