Henry Cowell

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Henry Dixon Cowell (1897-65) was an American composer, music theorist, pianist, researcher, and impresario.

Virgil Thomson, a writer who lived in the early 1950s, summarised Henry Cowell's music as a wider variety of expression and technique than that of any other living composer.

His experiments, which began three decades ago in rhythm, in harmony, and in instrumental sonorities, were considered by some to be wild.

Today, they are the youth's Bible, and conservatives, too, "advanced." No other composer of our time has created a body of works so radical and so common, so penetrating and so comprehensive.

Henry Cowell's contribution to this huge production as a pedagogue is particularly noteworthy.

There is no other quite like it.

Few people are given the opportunity to be both fecund and right.

Early life

Cowell was born in rural Menlo Park, California, a San Francisco suburb. Henry Blackwood "Harry" Cowell, his father, was a romantic poet and a new immigrant from County Clare, Ireland. Clara "Clarissa" Cowell (née Dixon), a political activist, writer, and a native of the American Plains, who died at the age of 46 rather than being more than ten years old. Henry was born in 1946. Clarissa's ancestry was similarly Scotch and Irish, though her paternal lineage had been in America for centuries, with figures including astronomer Jeremiah Dixon, one of the American Mason-Dixon Line's surveyors. The two couples jumped for joy and embarked on bohemian life after meeting for the first time (later demolished in 1936). Harry had constructed on the outskirts of the city, where Henry would eventually be born. Henry had his first exposures to music in his first few years.

His parents would often sing of the folk songs of their native countries, and he'd soon be able to recite them before learning to speak. He also recalled hearing the traditional music of Indonesia, China, Japan, and others on several visits to downtown San Francisco. The family was gifted small instruments by relatives and neighbors, including a mandolin harp and a quarter-size violin, the latter of which Henry was keen on, making it his instrument of choice for a few years. After Cowell suffered from severe bouts of Sydenham's chorea and scarlet fever, his mother decided against both private lessons and public school work, he would eventually recover.

The Cowells evicted in 1903, the Cowells amicably divorced in 1903, by the time Henry was 5 years old, due to an ongoing feud with Harry and a French mistress. He was then born in Chinatown by his mother, who embued him with her strong anarchist and feminist convictions. It was during this period that he displayed a strong defiance of gender stereotypes, continued to wear women's clothes, and adorned the hue pink, instead of being designated "Mrs." Jones: "Today, Jones." When talking to his new Asian-American friends and their families in the neighborhood, he also had more exposure to music. Following the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, a majority of the Cowells' possessions and memorabilia were destroyed in the ensuing fire, which led to Henry and his mother's escape from California. Henry spent his childhood and friends in the American Plains and Midwest, later in New York City. He had no permanent home to live. At this point, schoolteachers of this period will often take note of his "musical genius" and eccentric personality, but they are often limited by "extrême poverty." During the family's brief stay in rural Iowa, Lewis Terman, the eventual explorer of the IQ test, met with the young Henry. He would argue that Cowell had a "very literary" accent. No English professor at a college level would have elaborated on it. And it was so natural. Intelligence is in the air. "I had the feeling that no unschooled boy who was not a genius of the first order could speak thus" and "although the intelligence is fine, scores of others have matched it." [...] However, there is only one Henry." Clarissa's work as a feminist feminist writer didn't earn her much money, and by the time they returned to San Francisco, she had become terminally ill with breast cancer. They discovered their house was destroyed by the previous earthquake and vandals looted after being unoccupied for so long. When Henry, a thirteen-year-old Henry restored it, Neighbors housed it. Cowell started small businesses at Menlo Park Train Station, janitorial service, raising chickens, and cleaning a neighbor's chicken cages in order to keep them financially alive.

He began to write short classical works in his mid-teens after receiving no formal training (and no schooling beyond his mother's tutelage). Cowell saved what he could from odd jobs, and at the age of 15, he bought a used upright piano for $60 ($1,772 in 2022). The piano greatly enhanced his compositional output by 1914, including his first living piece for solo piano and the repeating Anger Dance (originally Mad Dance). He'll begin learning in earnest, often by slamming the keyboard with all his might and cramming his mother's darning egg across the strings. Cowell arrived at the University of California, Berkeley, in the same year, studying composition with renowned American musicologist and composer Charles Seeger. Seeger would later write about their "concurrent but entirely separate pursuits] of free composition and academic disciplines. After displaying Seeger's drafts of his music, Cowell encouraged Cowell to write about the methods and logic behind his tone clusters, which would later become the basis for his book New Musical Resources.

Cowell, a teenager, created Dynamic Motion (1916), his first significant work to investigate the tone cluster's potential (listen). It requires the performer's ability to use both forearms and calls for keys to be halted, while still retaining the performance's dissonant cluster overtones via sympathetic resonance. Seeger, who spent two years in Berkeley, recommended that Cowell study at the Institute of Musical Art (later the Juilliard School of Music) in New York City. Cowell stayed there for three months (October 1916 to January 1917) before deciding that the musical atmosphere was too stifling and uninspiring. It was in New York, however, where he met Leo Ornstein, a young modernist piano composer. In the coming decades, the two teams will collaborate.

In February 1917, Cowell was enlisted in the army to avoid being drafted in World War I and seeing direct military combat. He worked in Camp Crane, Pennsylvania, where he spent a brief time as the assistant band director for a few months. Cowell was transferred to Fort Oswego, New York, in October 1918. He had been relocated just before a Spanish flu outbreak killed thirteen men at Camp Crane.

Cowell soon returned to California, where he had been active with Halcyon, a Southern California theosophical group. After befriending Irish-American poet and former Menlo Park resident John Osborne Varian, Cowell joined the group. Cowell's connection to Irish folk music from his father led him to Varian, Irish nationalism, Celtic heroes, and theosophy as a whole. Although Halcyon residents adopted a more inclusive and communist-leaning lifestyle, their music tastes were still rather conservative for the time. Varian referred to it as "sangtified raggtime [sic]" and, "rehymnified hymn music [sic]]. Cowell also wrote incidental and programmatic music to be performed at Halcyon. Cowell conceived the music for Varian's stage production The Building of Banba in 1917; Cowell's prelude, The Tides of Manaunaun, with its rich, evocative clusters, would be Cowell's most popular and widely performed work. In his music, Irish symbology would later be viewed as an unwitting continuation of the Celtic Revival movement of the twentieth century.

Later life

Despite the pardon — which enabled him to work at War Information, developing radio programs for broadcasting internationally — Cowell's detention, incarceration, and attendant notoriety had a devastating effect on him. "The impression I got was that he was a scared person, with the fear that "they're going to get him," Conlon Nancarrow, who saw him for the first time in 1947. He would often be pressed by reporters to comment on the facts surrounding his crimes and detention, but he would not be able to do so. Cowell's compositional output became noticeably more conservative shortly after his release from San Quentin, with simpler rhythms and a more traditional harmonic language.

Many of Cowell's later works are based on American folk music, such as the series of eighteen and Fumbrance Tunes (1943–64); folk music had unquestionably played a role in several of Cowell's prewar compositions, but the radical transformations that had been his trademark have been largely scrapped. And, as Nancarrow pointed out, there were other repercussions to Cowell's detention: "Of course, politically, he kept his mouth shut," Cowell said. "He had been radical politically before," says the author.

Cowell, no longer an artistic experiment, maintained a liberal bent and continued to be a figure in the incorporation of non-Western musical idioms (along with Harrison and McPhee) in the incorporation of non-Western musical idioms, as in the Japanese-inflected Ongaku (1957), Symphony No. 10. 13, "Madras" (1956–58) (which had its premiere in the eponymous city) and Homage to Iran (1959). His most popular, poignant songs date from this period, from Music I Heard (to a Conrad Aiken poem; 1961) and Firelight and Lamp (to a poem by Gene Baro; 1962). In 1951, Cowell was elected to the American Institute of Arts and Letters. In collaboration with his wife, Cowell, he wrote the first major study into Ives' music and provided vital assistance to Harrison as his former student championed the Ives rediscovery. Burt Bacharach, J. H. Kwabena Nketia, and Irwin Swack were among his postwar students, and he spent more than a decade as a consultant to Folkways Records, writing liner notes and editing collections such as Music of the World's People (1961) and Primitive Music of the World (1962). For a Folkways album in 1963, he recorded the searching and vibrant performances of twenty of his seminal piano pieces. In his final years, Cowell may have been released by age and his own seniority, as well as Thesis (Symphony No. 2). Simultaneous Mosaics, 1960-1963, pp. 15.

Cowell was diagnosed with colorectal cancer in October of 1964 after a physician discovered an abundance of polyps in his body during an examination. Because it went undiagnosed for too long and almost completely engulfed his large intestine, it was decided that it could not be operated on. After suffering a string of strokes and succumbing to the disease, Cowell died on December 10, 1965 in his Shady, Woodstock, New York home.

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Musical career

Cowell, a pianist, appeared regularly in North America and Europe as a pianist with the support of his former students, performing his own experimental works, seminal experiments in atonality, polytonality, polyrhythms, and non-Western modes, beginning in the early 1920s. He performed in New York, toured France and Germany, and became the first American musician to visit the Soviet Union, with many of these concerts sparked huge audiences and protests. It was during one of these tours that Richard Buhlig introduced Cowell to young pianist Grete Sultan in Berlin in 1923. They worked closely together, which was an important component of Grete Sultan's personal and artistic growth. Cowell later made such an impression with his tone clustering technique that famous European composers Béla Bartók and Alban Berg requested his permission to use it.

"I kicked up a riot in London and Berlin, and had some good and some very bad notices from both places," Cowell wrote in a letter addressed to his friend on January 10, 1924. In works including Aeolian Harp (1923) and Fairy Answer (1929), Cowell's new technique was what he referred to as "string piano" — rather than using the keys to play, the pianist manipulates the strings more precisely. The primary inspiration for John Cage's creation of the prepared piano was Cowell's experiments with string piano techniques. Cowell pioneered a compositional technique called "rhythm-harmony" in early chamber music compositions, such as Quartet Romantic (1915-17) and Quartet Euphometric (1916-1919-1919): "Both quartets are polyphonic, and each melodic strand has its own rhythm," he described. "Even the canon in the Romantic's first movement has different note-lengths for each speaker."

After extensive revision in 1930, Cowell began writing New Musical Resources, which would eventually be published after extensive revision. Cowell's book explored a variety of unconventional rhythmic and harmonic schemes he used in his compositions (and others that were entirely speculative). He addresses the harmonic series and "the influence [it] has exerted on music throughout history, how many musical works of all ages are connected to it, and how a vast variety of musical materials can be assembled," explains the composer. It will have a major influence on the American musical avant-garde for decades to come. John Cage hand-copied the book and later studied Cowell, and Conlon Nancarrow would refer to it years later as having "the most authority of anything I've ever read in music."

Cowell appeared at Leipzig, Germany, on October 15, 1923, during his first tour in Europe. During this performance, he received a notoriously hostile reception, with some modern musicologists and historians referring to the performance as a turning point in Cowell's performance career. The audience became more and more tense as he progressed into the festival, deliberately saving the most popular and provocative pieces for last. Cowell recalled hearing a man in the front rows threaten to physically remove him from the stage if he did not stop, gasps and screams were heard, and Cowell recalled hearing a man in the front rows threaten to physically remove him from the stage if he did not stop. He later remembered: He recalled: He recalled: During his fourth movement Antinomy from his Five Encores to Dynamic Motion.

During the commotion, a gentleman hopped up from one of the front rows and shook his fist at Cowell, yelling, "Do you take us for idiots in Germany?" some said, although others threw the concert's program notes and other paraphernalia at his face. An edifying crowd of audience members erupted on stage about a minute later, and a second, more sympathetic group descended on the crowd. The two groups started yelling over and confronting one another, resulting in a massive physical confrontation and riot on the stage, which culminated in a large physical confrontation and riot, which was followed by the Leipzig police. "The police came on and arrested 20 young fellows, the audience being in a total state of hysteria — and I was still playing!" Cowell later recalled. Since he had no serious bodily harm, the Leipzig authorities decided not to admit him to the local medical center. He was clearly shaken and jittery as he took his bow for the audience that remained and left the hall after the concert ended and the stage was cleared.

The local Leipzig newspaper was extremely critical of Cowell, the show, and his musical style as a whole. “[...] such a meaningless strumming and such a repulsive hacking of the keyboard that one must not only with hands, but also with fists, forearms, and elbows, was a joke in the end,” the Leipziger Neuste-Nachrichten said.

Comparisons were made later between this event and other riotous performances by experimental and futurist composers in Europe, including the premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring a decade earlier and Italian futurist Luigi Russolo.

Léon Theremin's obsession with harmony, as well as other aspects of a chosen fundamental pitch's overtone series, prompted him to invent the Rhythmicon, or Polyrhythmophone, a portable keyboard instrument capable of playing notes in periodic rhythms proportional to a chosen fundamental pitch. Cowell's first electronic rhythm machine, as some sources inaccurately state, could produce up to sixteen different rhythmic patterns simultaneously, with optional syncopation. Cowell created several original compositions for the instrument, including an orchestrated concerto, and Theremin created two more models. The Rhythmicon will be almost forgotten soon, but it would not be long before 1960s, when progressive pop music producer Joe Meek experimented with the rhythmic concept.

Cowell took a radical compositional route through the mid-1930s, with solo piano pieces remaining at the forefront of his output; The Banshee (1925), which included several playing techniques such as pizzicato and longitudinal sweeping and scraping of the strings, as well as William Blake's classic poem The Banshee (1930) influenced by William Blake's classic poem. Much of Cowell's public image remained based on his signature pianoic technique: a San Francisco News writer in 1932 referred to Cowell's "famous 'tone clusters,' the most significant and original contribution to the field of music," a commentator on Cowell's "famous 'tone clusters, "probably the most startling and original contribution any American has ever made to the field of music." How Old Is Song? Cowell, a prolific composer of songs (he would write over 180 in his career), returned to Aeolian Harp in 1930-31, adapting it as the accompaniment to a father's song "How Old Is Song." He continued to perform chamber music with pieces like the Adagio for Cello and Thunder Stick (1924) that investigated unexpected instrumentation and some that were even more progressive: Six Casual Developments (1933), for clarinet and piano, sounds like something Jimmy Giuffre would compose thirty years later. His Ostinato Pianissimo (1934) placed him in the forefront of those writing original scores for percussion ensembles. During this period, he created imposing large-ensemble works, as well as the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1928), "Polyharmony," "Counter Rhythm," and "Counter Rhythm" (listen), and the Sinfonietta (1928), whose scherzo Anton Webern conducted in Vienna. Cowell began to delve deeply into aleatoric procedures in the early 1930s, giving actors a chance to identify primary factors of a score's realization. The Mosaic Quartet, one of his major chamber works (String Quartet No. 98). The collection of five movements, which has no predetermined order, is scored as a collection of five movements (1935).

Cowell, a principal figure in a circle of avant-garde composers that included Carl Ruggles and Dane Rudhyar, John Becker, Colin McPhee, French expatriate Edgard Varèse, and Ruth Crawford, who begged Charles Seeger to marry as a student (Crawford and Seeger will marry). In the press, Cowell and his circle were sometimes referred to as "ultra-modernists" (it has also been used to a few composers outside of the immediate circle, such as George Antheil, and some of its followers, such as Nancarrow); Virgil Thomson called them the "rhythmic research colleagues." Cowell founded the New Music Society in 1925, one of their main events was staging concerts of their performances, as well as those of artists such as Wallingford Riegger and Arnold Schoenberg, who would later invite Cowell to attend composition class during one of his European tours. Cowell founded the periodical New Music Quarterly, which would include many notable new scores under his editorship, including Ernst Bacon, Otto Luening, Paul Bowles, and Aaron Copland. He solicited contributions from a then-obscure composer who would be one of his closest friends, Charles Ives, before the first issue was published. Major scores by Ives include the Comedy from his fourth symphony, Fourth of July, 34 Songs, and 19 Songs; in return, Ives will provide financial assistance to a number of Cowell's ventures (including, years later, New Music itself). Many of the scores included in Cowell's journal were even more widely available as a result of the record label he founded in 1934, New Music Recordings, the public library he founded in 1934.

Ruggles, Varèse, American composer Emerson Whithorne, and Mexican composer Carlos Chávez joined the Pan-American Association of Composers, a group dedicated to supporting composers from around the Western Hemisphere and building a community of them that would transcend national boundaries in 1928. Its inaugural performance, held in New York City in 1929, featured solely Latin American music, including works by Chávez, Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, Cuban composer Alejandro Garca, and French-born Cuban Amadeo Roldán. Its next exhibition, which took place in April 1930, was based on the United States ultra-modernists, with works by Cowell, Crawford, Ives, Rudhyar, and others such as Antheil, Henry Brant, and Vivian Fine. Nicolas Slonimsky performed concerts for the association in New York, Europe, and, in 1933, Cuba. Cowell had appeared in 1930 and met with Caturla, who was still active in New Music. Cowell's Rtmica No. 58 is expected to continue to work on both his behalf and Roldán's. 5 (1930) was the first free-standing work of Western classical music specifically written for the percussion ensemble. Cowell also spread the ultra-modernist philosophy and theory during his time as a highly respected composer and scholar; one of his many students, George Gershwin, Lou Harrison, who said of Cowell as "the mentor of mentors" and John Cage, who called Cowell "the open sesame for new music in America," said Cowell.

For Cowell, the encouragement of Caturla and Roldán's ferocious rhythms, as well as Chávez, whose work often featured instruments and themes of Mexico's indigenous peoples, was natural. He had been exposed to a great deal of what is now known as "world music" on the West Coast; alongside Irish airs and dances, he discovered music from China, Japan, and Tahiti. These early experiences inspired his ethical musical outlook, exemplified by his famous statement, "I want to live in the whole world of music." He went on to research Indian classical music and developed "Music of the World's Peoples" at the New School for Social Research in New York and elsewhere, but Harrison's tutelage under Cowell would begin when he enrolled in a San Francisco version. Cowell was able to study comparative musicology (the precursor to ethnomusicology) in Berlin in 1931 with Erich von Hornbostel. He worked on Carnatic theory and gamelan, as well as with respected South Indian instructors (P. Sambamoorthy), Java (Raden Mas Jodjhana), and Bali (Ramaleislan).

Cowell was arrested in Menlo Park on "moral" charges for reportedly having oral sex with a seventeen-year-old male. Despite initially denied the allegation, he later admitted that not only did the act, but also other sex activities with the teen and other young men in the area, as well as during his time in Halcyon more than a decade ago. He was never accused of pedophilia or molestation, but since the young men were usually described as "boys" at the time, misleading reports were published in sensationalist newspapers and some in the public, jeopardizing his public image as a result of his homosexual activities. He wrote a complete confession and a plea for leniency on the grounds that "he was not solely homosexual but was in love with a woman he wanted to marry" while waiting for a court hearing. Both Cowell and the young men who spoke to police sent letters and other items that would later be used by the prosecution in his trial. For reasons that remain unclear, Cowell eventually agreed to overrule his lawyers and plead guilty. Judge Maxwell McNutt denied probation, but he was given the standard sentence of one to fifteen years. The board of pardons decided his term of incarceration at the maximum possible sentence in August 1937, following a parole hearing.

During a turbulent period in San Quentin State Prison, Cowell would serve for four years in the prison. Clinton Duffy, a former warden, would say that it was "one of the world's most primitive penitentiaries." Wardens and officials were abused physically by whipping and starving, and such "poor conduct" was common. Several leading psychologists weighed in on the composer's innocence during his incarceration, and later expressed disappointment in the prospect of "rehabilitating" him. Despite the fright, Cowell used his time there to teach music to fellow prisoners, direct the prison band, and continue to write at his normal rapid rate, with around sixty compositions. These included two main works for percussion ensemble: the Oriental-toned Pulse (1939) and the memorably sepulchral Return (1939). He also continued his experiments in aleatory music: for all three movements of the Amerind Suite (1939), he created five versions, each more difficult than the previous. Interpreters of the work are invited to perform two or even three versions of the same performance on several pianos. He explored what he called an "elastic" form in the Ritournelle (1939) for the dance piece Marriage at the Eiffel Tower. The twenty-four measures of the Larghetto and the eight of the Trio are both modular; however, Cowell has some thoughts that may be included or not and performed repeatedly, assuaging a choreographer's right to change the length and character of a dance piece without the usual constraints placed by a prewritten musical composition.

At the behest of Cage, Cowell had contributed to the Eiffel Tower project and was not alone in assisting his neighbor and former teacher. Aaron Copland and protégé Lou Harrison elicited his sexism, as did he and other gay composers, including Aaron Copland and protégé Lou Harrison. "[the] present imbalance in the great mass was never so apparent to me before," Harrison says in 1937. Comwell's cause had been championed by composers and musicians around the country, one of whom, Charles Seeger, was one of his most vocal offenders. Nevertheless, a few, including Ives, lost touch with him for a short period of time. In 1940, Cowell was released, but he and his wife Percy Grainger, an Australian ex-patriate composer and friend, lived in White Plains, New York, under surveillance. Sidney Hawkins Robertson, a well-known folk-music scholar who had been instrumental in winning his freedom in the following year, was married by Cowell in 2006. On December 28, 1942, Cowell received a pardon from California Governor Culbert Olson.

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