Henry Cowell

Henry Cowell, the son of an Irish immigrant father and grandson of the Dean of Kildare Cathedral, was born in 1897 in a Menlo Park house variously described as a cottage, a hovel and a shack. Lewis Terman, the creator of the Stanford-Binet intelligence test, said it was a "shanty." He described Cowell, then fourteen years old, as having an IQ of 131, an achievement which was matched by scores of others. But, said Terman in his book, The Intelligence of School Children, "there is only one Henry."1

Though he would ultimately be an instructor not only at Mills but the New School for Social Research, Columbia University, the Eastman School of Music, the Peabody School of Music and the University of California, give private lessons to George Gershwin and Burt Bacharach, and refuse an invitation to teach botany at Stanford, he himself was essentially unschooled except for one two-month period when he was six and another when he was nineteen.

On March 5, 1914--two years after buying his piano--he played a recital of his compositions for the San Francisco Musical Society. By then he had composed more than a hundred works.

Most of them were freed from European concert-music tradition by a lack of schooling (resulting, presumably, from his family's poverty. But The New Grove Dictionary of American Music reported that his parents were not only poor but philosophical anarchists whose ideas led Cowell to accept natural sounds and noises as appropriate musical materials).

Nor was it only lessons he went without: by the time he was an adult, he had attended only two concerts. ("I could not steal another person's compositions because I had not heard them," he told the Tribune.)3 He became familiar instead with the Chinese opera he encountered on San Francisco streets and the Irish folk music sung by his mother's relatives. Having no reason not to, he used secundal harmonies--chords made up of adjacent notes on the piano keyboard--which he called tone clusters and performed with his flat hand, fist or forearm. His extreme precision and force caused Howard Gardner (in a 1983 book entitled Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences) to rank his kinesthetic intelligence as "astonishingly high." It also caused at least two newspapers to send sports writers to review his concerts and the London Times' music critic to call him the world's loudest pianist.

His first audience was a member of the San Francisco Symphony who, passing by the Menlo Park shanty, heard piano music and stopped to listen, wondering who had written it. After an hour, he knocked on the door, having decided to ask. Discovering the composer to be a teen-aged boy, the musician told Henry Hadley, the Symphony's conductor, about him and a fund was established to raise money for his education.

When [his pieces] became too complicated to play--Bruce Archibald's notes for the Emerson Quartet's recording of Quartet Euphometric (1919) liken them to the computer-age meters employed by Carter and Boulez forty years later--Cowell sought to devise a totally new instrument capable of performing them, an accomplishment he realized in 1929 when Russian inventor Leon Theremin created the Rhythmicon. (But it was Cowell who visualized the new mechanism and suggested the photo-electric cell which became its operational element.) Rhythmicana, the concerto he wrote for it, nevertheless remained unplayed until 1971, six years after his death, when it was realized on a computer by Stanford professor Leland Smith accompanied by the Stanford Symphony Orchestra.

Amiable Conversation (1914) is polytonal, using an F sharp pentatonic and C major diatonic pattern simultaneously. An attempt to depict a dispute in a laundry between one Chinese with a high-pitched voice and another with a low one, it also initiated a far-reaching investigation of non-European music which ultimately involved a study of Javanese gamelan techniques and Japanese flutes and the composition of koto concerti, a Madras Symphony using traditional Indian instruments, and an orchestral piece called Orgaku (1957) based on Japanese Gagaku and Sankyokyu styles. The investigation caused extensive ramifications, paving the way for the transethnic ideas of Cage and Harrison and precipitating an end to musical colonialism.

Cowell's performances throughout Europe in 1923 were met with both shock--he made Stravinsky sound like the composer of the "Maiden's Prayer," said one reviewer--and high-echelon interest: Bart¢k requested permission to use his clusters; Schoenberg asked him to play for his class; Webern conducted a movement of his Sinfonietta.

Reviews from his 1924 Carnegie Hall recital made him a celebrity, instituting annual tours of the U.S. He was greeted by ovations in Paris. Critics in Germany wrote hundreds of articles about him. In 1929 he became the first American composer to be invited to perform in the Soviet Union, where his concerts were cancelled after a state committee called his music "radical." When the ban was reversed, local newspapers printed caricatures of him assaulting the piano while the audience looked on in terror. In Milan in 1929, Harp of Life caused listeners to emit so many "hoots and howls" that, at one point, it took five minutes to restore quiet. When he played a piece using his forearms, people on his right side got up and went to the left in order to watch. At the end, half of the audience greeted him with enthusiastic applause. The rest yelled insults.

A New York Herald Tribune review of a 1930 performance of his Tone Cluster Concerto in Carnegie Hall said that it produced a cacaphony which made Schoenberg and Stravinsky (played simultaneously) sound innocuous. But it also noted that the audience recalled him to the stage half a dozen times.

He was sent to San Quentin--after serving as his own defense attorney--for four years. Manion says that none of the several hundred letters written by him in prison show a hint of despair or self-pity. He filled his time by setting up a music program for other inmates, giving recitals and writing pieces for the prison band, orchestra and chorus. At least twelve new works were premiered there. The San Francisco Chronicle reviewed his prison recital debut on its front page under a headline reading, "Cowell wins first fight in San Quentin--with a piano."6 When other inmates shouted out a demand that he play St. Louis Blues, he said that, since he was out of practice, he would have to do something he knew better. He performed a work of his own called A Reel. The newspaper says his face "paled" when the audience remained silent. But then came a burst of applause which lasted for several minutes. He played another piece with the same result and left the stage overcome by emotion.

Despite (or because of) his imprisonment, he succeeded in supplying Martha Graham with a score which, by presenting its materials in alternative two, three or eight measure lengths, allowed her to piece together a perfectly-fitted dance accompaniment in an hour's time. A little earlier, he had specified that the five movements of the Mosaic Quartet be played in varying orders, creating what he called "elastic form" (and what composers of the fifties and sixties, taking up the idea, called "indeterminate" or "mobile" music).

A year after his parole into the charge of composer Percy Grainger (and his move to New York) he married Sidney Robertson. He was fully pardoned by the California governor in 1941 after the prosecuting attorney, reopening the case, made a recommendation to that effect.

In 1922 he had played a campus piano recital after which the Mills College Weekly said he would go on to make "a decided and definite contribution." In 1928 the Pro Arte, performing at Mills, premiered his Movement for string quartet (later retitled String Quartet No. 2). Ritual of Wonder and Chaconne--turned into dance scores by Marian Van Tuyl--received their world premieres at the College in 1938 and 1940. So did works by his students: Canticle No. 1 by Harrison and Double Music by Harrison and Cage were played during the same several years. A decade or so later, both pieces (along with Cowell's Ostinato Pianissimo) were recorded by Time Records as a means of documenting an extraordinary time during which American music, according to the liner notes by Frankenstein, took gigantic strides towards achieving "the honored place in the world arena it occupies today."