Chapter II

Henry Cowell

Henry Cowell was born there (Menlo Park) on March 11, 1897 and lived there during his early years, moving in 1902 to San Francisco with his parents before Harry and Clara separated. Then, frightened by the earthquake of 1906, Clara took her son to stay with relatives in Des Moines, Iowa. During 1907-8, they were in New York, where Clara attempted a writing career; but with no money and suffering from malnutrition, they were packed off to other relatives in Kansas before finally making their way back to Menlo Park in 1910. There, while herding cows, one of several odd jobs he had taken in order to support his mother, Henry met Professor Lewis M. Terman, the Stanford professor who was developing the Stanford-Binet I.Q. test and studying gifted children and geniuses. Terman, who hired Cowell at fifty cents a session to take a variety of intelligence tests, remained one of Cowell's sponsors for many years.

Other Stanford personalities who sponsored or helped Cowell were Samuel Seward in the English Department and Mrs. Thorstein Veblen, wife of the controversial economist. The critic Redfern Mason, in a review of a Cowell concert on November 6, 1920, refers to "men like Professor Veblen and Samuel S. Seward, Jr." as having been Cowell's sponsors. "They made an act of faith in the lad and rendered assistance in the time of need." It was more likely, however, that it was Mrs. Veblen rather than Veblen himself who sponsored Cowell. Veblen's biographer supports this in speaking of Ellen Veblen:

Like Veblen, she had many idiosyncrasies, but like Veblen she had many loyal friends who forgave them. She could be extremely generous, not only with money but also with her personality. Henry Cowell, the composer, was one of her proteges. She gave him his first music lesson, and once, to help him financially she dropped some money where she knew he would pass.

This was only one of the many stories__possibly apocryphal__which circulated about Cowell. There were others__in newspapers in California and throughout the country__which contributed to the view of Cowell as a young genius. Some concerned his enrollment at the University of California. One account in The Oakland Tribune reported that a member of the San Francisco Orchestra was so impressed with the compositions he heard Cowell playing as he passed the house that he introduced the boy to Henry Hadley, former director of the orchestra. Hadley then gathered together wealthy patrons to sponsor Cowell's courses with Charles Seeger and E.G. Stricklen at Berkeley. Another account of the same story had Hadley and Seeger obtaining a four-year scholarship for Cowell after which the boy started out each morning at 4:45, riding two miles on a bicycle to take the train for Berkeley.

The artistic circles of San Francisco and the academic communities of Berkeley and Menlo Park blended in the third of the region's locales of significance to Cowell's career: the resort area of Monterey and Carmel. Settled first by writers George Sterling and Mary Austin in 1905, other artists soon arrived from San Francisco, many escaping the unlivable conditions after the earthquake. When the art colony became known elsewhere, members of the new literary movement in other parts of the country began to migrate to Carmel. In 1908 Upton Sinclair and his group from Helicon Hall in New Jersey arrived. Sinclair Lewis came in the winter of 1908-9 and William Rose Benet in 1909. The Little Theater movement was represented by the opening of a pioneer workshop in the Forest Theater in 1910, and the new poetry movement came to Carmel with the arrival of Robinson Jeffers in 1914. Van Wyck Brooks came to get married in 1911, stayed for several months, and continued to visit frequently while teaching at Stanford. he described what he experienced there:

Carmel was a wildwood with an operatic setting where life itself also seemed half operatic and where curious dramas were taking place in the bungalows and cabins, smothered in blossoming vines on the sylvan slope....This Arcadia lay, one felt, outside the world in which thought evolves and which came to seem insubstantial in the bland sunny air.

Cowell's early acquaintance with Carmel in 1912 or 1913 has been documented by a review of a concert he gave several years later in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was introduced by Mary Austin__in 1928 a resident of Santa Fe__who recalled Cowell as a boy in Carmel:

Cowell's introduction in itself augured well. Mary Austin endorsed him in unmistakable terms of admiration. Mrs. Austin knew Henry Cowell 15 years ago in Carmel, she said, "as a boy, a little distrait, a little unusual, one of those descendants of the great Irish kings, who was destined for fame or for the insane asylum. His destiny surely has not been the latter."

Cowell's later association with Carmel__as a performer__began with a concert on July 15, 1924, at the newly built Theatre of the Golden Bough. The announcement of Cowell's concert in the Carmel Pine Cone contains enthusiastic references to Cowell as "one of the most talked of modernists of the day" and one whose recital would "excite...discussion. . ., for the modern movement in music is winning its way all over the world so rapidly that the whole musical public is giving it serious consideration. p.20

Charles Seeger, less romantic and more practical, also remembers the "gorgeous beach" at Halcyon as being "rich in clams." And back of it, he says, "was a little group of very poor people who just squatted on the land and, in good soil, had a little garden, living more or less from hand to mouth. . . . The little theosophical group believed in the oneness of man and the universe." He continues:

Henry Cowell came to some of their meetings and after they had sung their hymns Henry said, "You ought not to be singing those hymns. They have nothing to do with the oneness of man and the universe. You ought to sing my music." They said, "What's your music?" So he sat down and played some of the elbow music and they adopted it.

Whether Cowell joined in the theosophical discussions is not known, but Olive Cowell believes that the Halcyon experience was as close as Cowell ever came to a religion. Certainly his statement, This I Believe, written for the radio and television commentator Edward R. Murrow in 1954, with phrases which speak of "sound which flows through the mind," "dynamic forces in mind," and "conscious philosophies which impregnate the listener," rings with some of the same force as the wind and swirling sands of Halcyon. It begins "I believe in music: its spirituality, its exaltation, its ecstatic nobility, its humor, its power to penetrate to the basic fineness of every human being." And it concludes: ". . . I believe that a truly devoted musical work acts to humanize the behavior of all hearers who allow it to penetrate to their innermost being. This is why I am a composer."

. . . "less influenced by older composers." When he finally began formal training he had already composed extensively. Seeger says: "When Henry came to study with me in 1914 he put on the rack his Opus 18; he was then, fifteen or sixteen years old. And I expressed interest in certain compositions." Says Seeger:

But I discovered very quickly that he was an autodidact and the best way to handle autodidacts was to let them didact and work around from the outside, as it were. He was a very good example of autodidacts all through his life: he never learned anything from anybody else; he appropriated what he liked and paid no attention to what he didn't like.

It is interesting to note that both California society and academe accepted Cowell for what he was__a natural talent with his own fresh new ideas. pp21,22

Later that year, Walter Anthony of the San Francisco Chronicle continued the admonishment. Anthony identified Cowell, whom he had heard play "in the apartments of Mrs. George McGowan," as "the son of Harry Cowell, well known to local letters, and Clarissa Dixon, whose identification with Western art is perhaps even more secure":

He has the impulse of music. What he wants is direction and some simplicity. He is planning a concert at the Fairmont Hotel, which it is hoped by those who are helping him on his artistic way, will enable him to make a journey to Germany, there to imbibe the instruction which till now he has not enjoyed. But Cowell did not journey to Germany__either from preference or from lack of funds. Instead he continued studying and concertizing in the San Francisco area. p.23

Redfern Mason, in a review of a Cowell concert in Palo Alto, congratulated Cowell's mentors for having brought him under the "influence of law and order." Impressed with names but apparently unacquainted with the music, Mason credited Cowell's more orderly development to study of"orchestration with Carl Ruggles" as well as the fact that Cowell "found a congenial aide in Leo Ornstein." p.24