While lesser known (and performed substantially less) than other twentieth-century modernist composer, Henry Cowell (1897–1965) influenced the likes of John Cage, who, in 1959, defined Cowell as “the open sesame for new music in America”; Lou Harrison, who called him “the mentor of mentors”; and Hungarian virtuoso and composer Béla Bartók, who formally asked him to borrow stylistic conventions for his Piano Concerto No. 1.

“From the very beginning, Henry Cowell was seen as someone unusual, someone special,” wrote George Boziwick, composer and former curator of the New York Public Library’s American Music Collection, on the occasion of the opening of Cowell’s archive in 2000.

A California native, Cowell was born to what we would now deem “hippie” parents, both of whom were aspiring writers, and he grew up in the Bay Area’s Bohemian circles, amply exposed to non-Western music of all sorts. His parents divorced when Cowell was small, and he spent much of his childhood with his mother, who moved them to the Midwest, where she was raised, in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco. The two were extremely poor, and Cowell lacked formal musical training; there was no piano in the home and so, as he later wrote, “For one hour every day I practiced in my mind.”

Yet his low station was no match for his intellect and ambition. By age fifteen, Cowell and his mother—who’d returned to the West Coast—had acquired a piano. The boy had bought it with money he saved. Two years later, he started studying under Berkeley musicologist Charles Seeger (father of Pete), who experimented with counterpoints, especially of the dissonant variety. He spent some time in New York where he befriended Leo Ornstein, the early twentieth-century experimental composer. He then became involved with a theosophic cult, headed by Irish-born poet John Varian, which led to a fascination with Celtic and Irish mythology (Cowell’s father was from County Clare). In 1925 he founded the California-based New Music Society, publishing pieces of ultra-modernist composers, such as Charles Ives, who also bankrolled him, and at the height of the Great Depression, in 1934, he founded the New Music Recordings label.

Then, in 1936, he was arrested on a morals charge and sentenced to fifteen years in prison; he was paroled after four. His later years were spent working for the Office of War Information, which allowed him to tour the world and to further experiment with non-Western musical traditions.

Asked in 1955 why he failed to stick to one style, Cowell replied, “I want to live in the whole world of music!” As conductor Hugo Weisgall relays, Cowell was more interested in experience than style.

“I had never deliberately concerned myself with developing a distinctive ‘personal’ style,” Cowell stated, “but only with the excitement and pleasure of writing music as beautifully, as warmly, and as interestingly as I can.”

Direct Manipulation of Instruments

By the 1920s, Cowell had “acquired a kind of ‘freakish notoriety’ for his unusual treatment of the piano,” writes musicologist Suzanne Robinson. One of his best-known innovations was the so-called “tone cluster.” This consisted, Robinson says, of “thick stacks of contiguous pitches,” and he most frequently incorporated them in his earlier works, written between the 1910s and the 1930s.

“Musical scholars have long since canonized tone clusters as emblems of the musical revolution of this century,” writes composer and music professor Michael Hicks. “History and theory texts alike celebrate them, and, more than any other aspect of his career, Cowell’s clusters have made his reputation endure.”

In 1926, Cowell wrote about experiencing “musical visitations” in an article titled “The Process of Music Creation.” These visitations were a subconscious experience during which Cowell, “had at first not the slightest control over what was being played in [his] mind, nor could [he] capture the material sufficiently to write it down.”

This “material” was arguably untamed and fleeting.

“To understand why Cowell might imagine such musical sounds,” Hicks writes, “we should recall certain facts of his musical upbringing. His first instrument, dug out of the attic when he was about four years old, was a battered, out-of-tune zither, on which a single stroke could produce a huge band of adjacent pitches—a thick, microtonal tone cluster.”

When Cowell moved as a child to Chinatown in San Francisco from rural Menlo Park in 1903, where his parents had a cottage, he was likewise inspired by the sound of gongs and drums.

“An early biographical treatment of Cowell suggests that his imagined clusters were tied to specific images,” explains Hicks. “Marion Todd wrote in 1925 that Cowell experienced his musical visitations while acting out the mythic tales his mother told to him—stories of battles between gods and giants, of stars and flaming comets rushing through black space, and of a splendid world springing out of chaos.”

The most notable piece making use of tone clusters is The Tides of Manaunaun, composed between 1912 and 1917. The clusters fit the purpose of the piece; it portrays the god of water, according to Irish mythology, whose waves make order out of the primordial chaos. In deciding how to convey waves in musical terms, Cowell considered and rejected both octaves and then various chords because they “made the universe sound as though it were already in pretty tidy order,” as he relayed to The Palo Alto Times in 1954, as cited by Hicks. Eventually, “he came upon the idea of using all the notes in the lowest octave of the piano…with its ostinato of low, specially notated one-and two-octave clusters.”

Other notable innovations include the “string piano,” where the musician directly plucks and strums the instrument’s strings—as a harpist might—rather than applying pressure on the keys. Cowell’s Sword of Oblivion (1921–22), Aeolian Harp (1923), and The Banshee (1925) spotlight this technique.

In 1929, Cowell was introduced to Leon Theremin, the inventor of the namesake electronic instrument, and together they devised the “rhythmicon,” an electronic instrument that allowed for multiple rhythmic patterns and harmonies to be performed by one person. While he composed work for it, including Rhythmicana and Music for Violin and Rhythmicon, its performance in a live context was lacking, and he soon left it behind. However, like the Mellotron, it can be considered a precursor to the synthesizer.

“Cowell’s Rhythmicana was perhaps the first work of quality that exploited in a fundamental way the new electronic technology,” writes computer coder, professor, and composer Leland Smith. “It took another twenty years for electronic music of various sorts to reach the point where composers of only ordinary vision could advantageously make use of its capabilities.”

From Tone to Geography: The Prison Years

Amidst his prolific creativity, Cowell was arrested; the warrant contained a single charge, namely a violation of sec. 288a of the California Penal Code, which prohibited oral copulation. Cowell “had engaged in the act with a seventeen-year-old, one of a group of working-class teenage boys who liked to swim in the pond behind his house,” writes Hicks about the composer’s confinement in the Journal of the American Musicological Society. “As Cowell later explained, these young men had played on his homosexual inclinations for a period of over three years, engaging with him in numerous intimate encounters.” One of them came forward after asking for (and being refused) hush money from Cowell. And while at first Cowell denied the charge, he later confessed and pledged not to fight it.

On July 8, 1936, Cowell arrived at San Quentin, the largest prison in a state penal system that ranked high among the country’s worst. From the start, Cowell tried to rise above his oppressive surroundings. San Quentin hosted monthly Vaudeville nights, and Cowell was introduced there as an acclaimed and accomplished artist. There was a worn, old piano on site, and during these showcases, Cowell played his least experimental works, which won him fans among fellow inmates. He then set out to compose new music.

In October 1936, as relayed by Hicks, The Palo Alto Times described one of these works, writing that

[t]he well-known prison characters are easily identified. The rat is heard sneaking to an official to squawk, and then cringing for protection from his irate big yard companions. The Indian hums almost forgotten songs of the plains. Clack, clack goes the over-zealous screw as he beats his heavy cane against the cement pavement. The Chinese revive thoughts of the ancestors of his native land.

Cowell also assembled a small prison ensemble and played duets with violinist Raul Pereira, who was serving time for kiting checks.

Indeed, incarceration had little negative impact on Cowell’s output. In addition to performing in prison, he drafted articles on music and wrote forty-four chapters of The Nature of Melody, a book he completed in 1937. Cowell was also an active educator.

“He was teaching twenty-two hours a week, supervising other classes three more hours, holding two hours of teachers’ meetings, rehearsing the band five hours, and playing the flute with them an additional seven and a half hours,” Hicks writes.

In terms of entertainment, Cowell and his prison orchestra offered a combination of popular and classical music, rarely of the modernist kind.

“Although a subsequent warden feared that the programming of serious music damaged inmate morale, some prisoners developed a strong taste for the repertoire,” observes Hicks. “On the other hand, he savored the ethnic music to be heard at San Quentin. Mandolins and guitars, he wrote, outnumbered concert instruments by four to one.”

In a 1938 letter quoted by Hicks, Cowell wondered “whether American or British folk music ever sported anything comparable to the tamburitza orchestras of the Serbs,” and noted that the presence of Ozark fiddlers “who play the back-land tunes very well” offered him a lot to learn. Surrounded by music even in prison, Cowell became, in his stepmother’s words in a 1938 letter to pianist Percy Grainger, “quite himself again.”

The San Quentin years served as a bridge between Cowell’s two main “periods”; they represented a shift in his sources of inspiration. Additionally, during his internment, he was fervently defended on the outside by the likes of Cage and Grainger, who gave him a job upon his release. Charles Ives, by contrast, curtailed all contact, at his wife’s behest, writes Hicks.

Geographic Exploration: The State Department Years

Once free, Cowell’s compositions changed in nature. He abandoned the experimentalism of his early work in favor of other sources of inspiration. Traveling the world for the US Department of State, he served as a cultural emissary. The wide-ranging musical traditions he encountered during these travels percolated in his work, and through the shared language of art and music, he cultivated diplomatic relationships with foreign nations.

“He was among the numerous artists and performers dispatched by the State Department to sundry parts of the globe in an effort to convince the world of the cultural vitality of the United States,” writes musicologist David C. Paul.

Two world tours, the first in 1956–57, the second in 1961, took him to major theaters of conflict in the Cold War, India and Iran, and yielded Symphony No. 13, known as “Madras” (1957–58), and Homage to Iran (1959). The second tour also brought Cowell to Tokyo for the East-West Music Encounter.

“Japanese music and culture were of sustained importance to Cowell throughout his life,” writes professor of music W. Anthony Sheppard, noting that one can trace its influence in works from the “Oriental” movement of Adventures in Harmony (1911–12) to Concerto No. 2 for Koto and Orchestra (1965); his most notable Japanese-influenced composition is Ongaku from 1957. As such, Cowell “was instrumental in promoting the contra-Schoenbergian position on the world’s musical resources.” In fact, in 1947, Arnold Schoenberg, who is credited with transforming the practice of harmony in the early twentieth century, famously attacked those who relied on folk and non-Western music—especially Japanese music—as their source material.

Cowell also retained his fascination with American folk music, which he pursued alongside his wife, ethnographer Sidney Robertson Cowell, whom he’d married in 1941. In this realm, his Hymn and Fuguing Tunes stand out.

“Cowell combines the modal style of the ballad tunes that were appropriated for hymns in the southern United States with the fuguing tune idea that is associated with Billing’s name and was employed by many colonial American composers,” observes Weisgall. The approach

particularly well suited Cowell’s expansive melodic gifts, and it coincides remarkably with his diatonic modal taste. As with the tone clusters and dissonant counterpoint and harmony earlier, he has created a body of works of different lengths and complexity of technical treatment that establish their own consistent theoretical basis.

Legacy

Henry Cowell died in 1965, and, while his works are not widely performed, his influence in twentieth-century music remains clear, especially for the way he combined inspiration and resources. He shared his ideas with composers, publishers, and patrons as well as with friends completely removed from the world of music. He considered his ideas, writes musicologist Leta E. Miller, “rather like community property, hastily dashing off exuberant letters about various concepts, some of which were only in their formative stages.”

It’s hard to get a definite answer as to why Cowell’s work remains less performed than that of his peers. Perhaps it’s because access to his oeuvre was limited before 2000. Sidney Robertson Cowell oversaw Cowell’s papers and decided how and when his image could be used after his death; she severely restricted access to relevant materials and in turn hampered scholarly attempts to study his career and legacy.

“With access to these materials restricted, scholars have had to study Cowell’s life and work through other sources,” Boziwick writes. “The restrictions on the collection during the thirty-five years since Cowell’s death have seriously hampered an informed evaluation of his legacy, a complaint reiterated loudly throughout the 1997 Cowell Centennial Festival in New York City.” Indeed, it was only in 2012 that the first authorized biography of Cowell was published by Joel Sachs, who had labored over it since the 1980s.

“If you had invented his life,” Sachs said in an interview with the Juilliard Journal in 2012, “no one would believe it.”

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