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Henry Cowell
Henry Cowell (; March 11, 1897 – December 10, 1965) was an American composer, music theorist, pianist, teacher, publisher, and impresario. His contribution to the world of music was summed up by Virgil Thomson, writing in the early 1950s:〔The most recent standard collection of Virgil Thomson's writings, edited by Richard Kostelanetz and published in 2002, identifies Thomson's statement as undated. The statement is excerpted at length in the liner notes to the Smithsonian Folkways CD ''Henry Cowell: Piano Music'' issued in 1993. There the quote is dated 1953, but no source is provided. Given that (a) many of the dates listed for Cowell's piano pieces in the Folkways liner notes are incorrect (see Hicks (), p. 80, for more on that topic) and (b) Thomson refers to "experiments begun three decades ago," a date earlier than 1953 is plausible.〕
Henry Cowell's music covers a wider range in both expression and technique than that of any other living composer. His experiments begun three decades ago in rhythm, in harmony, and in instrumental sonorities were considered then by many to be wild. Today they are the Bible of the young and still, to the conservatives, "advanced."... No other composer of our time has produced a body of works so radical and so normal, so penetrating and so comprehensive. Add to this massive production his long and influential career as a pedagogue, and Henry Cowell's achievement becomes impressive indeed. There is no other quite like it. To be both fecund and right is given to few.〔Thomson (2002), p. 167.〕
==Early life==
Born in rural Menlo Park, California, to two bohemian writers—his father was an Irish immigrant and his mother, a former schoolteacher, had relocated from Iowa—Cowell demonstrated precocious musical talent and began playing the violin at the age of five. After his parents' divorce in 1903, he was raised by his mother, Clarissa Dixon, author of the early feminist novel ''Janet and Her Dear Phebe''. His father, with whom he maintained contact, introduced him to the Irish music that would be a touchstone for Cowell throughout his career. While receiving no formal musical education (and little schooling of any kind beyond his mother's home tutelage), he began to compose in his mid-teens.
By the summer of 1914, Cowell was writing truly individualistic works, including the insistently repetitive ''Anger Dance'' (originally ''Mad Dance'').〔Cowell describes the inspiration for the piece in the commentary track he recorded for Folkways in 1963: "The ''Anger Dance'' was composed at a time when I had been very much annoyed by the fact that a doctor to whom I showed a bent-up leg suggested that it should be cut off immediately. And since I didn't in the least approve of this, and thinking of it over and over again made me more and more angry, I stomped home on my crutches, and the phrases of the ''Anger Dance'' went through my mind louder and louder as I walked home" (track 20/5:06–5:41). Cowell biographer Michael Hicks (2002) describes the work as one of Cowell's "most prescient" and "proto-minimalist" (p. 60). The piece does, in terms of structure, anticipate minimalist procedures, and an interpretation by Steffen Schleiermacher from 1993 is simultaneously metronomic and jazzy in a way that reveals its kinship with the work of Steve Reich, in particular. But in his own 1963 recording, Cowell expresses a torment, through jagged tempi and ambivalent dynamics (all clearly purposeful), that renders ''Anger Dance'' very different in character from the work of the American minimalists.〕 That fall, the largely self-taught Cowell was admitted to the University of California, Berkeley, as a protégé of Charles Seeger. There he studied harmony and other subjects under Seeger and Edward Griffith Stricklen and counterpoint under Wallace Arthur Sabin.〔Hicks (2002), p. 68.〕 After two years at Berkeley, Cowell pursued further studies in New York where he encountered Leo Ornstein, the radically "futurist" composer-pianist. Still a teenager, Cowell wrote the piano piece ''Dynamic Motion'' (1916), 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 and intensify its dissonant cluster overtones.〔Bartok et al. (1993), p. 14 (unpaginated).〕
Cowell soon returned to California, where he had become involved with a theosophical community, Halcyon, led by the Irish poet John Varian, who fueled Cowell's interest in Irish folk culture and mythology. 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.〔Hicks (2002), p. 85.〕 In later years, Cowell would claim that the piece had been composed around 1912 (and ''Dynamic Motion'' in 1914), in an evident attempt to make his musical innovations appear even more precocious than they already were.〔Hicks (2002), p. 58.〕
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