Henry Cowell
Henry Dixon Cowell was an American composer, writer, pianist, publisher, teacher and the husband of Sidney Robertson Cowell. Earning a reputation as an extremely controversial performer and eccentric composer, Cowell became a leading figure of American avant-garde music for the first half of the 20th century — his writings and music serving as a great influence to similar artists at the time, including Lou Harrison, George Antheil, and John Cage, among others. He is considered one of America's most important and influential composers.
Cowell was mostly self-taught and developed a unique musical language, often blending folk melodies, dissonant counterpoint, unconventional orchestration, and themes of Irish paganism. He was an early proponent and innovator of many modernist compositional techniques and sensibilities, many for the piano, including the string piano, prepared piano, tone clusters, and graphic notation. The Tides of Manaunaun, originally a theatrical prelude, is the best-known and most widely-performed of Cowell's tone cluster pieces for piano.
Early life
Childhood
Cowell was born on March 11, 1897, in rural Menlo Park, California, a suburb of San Francisco. His father, Henry Blackwood "Harry" Cowell, was a romantic poet and recent immigrant from County Clare, Ireland. His mother, Clara "Clarissa" Cowell, was a political activist, author, and native of the American Plains, who was 46 when she gave birth to Henry in addition to being over ten years older than her husband. Clarissa's ancestry was similarly Scotch and Irish, although her paternal lineage had been in America for centuries, with figures including astronomer Jeremiah Dixon, one of the surveyors behind the American Mason–Dixon line. After meeting for the first time, the two quickly wed and undertook bohemian lifestyles, residing in a small, crude cottage Harry had built on the outskirts of the city — where Henry would eventually be born. It was in his first few years that Henry had his first exposures to music.His parents often sang to him the folk songs of their native homelands, and he was soon able to recite them before he learned to speak. During occasional visits to downtown San Francisco, he also recalled hearing the traditional music of Indonesia, China, Japan, and others. The family was gifted small instruments by friends and neighbors, including a mandolin harp and a quarter-size violin, the latter of which the young Henry took an interest in, making it his instrument of choice for a few years. His mother eventually decided to stop both the private lessons and his public school career after Cowell had severe bouts of Sydenham's chorea and scarlet fever — from which he eventually recovered.
Due to an ongoing affair between Harry and a French mistress, the Cowells amicably divorced in 1903, by which time Henry was 5. He was thereafter raised in Chinatown by his mother, who imbued him with her strong anarchist and feminist beliefs. It was during this time he exhibited a strong defiance of gender stereotypes — he refused to have his hair cut, often wore women's clothing and adored the color pink while preferring to be called "Mrs. Jones". He also had further music exposures when engaging with his new Asian-American friends and their families in the neighborhood. After the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, much of the Cowells' possessions and memorabilia were destroyed in the ensuing fire, after which Henry and his mother fled the state of California. With no permanent place to live, Henry resided with his mother's family and friends around the American Plains and Midwest, later in New York City. School teachers of this time often took note of his "musical genius" and eccentric personality that was hindered by "extreme poverty". Lewis Terman, an eventual pioneer of the IQ test, met with the young Henry during the family's brief stay in rural Iowa. He would posit that Cowell had, "language almost literary. No college professor of English could have improved upon it. And it was so natural. His conversation breathes intelligence. I had the feeling that no unschooled boy who was not a genius of the first order could speak thus" and, "Although the IQ is satisfactory, it is matched by scores of others. But there is only one Henry." Clarissa's career as a progressive feminist writer did not earn her much money, and by the time they eventually returned to San Francisco, she had become terminally ill with breast cancer. They found their home destroyed from the prior earthquake, and looted by vandals after standing unoccupied for so long. Neighbors housed the two as the then thirteen-year-old Henry restored it. In order to keep them financially afloat, he took up small jobs such as picking and selling flower bulbs at the Menlo Park Train Station, janitorial work, farming, and cleaning a neighbor's chicken houses.
Education and early career
While receiving no formal musical education, he began to compose short classical pieces in his mid-teens. Cowell saved what money he could from odd jobs, and at the age of fifteen, purchased a used upright piano for $60. The piano significantly aided his compositional output — by 1914, he had written over 100 pieces, including his first surviving piece for solo piano, the repetitive Anger Dance. He would begin experimenting in earnest, often by slamming the keyboard with all his strength, and rolling his mother's darning egg across the strings. In the same year, at the age of 17, Cowell enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, studying composition with renowned American musicologist and composer Charles Seeger. Seeger later made note of their, "concurrent but entirely separate pursuit of free composition and academic disciplines." After showing Seeger the drafts of his music, he encouraged Cowell to write about the methods and theory behind his tone clusters, which later became the draft for his book New Musical Resources.Still a teenager, Cowell wrote the piano piece Dynamic Motion, his first important work to explore the possibilities of the tone cluster. It requires the performer to use both forearms to play massive secundal chords and calls for keys to be held down without sounding to extend its dissonant cluster overtones via sympathetic resonance. After two years at Berkeley, Seeger recommended that Cowell study at the Institute of Musical Art in New York City. Cowell only studied there for three months before dropping out, believing the musical atmosphere was too stifling and uninspiring. It was in New York, however, where he met fellow modernist piano composer Leo Ornstein. The two would collaborate in later decades.
In February 1917, Cowell enlisted in the army to avoid being drafted in World War I and seeing direct military combat. He served in the ambulance training facility at Camp Crane, Allentown, Pennsylvania, where he had a short stint as the assistant band director for a few months. In October 1918, Cowell was transferred to Fort Ontario in Oswego, New York. He was transferred just before an outbreak of the Spanish flu killed thirteen men at Camp Crane.
Time at Halcyon
Cowell soon returned to California, where he had become involved with Halcyon, a theosophical community in Southern California. Cowell joined the commune after befriending Irish-American poet and former Menlo Park resident John Osborne Varian. Cowell's connection to Irish folk music from his father meant he was instantly drawn to Varian, Irish nationalism, Celtic legends, and theosophy more broadly. Although the residents at Halcyon embraced a tolerant and communist-leaning lifestyle, their music preferences were considered quite conservative for the time. Varian described it as "sangtified raggtime " and, "rehymnified hymn music ." Cowell managed to convince members to embrace his music, and wrote incidental and programmatic music to be performed at Halcyon. In 1917, Cowell wrote the music for Varian's stage production The Building of Banba; the prelude he composed, The Tides of Manaunaun, with its rich, evocative clusters, would become Cowell's most famous and widely performed work. Irish symbology later became a broader theme in his music, as an unwitting extension of the Celtic Revival movement of the 20th century.Musical career
New music and first tours
Beginning in the early 1920s, Cowell toured widely in North America and Europe as a pianist, with the financial aid of his former tutors — playing his own experimental works, seminal explorations of atonality, polytonality, polyrhythms, and non-Western modes. He gave his debut recital in New York, toured through France and Germany, and became the first American musician to visit the Soviet Union, with many of these concerts sparking large uproars and protests. It was on one of these tours that in 1923, his friend Richard Buhlig introduced Cowell to young pianist Grete Sultan in Berlin. They worked closely together — an aspect vital to Sultan's personal and artistic development. Cowell later made such an impression with his tone cluster technique that prominent European composers Béla Bartók and Alban Berg requested his permission to adopt it. In a letter addressed to his friend on January 10, 1924, Cowell wrote, "I kicked up quite a stir in London and Berlin, and had some very good, and some very bad notices from both places." A new method advanced by Cowell during this period, in pieces such as Aeolian Harp and Fairy Answer, was what he dubbed "string piano" — rather than using the keys to play, the pianist reaches inside the instrument and plucks, sweeps, and otherwise manipulates the strings directly. Cowell's endeavors with string piano techniques were the primary inspiration for John Cage's development of the prepared piano. In early chamber music pieces, such as Quartet Romantic and Quartet Euphometric, Cowell pioneered a compositional approach he called "rhythm-harmony": "Both quartets are polyphonic, and each melodic strand has its own rhythm," he explained. "Even the canon in the first movement of the Romantic has different note-lengths for each voice."In 1919, Cowell began writing New Musical Resources, which was finally published after extensive revision in 1930. In the book, Cowell discussed the variety of innovative rhythmic and harmonic concepts he used in his compositions. He talks about harmonic series and "the influence has exerted on music throughout its history, how many musical materials of all ages are related to it, and how, by various means of applying its principles in many different manners, a large palette of musical materials can be assembled." It would have a powerful effect on the American musical avant-garde for decades after. John Cage hand-copied the book and later studied Cowell, and Conlon Nancarrow would refer to it years later as having "the most influence of anything I've ever read in music."