Chapter VI The Second Season, 1928-1929

The first concert of the season was "an informal program of modern piano music" played by Arthur Hardcastle (see Plate XVI). Hardcastle was one of the loyal group of performers around Cowell__one whose qualifications were sometimes contested by other Cowell colleagues. Charles Seeger remembers him as a "piano tuner with a fine ear, who was a member of the theosophical group down at Pismo Beach." Gerald Strang, who attended Society concerts while a student at the University of California, Berkeley, calls Hardcastle a "piano technician" from Palo Alto, who participated in some of the experimentation both Cowell and Strang were doing at that time: "He evolved the idea that the main thing wrong with the piano was that it wasn't forte enough, so he devised a stunt of adding an extra sounding board and clapping it on over the frame."

To Strang, Hardcastle was an "excellent pianist," but others disagreed. Ray Green characterized Hardcastle as having been "dedicated but not a virtuoso," and Alfred Frankenstein, who met Hardcastle in the 1930s, says that he was the "hardest, toughest, most unresilient, and generally dullest pianist" he had ever heard. "He thought nothing, " says Frankenstein, "of playing things practically by sight in public performance. You could tell because it wasn't good and he wasn't really getting at what the music was all about."

It is possible that the local San Francisco critics in 1929 shared Frankenstein's point of view, because none reviewed the New Music Society Concert on September 19, 1928__this despite a program which included music by Debussy, Scriabin, and Bartok, a repertory usually attractive to critics of the day. Even Hardcastle's new approach to his instrument, including a new method of tuning (explained on the program announcement), apparently did not interest them. Cowell, in a letter to Ives, blamed the lack of coverage on the conflict that night with the debut of Maria Jeritza at the San Francisco Opera. "Only the music magazines covered it," he said. p.99

Plate XVI. Program for the New Music Society Concert, September 19, 1928.

MR. ARTHUR HARDCASTLE, ENGLISH, PIANIST, SPECIALIZES IN THE PLAYING OF MODERN PIANO MUSIC. HE HAS DISCOVERED THAT TO ADEQUATELY FIT NEW KINDS OF HARMONIES, AND FOR THE EXPRESSION OF NEW IDEAS, TO ENABLE HIM TO PRODUCE SUCH NEW QUALITIES FROM THE PIANO. MR. HARDCASTLE, APPROACHING THE SUBJECT AS A SCIENTIST AND A MECHANIC AS WELL AS A MUSICIAN, HAS DEVELOPED UNIQUE CONTRIBUTIONS TO PIANO TECHNIQUE, CARRYING IT A STEP FURTHER THAN APPARENTLY HAS BEEN DONE, AND HAS AS WELL DEVISED NEW MECHANICAL MEANS OF IMPROVING THE PIANO AS AN INSTRUMENT. HE TUNES HIS INSTRUMENT HIMSELF WITH HIS OWN METHOD OF MORE CLOSELY APPROXIMATING JUST TEMPERAMENT THAN IS POSSIBLE BY CUSTOMARY MEANS OF TUNING. P.101

On October 15, he wrote Ives: "I lectured about you in San Francisco last Wednesday, in Palo Alto last night, and will this evening in Redwood City." p.105