Henry Dixon Cowell (1897-1965)
A tireless musical explorer and inventor, Henry Cowell was born in March 1897 in Menlo Park, California, where he grew up surrounded by a wide variety of Oriental musical traditions, his father’s Irish folk heritage, and his mother’s Midwestern folk tunes. Already composing in his early teens Henry Cowell began formal training at age 16 with Charles Seeger at the University of California, Berkeley.
Further studies focused primarily on world music cultures. His use of varied sound materials, experimental compositional procedures, and a rich palette, colored by multiple non-European and folk music influences revolutionized American music and popularized, most notably, the tone cluster as an element in compositional design. Additionally, He is well remembered for his contributions as a music theorist, pianist, teacher, publisher, and impresario. His contributions to the world of music were summed up by Virgil Thomson as follows:
“Henry Cowell’s music covers a much wider range, in both expression and technique, than that of any other American composer. His experiments 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.”
From the time of his early childhood in Menlo Park, 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 folk music that would be a touchstone for Cowell throughout his career. While receiving no formal musical education, he began to compose in his mid-teens. After a period of academic-style juvenilia, in the summer of 1914 he wrote his first truly individualistic works, including the insistently repetitive Anger Dance.
That fall, the largely self-taught Cowell was admitted to the University of California, Berkeley. There he studied harmony and other subjects under Charles Seeger and Edward Griffith Stricklen, and he studied counterpoint under Wallace Sabin. 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), one of the first important works to explore the possibilities of the tone cluster. It requires the performer to use both forearms to play massive chords and calls for keys to be held down without sounding to extend and intensify its dissonant cluster overtones.
Cowell soon returned to California, where he had become involved with a theosophical community, Halcyon, led by the Irish poet John Varian, who fuelled 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. 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.
Beginning in the early 1920s, Cowell toured widely in North America and Europe as a pianist, playing his own experimental compositions, seminal explorations of atonality, polytonality, polyrhythms, and non-Western modes. He made such an impression with his tone cluster technique that Béla Bartók requested his permission to adopt it. Another novel method advanced by Cowell, in pieces such as Aeolian Harp (ca. 1923), 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 endeavours 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 (1915–1917) and Quartet Euphometric (1916–1919), 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 Quartet Romantic has different note-lengths for each voice.”
In 1919, Cowell had begun writing New Musical Resources, which would finally be published after extensive revision in 1930. Focussing on the variety of innovative rhythmic and harmonic concepts he used in his compositions, it would have a powerful effect on the American musical avant-garde for decades. Conlon Nancarrow, for instance, would refer to it years later as having “the most influence of anything I’ve ever read in music.”
Cowell’s interest in harmonic rhythm, as discussed in New Musical Resources, led him in 1930 to commission Léon Theremin to invent the Rhythmicon, or Polyrhythmophone, a transposable keyboard instrument capable of playing notes in periodic rhythms proportional to the overtone series of a chosen fundamental pitch. The world’s first electronic rhythm machine, with a photoreceptor-based sound production system proposed by Cowell, it could produce up to sixteen different rhythmic patterns simultaneously, complete with optional syncopation. Cowell wrote several original compositions for the instrument, including an orchestrated concerto, and Theremin built two more models. Soon, however, the Rhythmicon would be virtually forgotten, remaining so until the 1960s when progressive pop music producer Joe Meek experimented with its rhythmic concept.
Cowell pursued a radical compositional approach through the mid-1930s, with solo piano pieces remaining at the heart of his output—important works from this era include The Banshee (1925), requiring numerous playing methods such as pizzicato and longitudinal sweeping and scraping of the strings, and the cluster-filled Tiger (1930), inspired by William Blake’s famous poem. Much of Cowell’s public reputation continued to be based on his trademark pianistic technique. A critic for the San Francisco News, writing in 1932, stated that “Cowell’s famous ‘tone clusters,’ are probably the most startling and original contribution any American has yet contributed to the field of music.”
A prolific composer of songs (he would write over 180 during his career), Cowell returned in 1930–31 to Aeolian Harp, adapting it as the accompaniment to a vocal setting of a poem by his father, How Old Is Song? He built on his substantial oeuvre of chamber music, with pieces such as the Adagio for Cello and Thunder Stick (1924) that explored unusual instrumentation and others that were even more progressive: Six Casual Developments (1933), for clarinet and piano, were particularly futuristic in their conception.
His Ostinato Pianissimo (1934) placed him in the vanguard of those writing original scores for percussion ensemble. He created forceful large-ensemble pieces during this period, as well, such as the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1928)—with its three movements, “Polyharmony,” “Tone Cluster,” and “Counter Rhythm”—and the Sinfonietta (1928), whose scherzo Anton Webern conducted in Vienna. In the early 1930s, Cowell began to delve seriously into aleatoric procedures, creating opportunities for performers to determine primary elements of a score’s realization. One of his major chamber pieces, the Mosaic Quartet (String Quartet No. 3) (1935), is scored as a collection of five movements with no preordained sequence.
Cowell was the central figure in a circle of avant-garde composers that included his good friend Carl Ruggles, Leo Ornstein, John Becker, Colin McPhee, French expatriate Edgard Varèse, and Ruth Crawford, whom he convinced Charles Seeger to take on as a student. Crawford and Seeger would eventually marry. Cowell and his circle were sometimes referred to as “ultra-modernists,” a label whose definition is flexible and origin unclear (it has also been applied to a few composers outside the immediate circle, such as George Antheil, and to some of its disciples, such as Nancarrow); Virgil Thomson referred to the group as the “rhythmic research fellows.”
In 1925, Cowell organized the New Music Society, one of whose primary activities was the staging of concerts of their works along with those of artistic allies such as Wallingford Riegger and Arnold Schoenberg, who would later ask Cowell to play for his composition class during one of his European tours. In 1927 Cowell founded the periodical New Music, which would publish many significant new scores under his editorship, both by the ultra-modernists and many others, including Ernst Bacon, Otto Luening, Paul Bowles, and Aaron Copland. Before the publication of the first issue, he solicited contributions from a then-obscure composer who would become one of his closest friends, Charles Ives.
Major scores by Ives, including the Comedy from the Fourth Symphony, Fourth of July, 34 Songs, and 19 Songs, would receive their first publication in New Music. In return, Ives would provide financial support to a number of Cowell’s projects, including New Music itself. Many of the scores published in Cowell’s journal were made even more widely available as performances of them were issued by the record label he established in 1934, New Music Recordings.
The ultra-modernist movement had expanded its reach in 1928, when Cowell led a group that included Ruggles, Varèse, his fellow expatriate Carlos Salzedo, American composer Emerson Whithorne, and Mexican composer Carlos Chávez in founding the Pan-American Association of Composers, dedicated to promoting composers from around the Western Hemisphere and creating a community among them that would transcend national lines.
The association’s inaugural concert, held in New York City in March 1929, featured exclusively Latin American music, including works by Chávez, Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, Cuban composer Alejandro García Caturla, and the French-born Cuban Amadeo Roldán. Its next concert, in April 1930, focused on the American ultra-modernists, with works by Cowell, Crawford, Ives, and others such as Antheil, Dane Rudhyar, Henry Brant, and Vivian Fine.
Over the next four years, Nicolas Slonimsky conducted concerts sponsored by the association in New York, across Europe, and Cuba. Cowell himself had performed there in 1930 and met with Caturla, whom he was publishing in New Music. Cowell would continue to work on both his behalf and Roldán’s, whose Rítmica No. 5 (1930) was the first piece of Western art music written specifically for percussion ensemble. During this era, Cowell also spread the ultra-modernists’ experimental creed as a highly regarded teacher of composition and theory—among his many students were George Gershwin, Lou Harrison, who said he thought of Cowell as “the mentor of mentors,” and John Cage, who proclaimed Cowell “the open sesame for new music in America.”
Encouragement of the music of Caturla and Roldán, with their proudly African-based rhythms, and of Chávez, whose work often involved instruments and themes of Mexico’s indigenous people, was natural for Cowell. Growing up on the West Coast, he had been exposed to a great deal of what is now known as “world music”; along with Irish airs and dances, he encountered music from China, Japan, and Tahiti. These early experiences helped form his unusually eclectic musical outlook, exemplified by his famous statement “I want to live in the whole world of music.”
He went on to investigate Indian classical music and, in the late 1920s, began teaching courses in world music at schools in California and New York—Harrison’s tutelage under Cowell would begin when he enrolled in one such course in San Francisco. In 1931 a Guggenheim fellowship enabled Cowell to go to Berlin to study comparative musicology (the predecessor to ethnomusicology) with Erich von Hornbostel. He studied Carnatic theory and gamelan, as well, with leading Indian and Javanese instructors.
Cowell, who was bisexual, was arrested and convicted on a “morals” charge in 1936. Sentenced to a fifteen-year incarceration, he would spend the next four years in San Quentin State Prison. There he taught fellow inmates, directed the prison band, and continued to write music at his customary prolific pace, producing around sixty compositions, including two major pieces for percussion ensemble: the Oriental-toned Pulse (1939) and the memorably sepulchral Return (1939). He also continued his experiments in aleatory: For all three movements of the Amerind Suite (1939), he wrote five versions, each more difficult than the last. Interpreters of the piece are invited to simultaneously perform two or even three versions of the same movement on multiple pianos.
In the Ritournelle (Larghetto and Trio) (1939) for the dance piece Marriage at the Eiffel Tower, performing in Seattle, he explored what he called “elastic” form. The twenty-four measures of the Larghetto and the eight of the Trio are each modular; though Cowell offers some suggestions, any hypothetically may be included or not and played once or repeatedly, allowing the piece to stretch or contract at the performers’ will—the practical goal being to give a choreographer freedom to adjust the length and character of a dance piece without the usual constraints imposed by a prewritten musical composition.
Cowell had contributed to the Eiffel Tower project at the behest of Cage, who was not alone in lending support to his friend and former teacher. Cowell’s cause had been taken up by composers and musicians around the country, although a few, including Ives, broke contact with him. Cowell was eventually paroled in 1940; he relocated to the East Coast and the following year, he married Sidney Hawkins Robertson (1903–1995), a prominent folk-music scholar who had been instrumental in winning his freedom. Cowell was granted a pardon in 1942.
Despite the pardon—which allowed him to work at the Office of War Information, creating radio programs for broadcast overseas—his incarceration and the attendant notoriety had a devastating effect on Cowell. Conlon Nancarrow, on meeting him for the first time in 1947, reported, “The impression I got was that he was a terrified person, with a feeling that ‘they’re going to get him.'” The experience took a lasting toll on his music as well.
Cowell’s compositional output became strikingly more conservative soon after his release from San Quentin, with simpler rhythms and a more traditional harmonic language. Many of his later works are based on American folk music, such as the series of eighteen Hymn and Fuguing Tunes (1943–1964). Folk music had certainly played a role in a number of Cowell’s pre-war compositions, but the provocative transformations that had been his signature were now largely abandoned. And as Nancarrow observed, there were other consequences to Cowell’s imprisonment: “Of course, after that, politically, he kept his mouth completely shut. He had been radical politically, too, before.”
No longer an artistic radical, Cowell nonetheless retained a progressive bent and continued to be a leader (along with Harrison and McPhee) in the incorporation of non-Western musical idioms, as in the Japanese-inflected Ongaku (1957), Symphony No. 13, “Madras” (1956–58), and Homage to Iran (1959). His most compelling, poignant songs date from this era, including Music I Heard (to a poem by Conrad Aiken; 1961) and Firelight and Lamp (to a poem by Gene Baro; 1962). Despite the break in their friendship, Cowell, in collaboration with his wife, wrote the first major study of Charles Ives’s music and provided crucial support to Harrison, as his former pupil championed the Ives rediscovery.
Cowell resumed his teaching career, and the songwriter Burt Bacharach was one of his post-war students. During this period he also served as a consultant to Folkways Records for over a decade beginning in the early 1950s, writing liner notes and editing such collections as Music of the World’s Peoples (1951–61) (he also hosted a radio program of the same name) and Primitive Music of the World (1962). In 1963 he recorded twenty of his seminal piano pieces for a Folkways album. Perhaps liberated by the passage of time and his own seniority, in his final years Cowell again produced a number of impressively individualistic works, such as his Thesis (Symphony No. 15, 1960) and 26 Simultaneous Mosaics (1963). Cowell was elected to the American Institute of Arts and Letters in 1951. He died in 1965 in Shady, New York, after a series of illnesses. Today, his timeless music sounds as fresh and alive as when it was first composed, almost a century ago. His unique contributions as a pioneering innovator in American art music are still influencing composers even in the 21st Century.