Henry Cowell

• Born: March 11, 1897
• Birthplace: Menlo Park, California
• Died: December 10, 1965
• Place of death: Shady, New York

American classical composer

An eclectic figure in experimental composition, Cowell was a theorist, a teacher, and an indefatigable champion for new American music. His early works challenged the conventional notions of how a piano was to be played, while his later pieces explored techniques and styles of non-Western music and eighteenth century American hymnody.

The Life

Henry Dixon Cowell (KOW-ehl) was born in Menlo Park, California, thirty miles south of San Francisco. His parents, Harry Cowell and Clarissa Dixon, were both writers who espoused the progressive, intellectual bohemianism of late nineteenth century California, and their son’s upbringing and education were nontraditional. After a few unsuccessful attempts to integrate young Cowell into the public school system, his mother decided to educate him herself. Her curriculum emphasized literature, politics, and art over such mundane subjects as spelling and mathematics. Cowell’s early exposure to music was erratic: He studied the violin and took piano lessons, but he proved to be too free-spirited to accept formal training. He showed great interest in composing, but he lacked the ability to properly notate his ideas. His first pieces reveal an attempt to imitate the classical European masters, while simultaneously defying the traditional rules of form and tonality.

In 1914 Cowell began studies with Charles Seeger at the University of California, Berkeley. Impressed with Cowell’s musical potential, Seeger encouraged him to organize his creative and unusual composition methods into theoretically useful concepts. This eventually led to the creation of Cowell’s influential book, New Musical Resources. Seeger also urged Cowell to broaden his education and in 1916 arranged for him to study in New York at the Institute of Musical Art (later renamed the Juilliard School). Although Cowell rejected the school’s conservative approach and returned to California within a few months, he did learn something from Manhattan’s cultural life. He met the fiery, virtuosic composer Leo Ornstein, whose piano compositions were famous for aggressive dissonances created through small clusters of notes. Upon his return to the Bay Area, Cowell had a renewed sense of himself as a composer, and he began writing a series of strikingly original compositions for the piano. At this time Cowell began to give regular recitals, and he soon became a significant figure in the American musical avant-garde.

In the 1920’s and early 1930’s Cowell performed in Europe and in the Soviet Union. At the same time Cowell was actively promoting his own career, he was diligently working on behalf of others. In 1925 he formed the New Music Society, an organization that sponsored concerts and published scores by new American composers. In addition, Cowell taught innovative courses in composition and world music at the New School for Social Research in New York and at Stanford University and Mills College in California.

In May, 1936, Cowell was arrested on a morals charge for engaging in sexual acts with teenage boys. He was sentenced to fifteen years in San Quentin State Prison. The dedicated support of his family and his colleagues ultimately secured his release in 1940, after only four years. During his incarceration, Cowell stayed active as a composer and teacher, leading a band at San Quentin and teaching music to his fellow inmates.

Upon his release in 1940, Cowell took his career and his compositional style in new directions. He married Sidney Robertson in 1941, and he took a job as a music editor for the U.S. Office of War Information. He also resumed his teaching career on the East Coast, and he became more actively involved in the study of world music.

In the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, he journeyed around the world, visiting more than a dozen countries as both a musical ambassador for the United States and an interested musician. The longest portion of his travels was spent in Iran, where he worked closely with government officials, advising them on the development of their music schools and their radio programming. His experiences abroad resulted in a number of new and significant compositions that showed not only the immediate impact of his firsthand encounters with non-Western musical practices but also a coalescence of his lifelong interest in world music.

Despite suffering a series of painful and debilitating illnesses in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, Cowell continued to teach and prolifically compose. He died on December 10, 1965, at the age of sixty-eight.

The Music

Seemingly unconcerned with developing a personal style, Cowell allowed his many interests to guide each of his compositions. No single piece accurately represents his immense catalog of more than nine hundred works. He composed quickly and rarely revised his compositions. His earliest published works are brash and full of experimental devices, such as tone clusters, dissonant counterpoint, elaborately complex polyrhythms, and unconventional playing techniques. The second half of his career, however, is marked by a more judicious use of experimental devices, a greater adoption of traditional tonality and modality, and a deeper exploration of the hybridization of Western art music practices with the practices of non-Western music.

Early Works. Cowell’s best-known and most influential compositions are undoubtedly his early solo piano works. Though he already had composed a large number of pieces, it was after visiting New York in 1916 and encountering the ultramodern music of Ornstein that his musical style would find direction. Cowell began cultivating a new repertoire of compositions based on extended methods of producing new sounds from the piano. His Dynamic Motion, which depicts the rumbling subways of Manhattan, combines a jovial little melodic motif with crashing groups of clustered, adjacent notes on the piano (known as tone clusters) produced with the performer’s fists, palms, and forearms. The following year, Cowell was asked to provide music for a play based on Irish mythology, and he again found an opportunity to employ tone clusters. The overture to The Tides of Manaunaun combines a lilting Irish tune with palm and forearm clusters that sonically imitate the crashing of waves upon the shore. As Cowell gained notoriety for his brazen new works and performances, he continued to cull new sounds from the piano. The Banshee, again based upon Irish mythology, portrays the deathly screech of a banshee through direct contact with the piano strings, using both the flesh of the finger and the fingernail. The sheer originality and shocking effect of this piece made it one of Cowell’s most famous compositions.

String Quartet No. 4. While Cowell gained international fame in the 1920’s as a composer and performer of shocking, modern compositions for the piano, his interests had always been much broader. He had long contemplated concertial ideas found in non-Western music, but, aside from a few small examples, this interest is not directly apparent in his early compositions. In his fourth string quartet, which he dubbed the “United Quartet,” Cowell sought to reconcile musical techniques and concepts from other cultures with Western art music practices, searching for the commonalities among various musical styles in order to form a hybrid of compatible elements. The melodic and harmonic content of the quartet is derived from intervals and scales that Cowell believed were universally comprehensible. His studies of non-Western music led him to the conclusion that a three-note scale, for instance, was common among primitive musical cultures. Its inclusion in this quartet, along with other globally common musical devices, such as droning fifths, pentatonic scales, and percussive effects, was Cowell’s way of bringing the common musical procedures of the non-Western world into harmony with the Western classical tradition of the string quartet, presumably rendering the composition universally comprehensible.

Hymn and Fuguing Tunes. Following his incarceration, Cowell’s musical language evolved in unpredictable ways. While many have viewed the more tonal, conservative language of Cowell’s compositions during the second half of his career as a regression and a denial of his ultramodern style from the previous decades, it was in fact a deeper, more mature search for a distinctly American musical sound. He found inspiration in the pre-Civil War tradition of shape-note singing, particularly represented by William Walker’s 1835 collection of hymns titled The Southern Harmony. Cowell was attracted to the modal quality of the melodies and the nonacademic approach to harmonizing them (featuring parallel fifths and octaves, and almost completely eschewing chromaticism). These tunes were often set homophonically as hymns, or they were turned into “fuging tunes” with imitative counterpoint. Cowell adopted these two approaches and combined them with the prelude and fugue structure made famous by Johann Sebastian Bach in order to form a wholly original hybrid genre Cowell called the Hymn and Fuguing Tune. Between 1944 and 1964 Cowell composed eighteen such works, each for a different ensemble of instruments.

Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 2, scored for strings, is the best-known of this series, and it perfectly exemplifies the style. The opening hymn movement features a completely diatonic setting of a tune that suggests the Dorian mode commonly encountered in early shape-note singing. The harmonization unabashedly explores the parallel sonorities also distinctive to the hymns in Walker’s collection. The intertwining imitation of the subsequent fuguing tune movement advances almost entirely in stepwise motion, relying on the beautiful simplicity of clearly comprehensible counterpoint.

Persian Set. At the end of 1956 and the beginning of 1957, during his nearly three-month stay in Iran, Cowell recorded his experience in a composition that again sought to hybridize disparate musical traditions. In Persian Set, Cowell merged the Western classical four-movement structure with analogous formal structures found in traditional Persian musical suites, and he also scored the work for a mix of Western and Persian musical instruments. The piece calls for strings, piano, clarinet, and piccolo, as well as a tar (a Persian lutelike instrument) and a drum, which most performers interpret as a Persian tombak drum. In addition, Cowell imitated the largely improvised and monophonic tradition of melodic development and variation found in Persian music, casting it within traditional Western forms with suggestions of harmonic motion.

The first and third movements are pseudoimprovisational dialogues between the melodic instruments, accompanied by droning tonic and dominant tones. The second movement is more rhythmically charged, featuring a strongly defined pattern in the drum, while the main theme is presented monophonically in the strings. Cowell suggests harmonic motion with a subtly articulated bass line in the piano part. The work’s finale is a full realization of Cowell’s goals toward hybridization. It is simultaneously a rondo, typical of final movements within a Western classical four-movement structure, and a Persian reng, a fast dance movement in triple meter often heard at the end of instrumental suites. Persian Set premiered in Tehran in September of 1957, and it remains Cowell’s most successful transcultural composition.

Musical Legacy

Despite his large number of works and various methods of composing, Cowell is noted more for his innovative ideas and fearless approach to expanding the Western classical tradition than for his compositions. His writings inspire modern composers to look beyond the inherited traditions of European classicism and to reexamine the ways in which modern music can be constructed. As a teacher, he introduced countless students (including John Cage and Lou Harrison) to musical traditions outside the Western world. Even the U.S. government recognized his unique understanding and employed him as a musical ambassador and as a general source of cultural knowledge. His enormous and eclectic oeuvre—with its exploration of styles and techniques futuristic and retrospective, within and outside Western tradition—presaged the trend toward postmodernism.

Bibliography

Hicks, Michael. Henry Cowell: Bohemian. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002. This substantial biographical treatment of the composer examines his life until his incarceration in 1936 and places in context his upbringing within the bohemian culture of early twentieth century California.

Lichtenwanger, William. The Music of Henry Cowell: A Descriptive Catalog. New York: Institute for Studies in American Music, Conservatory of Music, Brooklyn College CUNY, 1986. An annotated catalog of Cowell’s compositions, including dates of performance, locations of manuscripts and sketches, and detailed commentary on each piece.

Mead, Rita. Henry Cowell’s Concerti, 1925-1936: The Society, the Music Editions, and the Recordings. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1981. A detailed study of Cowell’s New Music Society that traces the specific activities of this organization, including concerts, publications, recordings, and correspondence.

Nicholls, David. American Experimental Music, 1890-1940. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. In-depth analyses of the most significant and groundbreaking compositions by Cowell and his contemporaries prior to 1940.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. The Whole World of Music: A Henry Cowell Symposium. The Netherlands: Harwood, 1997. A collection of articles treating various aspects of Cowell’s career and music. Personal recollections from Harrison and Sidney Robertson Cowell are included.

Principal Works

chamber works:Irish Suite, 1929; String Quartet No. 4, 1936 (United Quartet); String Quartet No. 3, 1939 (Mosaic Quartet); Suite for Piano and String Orchestra, 1942; Concerto No. 1, 1964; Concerto No. 2, 1965.

orchestral works:Sinfonietta, 1928; Four Assorted Movements, 1939; Four Irish Tales, 1940; Symphony No. 2, 1941; Symphony No. 3, 1942 (Gaelic); Exultation, 1943; Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 1, 1944; Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 2, 1944; Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 5, 1946; Symphony No. 4, 1947; A Curse and a Blessing, 1949; Symphony No. 5, 1949; Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 3, 1951; Fantasie, 1952; Symphony No. 7, 1952; Symphony No. 11, 1954 (Seven Rituals of Music); Symphony No. 6, 1955; Persian Set, 1957; Symphony No. 13, 1959 (Madras); Symphony No. 16, 1963 (Icelandic); Twilight in Texas, 1968.

piano works:Dynamic Motion, 1916; The Building of Bamba, 1917 (performance written by John O. Varian; revised 1930); The Tides of Manaunaum, 1917; The Banshee, 1925.

writings of interest:New Musical Resources, 1930.