Hanson sent him recordings on crude aluminum discs, from which Kennan could tell very little. In 1939, his teacher, Howard Hanson, conducted it with the Eastman Rochester Orchestra, but Kennan was in residence at the American Academy in Rome.
Kennan, the composer, writer, and educator, has been an essential voice in America's musical counterpoint since 1936 when he won the Prix de Rome Composition Prize, in part for a symphony he wrote as an undergrad at the Eastman School of Music. They were the standard texts in grad school, and they are still used today." "In high school and at the university I used both of these books. "It is almost unheard of for a textbook to have that kind of life," says Donald Grantham, Kennan's colleague at the UT School of Music and co-author of the latest revision of The Technique of Orchestration. "I refer to it all of the time," he says. Austin Symphony Orchestra conductor Peter Bay kept his copy of The Technique of Orchestration from his student days at the Peabody Conservatory. They are two books that music students don't sell back at the end of the semester. His other book, The Technique of Orchestration, has been the standard since 1952. His definition would be incomplete if one word were removed. "The art of combining two or more voices in a musically satisfying way." His book on the subject has been the standard text for more than four decades, and he has a succinct definition when new acquaintances ask what counterpoint is. It separates Mozart from Salieri, Beethoven from Hummel, the Beatles from the Dave Clark Five. But often counterpoint is the intangible ingredient that makes millions of folks bond with a Beethoven symphony, a Duke Ellington masterpiece, or a Sting album. You can't hum it or tap it out on a table.