Search Results

Henry Cowell (1897-1965) gained fame for his musical innovations during the 1910s and 1920s—especially for his use of clusters (which he defined as “chords built from major and minor seconds”), his conceptualization of the string piano (a technique of plucking and otherwise manipulating the piano strings rather than striking the keys), and his forays into complex rhythms. And as with Carl Ruggles, Cowell's connection to the innovative theories of Charles Seeger deeply affected his own work. Cowell made a debut at Carnegie Hall in New York City in 1924 and took several European concert tours during the 1920s. Cowell also felt the impact of spirituality on his evolving theories of new music. In the early stages of his exploration he had significant contact with Dane Rudhyar. In writings about spirituality and dissonance, Rudhyar repeatedly conjured up Cowell's clusters as exemplifying his ideals. By late in the decade, the language Rudhyar used for describing Cowell's music began to travel beyond spiritual circles, becoming enmeshed in the rhetoric surrounding these novel pitch constructions.

The San Francisco Symphony's repertory under Hadley and Hertz may have been appealing to the public, but it made few claims to adventurousness. Hadley, of course, was just getting a new organization off the ground, and, though he did conduct some works by U.S. composers, his most frequently programmed American composer was Hadley himself. Hertz inherited a more experienced ensemble, but he too approached his programming with caution, in part revealing his own preferences, but also probably reflecting his tenuous relationship with the board of governors, who were responsible for renewing his contracts. New music could potentially alienate audiences, and Hertz recognized the importance of maintaining high attendance. If the symphony's programming was conservative, the city's opera offerings were even more so. Traveling companies presented the same dozen or so works over and over, with a tiny sprinkling of unusual operas. In this conservative climate, there was plenty of room for an organization that would promote the avant-garde. That need was met by Henry Cowell, who almost single-handedly put San Francisco on the map during the 1920s and 1930s as one of the country's most adventurous locales for new music. In 1925 he founded the New Music Society of California. Ten years later critic Alfred Frankenstein would call it “the most important organization fostering modern musical creation in this country”.

Japanese music played a central role in the formation of American musical modernism. This chapter focuses on the position of Japanese music in the careers of Henry Eichheim and Henry Cowell. For Eichheim, Japan had “a poetry no other country seems to possess.” Inspired by the writings of Lafcadio Hearn, Eichheim traveled to Japan between 1915 and 1928 and composed multiple pieces based on Japanese material. Japan was of central importance throughout Cowell’s life. In the 1930s Cowell studied shakuhachi with Kitaro Tamada who later wrote poignantly to Cowell from his Japanese American Internment Camp. Cowell traveled to Japan in 1957 and 1961 during the Cold War and composed several Japanese-inspired works, including for koto. Juxtaposing the musical journeys of these two composers and proselytizers highlights the roles Japanese music played for those Americans who sought to sound “ultra modern” in the twentieth century.

This chapter focuses on Henry Cowell's advocacy of Charles E. Ives and his music between the years 1927 and 1947. Cowell's ideas about Ives can be grouped into two periods: those produced prior to the sentence he served at San Quentin State Prison for a 1936 conviction on a morals charge, and those produced after his release in 1940. This chapter first considers Cowell's portrait of Ives as a New England musical ethnographer before discussing the views of anthropologists, folklorists, and musical modernists about folk music. It then examines how Cowell became interested in folk music, along with his influence on Ives. It also looks at the notion of a usable past, advanced by Van Wyck Brooks in his essay “On Creating a Usable Past,” in which he called for a rewriting of the history of American literature. The chapter concludes with an assessment of Ives's “Concord” Sonata and Ives's commitment to freedom (in the sense of refusing to impose a fixed final form on his works).

This chapter examines how Charles E. Ives emerged as a Cold War icon, and more specifically as a champion of the liberating powers of individualism, during the period 1947–1965. It begins with a discussion of Lou Harrison's role in pushing Ives from the modernist peripheries of the American musical world toward its center, and in helping the composer win the Pulitzer Prize in 1947. It then considers how Ives and his music were drawn into a discussion about the nature of freedom against the backdrop of the Cold War. In particular, it explores how Ives's music was programmed on concerts designed to promote the artistic products of “cultural freedom,” citing the presentation of his work at an arts festival in Paris that was held under the auspices of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. It also looks at Henry Cowell's book Charles Ives and His Music, written in collaboration with his wife Sidney, and concludes with an assessment of Ives's musical legacy as a function of his commitment to transcendentalism.

The second chapter focuses on the early reception of Schoenberg’s music in America. It traces constructions of his image in the American press, important American Schoenberg pioneers, such as Frederick Stock, Leopold Stokowski, Henry Cowell, the Flonzaley Quartet, and Leo Ornstein, American premieres of Five Orchestral Pieces and Pierrot lunaire, and early press reactions to his music before 1933. It also discusses Schoenberg’s contact with American musicians in Europe, including pianist Richard Buhlig, composer-pianist Louis Gruenberg, and Adolph Weiss and Marc Blitzstein, who studied with him in the 1920s. Schoenberg’s fascination with America and early attempts to tour this country are covered as well.

This chapter begins by describing the 19th-century origins of some of the basic ideas that underlie the book's approach: the first metaphorical application of the terms “consonance” and “dissonance” to rhythmic structures (in the writings of Hector Berlioz); and early examples of the recognition of two basic categories of metrical conflict, based, respectively, on incongruent groupings, and on non-aligned presentation of congruent groupings (in writings of François-Joseph Fétis and Hugo Riemann). The second part of the chapter traces these ideas through the 20th century, referring to writings by Henry Cowell, Charles Seeger, Joseph Schillinger, Wallace Berry, Maury Yeston, and Carl Schachter, among others, and to various earlier discussions of the music of Robert Schumann.

This chapter surveys American music's role during the initial period of occupation and reconstruction up to the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany and the official division of East and West Germany. It mentions American composers who contributed to the presence of American music on the European continent, paying particular attention to Henry Cowell who was the one of the most adventurous composers of his generation. It explains that while mainstream contemporary American music received little or no attention at new music festivals during the period, tentative awareness of something radical began to spread on the radio and at other music venues.

Well into the twentieth century, American music and the arts were influenced by nostalgia for the past and communalism based on self-organization. The ultramodern composers of the 1920s rejected nostalgia in favor of self-organization. It was Edgard Varèse, a French immigrant who had arrived in America in 1915 and formed the International Composers' Guild, who proposed the idea for a new type of musical organization and played a central role in the acceptance of ultramodern music in the 1920s. Other musicians played key roles in the modernist movement of the 1920s and were gravitating to New York, particularly Carl Ruggles, Charles Seeger, and Henry Cowell. In the 1920s, musical modernism gave rise to a relatively complete subculture in which composers founded their own organizations to promote their own music. A problem of ultramodernism from the very first concerts of Ornstein was the audience, although it was not sought by every ultramodern composer.

This chapter examines a period during the mid-fifties when a series of performances by John Tudor and John Cage in Darmstadt in 1958 established American experimental music as a central part of German new music discourse. It suggests that the performances of Tudor and Cage had a deep impact on the position of American music in West Germany. It discusses Henry Cowell's 1956 tour of West Germany and describes how American musicians acquired new allies in the European avant-garde and gained access to an unrivalled network of support for decades to come.

This chapter focuses on how Henry Cowell marketed himself as an unorthodox American composer-performer, to a public committed to the European masters. In June 1919, Henry completed a four-movement Piano Sonata, an a cappella setting of Psalm 121, and wrote short pieces for cello solo and for piano, a sonata movement, and a song to words by John Keats. He also finished the Quartet Euphometric (“Euphonious Meter”), a composition which he began in 1916. After a summer devoted almost exclusively to composing, Henry headed east in October 1919. In Chicago he visited some of Ellen Veblen's old friends, almost certainly including Georgia Kober. In New York he began searching out every opportunity to play. He also enrolled in the Institute of Applied Music in New York to study fugue with R. Huntington Woodman. Certain that he would return to New York in the autumn, Henry left for California and held a full concert on November 6 in Palo Alto's Community House. On March 31, 1922 he was back in New York, appearing as a guest in Carl Ruggles's lecture on modern music at the Whitney Studio Club.

Music became a tool of choice in the cultural war that the United States fought in concert with its military campaign. Musical diplomacy was used to win the hearts of Allied and neutral nations; morale and propaganda operations employed classical music to uplift and impress; the military was faced with contradictory ideologies and agendas when it came to musical performance and education; and music therapy flourished in the desperate fight to “recondition” those soldiers whom trauma had left unable to return to combat or to reintegrate into civilian society. These issues are explored in four sections dedicated to the main governmental institutions during World War II: the Office of War Information (OWI), the State Department, the armed forces, and the military hospitals and research institutions that developed music therapy. In this context of institutional history, several individuals are featured more prominently, including Henry Cowell and Bess Lomax Hawes (OWI); Olin Downes, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, and Mobley Lushanya (State Department); Chauncey Lee and Harold Spivacke (armed forces); and Harriet Ayer Seymour and Willem van de Wall (music therapy).

Even after the great success of the Rhapsody in Blue, Gershwin continued his musical studies. To this end, he sought an outstanding composer-teacher, although this pursuit largely came to naught. As in the case of his other would-be composer-teachers, Gershwin apparently received an education of sorts from Igor Stravinsky's music itself. His continuing search for guidance led to another well-known encounter with a Russian composer, namely, Alexander Glazounov. Later, Gershwin showed extraordinary courage in making his 1929 conducting debut leading a world-class orchestra unsympathetic to his music in a performance of the challenging An American in Paris before an audience of many thousands. His conducting debut earned unanimously good press. During these later years, Gershwin continued his studies in music theory with Henry Cowell, Wallingford Riegger, and Joseph Schillinger.

To young creative artists of the 1920s, New York City seemed to hold unprecedented charm and unlimited potential. As a talented new generation of American writers, musicians, and painters reached maturity—ranging from Langston Hughes and Ernest Hemingway to Josephine Baker, Duke Ellington, Arthur Dove, and Georgia O'Keeffe—it included composers who wrote music for the concert hall, most notably George Antheil, Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell, Ruth Crawford, George Gershwin, Roy Harris, Roger Sessions, William Grant Still, and Virgil Thomson. Over the course of the decade, American composers of concert music explored an imaginative range of styles and ideologies, all under the banner of modernism. Leaders emerged among them: first the French-American Edgard Varèse; and by the second half of the decade, Copland and Cowell. This book looks at the extraordinary network of composers and ideologies that gave rise to modernist music—or new music—in New York City, from World War I until the early years of the Depression.

This chapter focuses on Henry Cowell's performances in the United States following his European tour that concluded on February 4, 1924. Henry's official New York debut was marked by a concert at Carnegie Hall's main auditorium and produced by Arthur Judson, followed by another at the Town Hall. After the Town Hall recital, Henry went on the road, opening at the end of February in Chicago before traveling to California to play for the American College Salon in Oakland. After two more Bay Area concerts, he commenced a series of lectures at the San Francisco Conservatory. In early 1925, Henry's hectic schedule included a concert sponsored by the New York City Board of Education, an interview with a Rome paper, a private performance for a wealthy crowd including the patroness Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, and a concert in the Manhattan Opera House. He also commenced his long, stormy collaboration with Edgard Varèse and founded the New Music Society of California.

This chapter focuses on Henry Cowell's imprisonment in California's San Mateo County Jail because of a morals charge involving a young man. Over the years, Henry enjoyed helping the disadvantaged young people of Menlo Park. In 1931, he allowed some of them to build a swimming pool behind his house, where they liked to gather. On May 21, 1936, however, a relative of a seventeen-year-old member of the swimming group filed a complaint against him. After questioning by the police, Henry pleaded guilty to engaging in oral sex with a young man. On May 23, 1936, he was arrested on a morals charge. Homosexuality was not a requirement of guilt, nor was Henry charged with being homosexual. In the county jail, Henry was bombarded by letters offering unconditional support. Henry's notes, probably written the day of or after his arrest, show that he told his father Harry and stepmother Olive not to hire a lawyer unless they were convinced that he could really accomplish something. Sidney Cowell, Henry's wife, documented his prison years.

This chapter focuses on Henry Cowell's relationship with his father Harry and Olive Thompson, who developed an affair with Harry. In the winter of 1922–1923, Olive, a thirty-five-year-old professor of international relations at San Francisco State College, met Harry Cowell. She would later try to bring Harry and Henry closer, succeeding partly because her boundless affection for Harry made him so likable. Convinced of Henry's genius, Olive dedicated her formidable energies to his success. Without her, Henry's phenomenal accomplishments over the next thirteen years would not have been possible. Samuel S. Seward, Charles Seeger, and Lewis M. Terman also played key roles by teaching Henry to pursue his goals rationally and with extreme self-discipline. Henry came to realize that American music lovers generally were ignorant of modernist aesthetics and ideas, yet he was aware that they could be open-minded, since most of them were not obsessed with the European musical tradition.

This chapter focuses on Henry Cowell's activities in the United States in the early 1900s as a musician and composer. During his time in America, Henry composed and ran the New Music Society. One private event, at which Leo Linder played, was a prelude to the New Music Society's November 20 concert at the Los Angeles Biltmore Hotel. Henry's articles of c.1925–1927 summarize his thinking as his career was gaining momentum. Foremost in his mind was the damage to modernism wrought by composers who turned “modern” just to seem new. While he would have preferred that his music speak for itself, his unpretentious lecturing and writing did wonders for his public image. Despite his reservations about the effectiveness of concerts for circulating music, Henry continued to present New Music Society concerts, but moved them to California's Bay Area for 1927–1928. Meanwhile, Aaron Copland and his friends in the League of Composers formed Cos Cob Press as an East Coast counterpart to New Music Quarterly, a journal published by Henry.