Chapter XI The Seventh Season, 1933-1934

With his studies in Berlin completed, Cowell returned to the United States to a schedule of activities which was to become routine for the next three years__teaching at the New School in New York in the fall and lecturing, concertizing, and teaching around San Francisco in the spring and summer. He was by now becoming known more as a lecturer than as a performer, and promotional material and publicity about him stressed his educational leanings. A flyer distributed in 1933 or 1934 was entitled "Henry Cowell's Educational Lectures on Subjects Pertaining to Contemporary Music." his editorship of the Quarterly was considered significant accreditation for his lectures, because it was pointed out on this flyer that, "as the publisher of NEW MUSIC, devoted to the exclusive printing of American music, Cowell has special knowledge of this subject. (One article about his lectures at Mills College during the summer of 1933 referred to him as "Dr. Cowell.") p. 241

Finally there was sweet success for the New Music group, with the first notice of musical activities on the West Coast to appear in the January-February 1934 issue of Modern Music. After ten years of publication, the League of Composers journal saw fit at last to acknowledge that modern music was being performed in California. Furthermore, the emphasis in the article (by John Weatherwax) was on the New Music Society and the New Music Workshops. "There is no doubt," he began his tribute, "that the New Music Society of California, this year as for many past, did more for modern and ultra-modern music than did any other California organization."

Weatherwax pointed to Cowell's piano recitals and courses, Hardcastle's concerts and lectures (calling them "invaluable"), and pianist Douglas Thompson's radio broadcasts. In particular he singled out the Pazmor-Foster performance of General Booth (which he said, "permanently established the attitude of Bay Regioners toward Charles Ives' music") and the Western premiere of Gruenberg's The Daniel Jazz ("music and entertainment . . . far superior to Emperor Jones [performed in Los Angeles]").

Weatherwax discussed the impact Cowell and "two other New Music Society officers__Carol Weston, conductor of the Mills College String Orchestra (and an orchestra at Carmel), and Gerald Strang, founder of the Eastbay new Music Workshop"__had on the encouragement of interest in modern music at Mills. He then described the workshops:

At the new Music Workshops [two of them; both outgrowths of the New Music Society's activities], composers have their work played, performers familiarize themselves with modern idioms, and laymen become inducted into the mysteries of modern music. The atmosphere, like that of the old Harvard "47 Workshop" (Professor Baker's), is quite informal. Everything contemporary that can be found is played and analyzed. An immense quantity of manuscript and printed material__from Achron and Antheil to Webern and Weisshaus__has been sight-read at those weekly meetings. pp.254-255

New Music Society: Recital by Thompson

The Society concert that January featured a pianist new to the New Music circle, Douglas Thompson, playing a program of contemporary music, some of which had already been published by New Music (Plate XL). Ray Green, whose piano music was performed by Thompson, remembers Thompson as a brilliant performer who later became pianist for the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra;

Douglas could look at a piece and play it from memory. He was remarkable and almost completely self-taught. He could play things with an absolutely perfect accuracy, too. He played the premier of my American Agon __quite a big piece for keyboard__and did a stunning job, making it a big sounding piece. he also played other pieces of mine around Carmel, San Francisco, and the Bay Area__my Sonatina and the first fugue from my Festival of Fugues.

Marjory Fisher reviewed the concert for the San Francisco News . Impressed with Thompson, "a fine young pianist," she talked about the "overflowing audience," and the "stimulating program of works by composers who are making musical history but whose names are too seldom found on symphony or artists' concert programs." She discussed the New Music works on the program, calling the Chavez Sonatina "percussive and dissonant, stripped of all non-essentials" and the Crawford Piano Study "virile and highly entertaining."

Upon hearing Thompson's performance of An American Agon, says Green Johanne Bi‚try Salinger, critic for the French newspaper, Courrier du Pacifique, decided to ask him to teach her son Pierre. (Pierre Salinger later became press secretary to President John F. Kennedy.) Johanne Salinger sometimes reviewed New Music Society Concerts. The one she attended in February was not very much to her liking.

New Music Society: Song Recital by Doris Barr

In April the Society presented a recital of contemporary songs by Doris Barr, soprano, and Carrie Teel, pianist, "two of San Francisco's most noted proponents of modern music," as announced by the San Francisco Chronicle (Plate XLII). p.275,277

Plate XL. Program for the new Music Society Concert, January 11, 1934. (San Francisco Public Library)

The New Music Society of California Presents DOUGLAS THOMPSON PIANIST in a Program of Modern Piano Music At the Studio of DORIS BARR 1079 Filbert St., near Leavenworth, San Francisco Thursday, January Eleven, 1934 at Eight-Thirty P M Admission, Fifty Cents Members free

PROGRAM

Carlos Chavez.........................................Sonatine Gunnar Johansen.................Tocata Phrygina Ruth Crawford..................Piano Study in Mixed Accents _______ Bartok..Eight Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs-Op. 20 ________ Ray Green.........An American Agon-Sonata in Three Movements Energetic and hard. Fugue. Serenely........Coda__Exultation (first Performance)

INTERMISSION

Hindemith......................................Rondo from Opus 37, Book 1 Imre Weisshaus......................................................... ...........Piece Gerald Strang...........................................................P iano Study Mompou........................................................Cant s magica No. 2 Schoenberg........................................................ Piece Opus 33a Schoenberg........................................................ Piece Opus 33b Lee Sims.............................................................. .........Meditation Cowell............................................................ ..............Harp of Life Cowell............................................................ ....................Antimony Cowell............................................................ ..............Aeolian Harp Stravinsky............Dance of Youth from "Le Sacre du Printemps" (Arranged by DOUGLAS THOMPSON) p.276

New Music Quarterly: songs and sonatina by Green

The April 1934 issue of New Music (Volume VII, Number 3) contained music by Ray Green, who was at that time a student of Ernest Bloch and Albert Elkus at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. After having been advised by Elkus in 1933 he went to show some of his music to Cowell. He recalled the circumstances:

Cowell chose four of Green's previously written vocal works and asked him to write a new piece to include in the issue. Hey Nonny No for mixed chorus, set to an anonymous Elizabethan verse, is light, contrapuntal, and essentially barless, with points of imitation identified by letters. There is frequent imitation, often at the fourth, and skips of the seventh__two characteristics common in Green's music of this period, according to Green's biographer Sidney Vise. In Example 120, the imitation is at the fifth.

The second choral work, Sea Calm (erroneously titled Sea Charm in the edition), is a setting for men's chorus of two lines from Langston Hughes's Ringkeeper. Hughes, a friend of Green, lived in San Francisco during the 1920s and, according to the composer, heard and admired the song. In an attempt to reflect the aura of the lines__"How strangely still the water is today! It is not good for water to be so still that way"__Green depicted the rolling motion of the water in quarter-tones, notated with diagonals (_ = a quarter-tone above the note written; ? = a quarter-tone below the note written). (See Example 121.)

The two solo songs in the edition, from Green's Four Short songs, are settings of Carl Sandburg's familiar poems Fog and Summer Grass. "We were originally going to publish all four," Green recalls. I even had a letter from Sandburg saying that he would be delighted to have them used. But then it turned out that Henry had only enough money for so many pages so I chose these two." the music is atonal, lacking time signatures and bar lines, with secundal harmonies, cluster chords, and Green's favorite intervals__the seventh (in Fog) and fourth (in Summer Grass). (See Example 122.)

Green wrote the Sonatina for piano especially for the edition. In three movements with introduction, it is dissonant and contrapuntal but grounded in a D tonality. Green says that it represented a new development for him in what he calls "contrapuntal harmony" of "blocks of sound" which are particularly evident in the first movement. One new device for Green was the silent sounding of the initial chord which remained sustained throughout the introduction, producing overtones (Example 123a).

The second movement, although lacking a time signature, is a slow march (Example 123b). The final movement, after vigorous passages of two-part counterpoint, returns briefly in the Coda to the octave theme of the first movement and the motive based on the quartal harmony in the introduction.

An amusing outcome of this New Music edition was recalled by Green in an interview. The birthdate of 1908 listed in the issue is his true birthday, but many encyclopedias and various books have given it as 1909. When Green needed proof of his age to apply for social security benefits, he took a copy of New Music along to the governmental office. "The young guy who was interviewing me," says Green, "went around the office showing his colleagues the issue, because nobody had ever come in with a thing like this to prove a date." p.281

The titles to Strang's pieces refer to their order in a series of experiments in dissonant counterpoint. Eleven is dated October 1931, Fifteen , August 1932. Strang discussed their composition:

Now Eleven was dedicated to Henry Cowell, of course, partly because there are tone clusters in it which I certainly owed to him because he introduced me to them. But part of the idea behind this was, in the first place, the building of rather heavy sonorities whose content was arbitrary, but essentially the internal movement within them was contrapuntal. I've always thought in these terms even in the choral-like sections in the beginning of Eleven. There is an inner movement of voices which was definitely contrapuntal in my mind. Then the idea was that these fixed sonorities would spread both in range and increase in thickness until they reached the point where they involved the entire keyboard and, of course, this meant the gradual thickening up of the texture until the chords became tone clusters. [See Example 131.]

By way of contrast (could hardly be more obvious a contrast), the rather simple and straightforward two-part dissonant contrapuntal passage in which there is counterpoint of measure as well as counterpoint of pitch iinvolved and, of course, then, the sustaining of the tone cluster__a silent tone cluster in the bass which allows the overtones to evolve. [See Example 132]. Fifteen is again a contrapuntal experiment in many ways, although I owe something to Chavez, I think. On Fifteen , both in terms of the texture and in terms of the percussive rhythmic business, I don't think I was much influenced by Stravinsky, rather Bartok and Chavez. Both show in this piece. Again there is contrapuntal significance everywhere, but this is mainly a study in the rhythmic use of certain intervals. I think you will find if you check it through, that the only intervals used in a vertical sense are seconds, sevenths, fourths, and fifths__or their expansions. [See Example 133.] p.291

Strang explained the theoretical basis for his composition at this time and how it led logically to his later adoption of Schoenberg's theories:

This was the period when I was working on the basis that dissonance was a relative proposition and that when you used nothing but what had formerly been called dissonance on a purely technical basis__when you set up a texture that was either tied or mostly based on certain intervals_-that after a certain length of time, they lost all significance of dissonance or consonance__simply became the material and, of course, this led toward the Schoenbergian point of view where dissonance and consonance became matters more of the way you use things than of the specific content of the music. Of course, these things are all ferociously dissonant in terms of the conventional definition of dissonance. p.292