Cowell's Clusters

Cowell's Clusters
Author(s): Michael Hicks

Source: The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 77, No. 3 (Autumn, 1993), pp. 428-458
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/742390
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The Twentieth Century
Cowell's Clusters
Michael Hicks
None of Henry Cowell's innovations was more praised or more vilified

than his "tone clusters," the thick stacks of contiguous pitches that
appear in many of his piano works from the 1910s to the 1930s.
Newspaper reviews of his recitals during those years are strewn with
advisories about either the cleverness or the silliness of his use of fists
or forearms to play the piano. Meanwhile, "serious" musical journals
of the period contain about equal measures of admiration and scorn
toward the piquantness of Cowell's compositions that feature clusters.
Of course, musical scholars have long since canonized tone clusters as
emblems of the musical revolution of this century. History and theory
texts alike celebrate them, and, more than any other aspect of his
career, Cowell's clusters have made his reputation endure. Gilbert
Chase puts it aptly: Henry Cowell is "The Cluster Man."'
Yet, for all the historical weight Cowell's clusters have accumu-
lated, the facts surrounding their origins and early history remain
cloudy. In these matters scholars have often been tempted merely to
paraphrase Cowell's later reminiscences, even though-as we have
seen in the cases of Igor Stravinsky, Charles Ives, and John Cage-
that sort of deference can mislead us, blurring our vision of the
music's connection to other musics.2 Like those composers, Cowell
has often been allowed to be the undisputed oracle of his role in his-
tory. And like them, he ultimately deserves a critical investigation of
the best published and unpublished sources concerning his life and
work.3 A good place to start in such an investigation is the matter of
his clusters-how he arrived at them, how he exploited them, and
how he transformed them from "elbow music" to "secundal harmony."
Concerning the origins of clusters, only one fact is certain: throughout

his life Cowell vacillated about why and how he began using them.
His most frequent explanation during the earlier part of his career was
that clusters began as sounds he imagined and later transcribed to the
428
Cowell's Clusters 429
keyboard. In 1926 Cowell wrote that as a child he received frequent

and uncontrollable "musical visitations": "I had at first not the slight-
est control over what was being played in my mind ... nor could I
capture the material sufficiently to write it down."4 According to
another account, he began to devote one hour a day (4:00-5:00 P.M.)
to learning to control these sounds in his head.5 Only later did he
devise a way to write the sounds down, he said, realizing them on an
instrument last of all--to his great disappointment, he added, because
the sounds as he played them were never so fine as those he dreamt
of.6 In 1932 Homer Henley summed up what Cowell explained to him
was the origin of his clusters: "the sounds which [he] produced were
heard first in his own brain and . . the effects he produced on the
piano were but the necessitous inventions which he had to create to
produce those sounds. . . . First he heard the clusters of sounds; then
he invented the medium for their expression."7
To understand why Cowell might imagine such musical sounds,
we should recall certain facts of his musical upbringing. His first
instrument, dug out of the attic when he was about four years old, was
a battered, out-of-tune zither, on which a single stroke could produce
a huge band of adjacent pitches-a thick, microtonal tone cluster.
Moreover, after he and his mother moved to the Oriental district in
San Francisco, he was frequently exposed to the sound of gongs and
ceremonial drums. He later wrote that "The Chinese found out many
centuries ago that . . . banging noises have musical value and
enjoyment-giving possibilities."8 His frequent exposure to those "bang-
ing noises" undoubtedly saturated his musical imagination.
But an early biographical treatment of Cowell suggests that his
imagined clusters were tied to specific images. Marion Todd wrote in
1925 that Cowell experienced his musical visitations while acting out
the mythic tales his mother told to him, "stories of battles between
gods and giants, of stars and flaming comets rushing through black
space, and of a splendid world springing out of chaos. Then all day
out on the hills [of Menlo Park] he re-lived the tales he had heard at
night and in his imagination heard powerful, magnificent music
accompanying them. He longed to express this music but he had no
instrument. "9
In other-and chiefly later-accounts of the origins of clusters,
Cowell claims that he devised clusters to meet a specific dramaturgical
need. Having been commissioned at the age of fifteen to write music
for an outdoor pageant based on Irish creation myths, Cowell ex-
plained, he needed music that would depict the character Manaun-
aun, the god of waters, as his mystic waves began to order the
430 The Musical Quarterly
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Figure 1. Henry Cowell in a publicity photo from the Copland-Sessions conc

Music Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Asto
Foundations.
universe out of chaos. To portray the waves musically, Cowell tried

octaves and then various chords, but rejected all of them because they
"made the universe sound as though it were already in pretty tidy
order."10 Finally, he came upon the idea of using all the notes in the
lowest octave of the piano. The result, he said, was the piece The
Tides of Manaunaun, with its ostinato of low, specially notated one-
and two-octave clusters (on A and D).
In a variant of this story, purportedly based on Cowell's own
testimony, Madeline Goss explained that the idea of clusters was
necessitated by the acoustic environment of the Irish pageant: "At the
rehearsal, finding that his music sounded disappointingly thin on the
lone piano under the trees, and that his ten fingers couldn't make
enough sound to satisfy him, [he] supplemented his fingers by using his
fist--then his whole forearm."11 In this account, lack of volume, not
text painting, necessitated clusters.
Still, there may be a more obvious genesis to Cowell's clusters
than any of these. In one of the first encyclopedia articles on Cowell
(1936), David Ewen reported, "He tells us that when, as a boy, he
first stumbled across an old, decrepit piano, he began at once to
experiment with new possibilities on it-not far different from the
experiments which were later to make him one of the most original
forces in music."12 In other words, when Cowell first approached the
keyboard, he instinctively behaved as most children do, playing groups
of adjacent pitches ad libitum, with whatever means were available,
including the flat of the hand, the fist, or even the forearm. Cowell's
widow recently gave the same explanation: "The first time he saw a
piano he must have sat down and played as a child will play with the
palms and the fists and so on to see what it would do. . . . I don't
think that was an idea that he worked at developing at all--a lot of
children have it."13 Incidentally, she has also identified that first
piano as an instrument that was loaned Cowell by a neighbor when he
was still a thirteen-year-old field worker at his aunt's farm in Kansas.
According to one sardonic recollection, this piano had "quite a few
usable notes"--suggesting that it was probably incapable of being
played in a "normal" way.
There is yet another reason why Cowell may have been prone to
playing the piano with palms, fists, and forearms. When he was about
eight years old, he was stricken with juvenile chorea, more commonly
known as St. Vitus' Dance. This illness prevented him from continu-
ing the violin lessons his parents had arranged for him because its
spasms prevented him from executing the proper fingerings: a chief
symptom of St. Vitus' Dance was the so-called "milkmaid's grip," an
of"
one
Figure 2. Cowell, ornate flatware in hand, poses for a publicity picture,
uncontrollable clenching of the hands that results in

the sufferer can do nothing but form fists. Although
sided with time, Cowell retained the spasms for many
ing to a 1919 account by a neighbor, the Stanford psy
Terman, Cowell still exhibited choreic symptoms whe
teen, the year he bought his first piano.14 His pathol
affected his technique.
If there is no "true" origin to Cowell's clusters, n
or physical habit that spawned them, this much, at le
when Paul Rosenfeld credited Cowell in 1924 with "th
method" in his cluster music, he surely was mistaken
ery" was something akin to Columbus's "discovery" of
populated. Countless children had used the method
The difference was that none of them before had calle
Whatever else clusters may have expressed, they besp
infantilism to which modem art routinely surrendered, a return to

childlike principles in the hopes of rejuvenating technique.
Cowell may well have felt that his early improvisations with clusters
amounted to "compositions" in some sense, even if they were not
written down. But what was Cowell's first notated cluster piece? Most
secondary sources accept Cowell's account that his first cluster piece
was The Tides of Manaunaun, said to have been composed and pre-
miered in 1912.15 Unfortunately, all the available evidence suggests
that Tides in its present form was not written (or at least written
down) until much later. Sidney Cowell herself said as much in a 1983
letter, remarking that her husband had for many years given the date
for Tides as 1912, "but later decided he was mistaken and that it
should be 1914." In the same letter she clarified her husband's re-
peated identification of Tides as his first cluster piece. Henry, she
wrote, did not really consider Tides the earliest cluster piece he had
composed, but rather his "earliest tone-cluster piece still actively in
the repertory," clearly a much different matter.16
When Cowell's cataloguer, William Lichtenwanger, collated the
composer's comments with extant documentation, he placed the piece
at 1917, the year when Cowell wrote down and performed the Irish
pageant music for which Tides was supposed to be the prelude.17 Mrs.
Cowell wanted to "pry Mr. Lichtenwanger loose from" this date, she
said, because she felt Tides must have been composed much earlier. 18
She cited the utter simplicity of the piece as evidence: how could it
have been composed after works such as Dynamic Motion? Unfortu-
nately, the evolutionary argument fails with Cowell. His total opus
overwhelmingly demonstrates that he did not evolve in his technique,
but simply affected whatever style suited the poetics of the occasion-
a very simple piece often follows a complex one.
While published notices of Cowell's performances of cluster
pieces can be found beginning in 1914, no published notice of a per-
formance of a piece titled The Tides of Manaunaun has been found
prior to October 1920. Furthermore, no manuscript of the piece seems
to survive, no holograph score that might contain a date or other
evidence for its time frame; the 1922 published version is the earliest.
There is simply no longer any basis for continuing to place Tides at
1912. This may not seem to be a point worth laboring, but this early
date not only mars the chronology, but also obscures the poetic back-
ground of the piece, about which I will have more to say later.
Cowell's earliest extant manuscript to call for clusters in the

sense in which the term is generally used is Adventures in Harmony, a
piece written for his piano teacher Ellen Veblen (estranged wife of
Thorstein Veblen) and rather safely dated at 1913. Subtitled "a Nov-
elette," the piece is divided into six movements called "chapters,"
which attempt to show the young Cowell's harmonic versatility and
novelty. Clusters appear first at the opening of "Chapter III," a move-
ment marked "grave espressivo." Here, the clusters appear as metric
pulsations produced by repeatedly pressing down the entire bottom
octave of the piano "with the whole hand," as the manuscript indi-
cates (Ex. la). (Actually, all of the notes of the octave are not
given-G, G-sharp, and B are omitted--inadvertently, no doubt,
since as written it is impossible to play.) The resultant gonging effect
accompanies an arioso bass melody in the right hand, until, at (what
appears to be) m. 11 he introduces a new figure--two-octave clusters
as "backbeats" (i.e., strong pulsations on beats 2 and 4) amid two-
handed chordal fanfares (Ex. ib). These "macroclusters," as I call
them, are denoted in the score as "arm chords." Finally, chapter 3 of
Adventures in Harmony offers a broad, thirty-second-note "arpeggia-
tion" of a one-octave cluster (Ex. ic).19
Chapter 5 of Adventures in Harmony, m. 27, presents simulta-
neously strictly diatonic clusters in the extreme lower and upper regis-
ters of the instrument; Cowell writes "hand" above the chords, though
again, given the notes actually shown, it is unclear how they could be
played (Ex. Id). Chapter 5 also provides some instances of what we
might call "microclusters," three-note secundal groups (Ex. le).20
Unlike the hand and arm chords in this work, these microclusters are
simply passing sonorities of the sort that one finds in keyboard works
from previous style periods. They are also related to small groups of
pitches among the closely spaced harmonies in many of Cowell's juve-
nile works--added-note chords, for example, and inverted seventh
and ninth chords. Such microclusters seem of little interest and rele-
vance to the more radical bands of sound with which Cowell is gener-
ally associated. Nevertheless, as we shall see, these microclusters
figured prominently in Cowell's later theory of tone clusters.
Incidentally, none of the clusters in Adventures in Harmony seems
to have provoked indignation among the critics. Reviewing Cowell's
debut recital in March 1914, Anna Cora Winchell of the San Fran-
cisco Chronicle wrote that Adventures in Harmony manifested "an
unusual grasp on the bigness of color and its value as interpretive of
deep feeling, the combination of notes at times being almost sym-
phonic"; the piece, she continues, is "without jar to the ear."21 Red-
1(0
-vCL-W # i
r--,,-- , -. '1!
Example la. Adventures in Harmony (1913), cha
scripts used by permission of Sidney Robertson C
*ItWAR
%- I
- -- _
Example l b. Adventures
uncertain because of the
A A
Example Ic. Adventures
uncertain because of the
i. 4L 4E b
I *4`1pkve8?
Example 1d. Adventures in Harmony (1913), chap
U I1
11.9
,, ,, {,.5 i I
- J F I
Example l e. Adventures in Harmony (1913), chapte
fern Mason's review of this recital for

nothing at all against the clusters. His
"has not the faintest notion of what i
The path Cowell's clusters took in th
tures in Harmony is difficult to trace.
asserted that he composed a number o
1915, pieces that continue to be publis
But, as with Tides, it is easy to show
moved the dates of these pieces forwa
signed to them on work lists for the
and the Pan American Union in the
them in the chronological log of comp
1924 (Table 1).
In fact, none of the surviving piece
book during the three and a half years
Harmony contains any indication of h
sional microclusters appear in these w
Table 1. Dates assigned by Henry Cowell to his early cluster pieces
Piano works (listed in ACA/PAU, PMHC) CD ACA/PAU PMHC
Tides of Manaunaun [not listed] 1912 1911-1912

Advertisement Nov 1917 1914 1914*
Dynamic Motion Nov 1916 1914 1914
Amiable Conversation Nov 1917 1914 1914*
What's This? Nov 1917 1914 1915*
Antinomy Dec 1917 [not listed] 1914*
The Hero Sun 1922 1915 [not listed]
The Voice of Lir Nov 1920 1915 1918*
Exultation May 1921 1919 1919*
The dates listed under CD come from "Composito

Collection, New York Public Library, Music Divisi
(Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1969), 403-23. T
Henry Cowell Compositions," Bulletin of the Ame
"Chronological Catalog of the Works of the North
Americas: Biographical Data and Catalogs of Their
And the dates listed under PMHC come from the n
by the Composer, Folkways Records FG 3349; an ast
given date]."
recalled that Cowell showed him pieces with large clusters when Cow-
ell was his student (1914-1917), all of those pieces that Seeger
recalled by name are dated in Cowell's log book December 1916 and
later. 23 The few available programs and reviews of Cowell's recitals
during 1914, 1915, and most of 1916 also name no cluster pieces,
except for Adventures in Harmony, and even that is not named after
1914. Far from shocking his audiences with clusters, Cowell in his late
teen years wrote and performed primarily simple song accompani-
ments, children's music, and pieces in imitation of classical masters-
until the fall of 1916, that is, when Cowell moved to New York City
and met Leo Omstein.
Critics usually described Omstein as a "futurist" composer and
pianist because much of his music seemed obsessed with the speed,
aggression, and mechanization of modem life.24 The technique that
seemed most daring in his piano works involved the rapid repetition
what Cowell would later call clusters. As the Musical Quarterly
explained in 1918, "Omstein gives us masses of shrill, hard disso-
nances, chords consisting of anywhere from eight to a dozen notes
made up out of half tones heaped upon one another."25 To play such
chords, according to the London Daily Telegraph, Omstein would place
the fingers "close together, stiffening the hands and striking alternat
down on the keyboard perpendicularly in ramrod fashion as hard as

possible [and] slapping the upper notes . . . in the bass."26 The effect
of this technique was clear to Lawrence Gilman: "sometimes . . . it
seems as if a maniacal rage possessed [Omstein], and you think he
must surely be beating the keyboard furiously with both fists."27
Omstein's clusters were actually a far cry from the broad gong-
like chords of Cowell's Adventures in Harmony. Omstein preferred only
two or three adjacent seconds at once -microclusters, really, which
appear as clumps of notes within larger chords. Omstein's explanation
of how he came upon these clusters did resemble Cowell's: the clusters
came to his imagination first, uncontrollably, and he transcribed them
to the keyboard.28 But he had little interest in the sort of clusters
Cowell had tried, as he later explained: "By the time that you put so
many minor seconds together, the inside would become absolutely
muddy and would become black."'29
When Cowell arrived in New York in the fall of 1916 to study at
Damrosch's Institute for Musical Art, it was inevitable that he would
be introduced to Omstein. The earliest and most detailed account of
their meeting is as follows: "A musician spoke to Omstein of Cowell,
but he refused to meet him [until] the musician said: 'Leo, you are
foolish; this young man is more modem in his compositions than you.'
This interested Omstein, who arranged the interview and was so
enthusiastic and excited that he declared: 'These are the most inter-
esting compositions I have seen by any living American.' He told
Cowell that he was on the wrong track technically, but agreed to take
him for a year's study.'"30 This tutelage never materialized, apparently
because of Cowell's distaste for living in New York.
Cowell was interested in musical futurism at least two years
before he met Omstein: he concluded his 1914 piano suite entitled
Resume with a (no-cluster) movement labelled "futurist." In December
1916, however, at the close of his stay in New York, Cowell produced
a new cluster piece, entitled Dynamic Motion. At first he marked the
pencil draft "Largo," putting the piece more or less in the same class
of brooding, emotive music as chapter 3 of Adventures in Harmony.
But Cowell soon crossed out that tempo marking and replaced it with
"Allegro"; he went on to explain that the piece was a tone painting, a
musical representation of a New York subway.31 It was typically futur-
istic imagery, and, unlike the placid gonging effects of Adventures in
Harmony, it unnerved his audiences--all to the better, since shock
value would always create bigger concert receipts.32
Much of Dynamic Motion consists simply of new articulations of
the hand and arm chords of Adventures in Harmony. A rapidly arpeggi-
ated cluster, for example, is produced by a tilting of the arm. Sympa-

thetic resonances are produced by silently depressing low clusters (a
variant of the technique Cowell had encountered when Seeger showed
him Arnold Schoenberg's Op. 11, no. 1, at their first lesson). Octave
and two-octave clusters are divided into their most logical pianistic
components-white keys and black keys. Large bands of pitch alter-
nate rapidly between diatonic collections and their complementary
pentatonic, and when combined white- and black-key macroclusters
are called for, both arms are used, a departure from his earlier one-arm
approach.
Beyond its innovations in technique, Dynamic Motion shows
Cowell using clusters to try to overcome the fault Redfern Mason had
seen in his music. In mm. 13-16, for example, Cowell executes what
would become an essential part of his later technique-a progressive
widening from micro- to macroclusters in order to give rhetorical
weight to small gestures. In the same vein, the motivic major sevenths
of mm. 29-30 immediately reappear as alternating white- and black-
key clusters in mm. 31-32. Such passages transform clusters from
mere gonging effects to developmental devices.
Despite the great leap forward made by Dynamic Motion, Cowell's
compositional log book suggests that he abandoned these techniques
for almost a year.33 Not until November 1917 did he produce succes-
sors to Dynamic Motion-five of them written within a two-month
period. Cowell entitled them What's This?, Amiable Conversation,
Advertisement, Antinomy, and Time Table; collectively he called them
the "Five Encores" to Dynamic Motion (though in practice he freely
interspersed them in his recital programs so that they were not just
encores). Some of these "encores" extended the pyrotechnics of
Dynamic Motion. For example, in Advertisement he specifies that a
running cluster passage is to be played by the fists; in Antinomy, he
calls for a two-arm cluster tremolo.
These latter pieces (the third and fourth "encores," respectively)
also codified the bravura techniques of Cowell's futurist style: mea-
sured arpeggiations of smaller clusters (up to five notes, played by the
fingers of one hand);34 unmeasured arpeggiations of larger clusters (a
twelfth or more, played by tilting the forearm against the keys);
microcluster filigree (played by alternating fists); and macrocluster
filigree (played by alternating forearms). These techniques are some-
times used for development, sometimes not. With the Five Encores
Cowell apparently learned that he could create whole works simply by
transposing his basic techniques into disparate registers and then jux-
taposing them with more conventional passage work. Such pieces were
improvisatory, shallow in structure; correspondingly, he tended to give

them offhand titles, drawn from casual speech or jargon: It isn't It,
Conservative Estimate, Well? and Seven and One Fourth Pounds, to
name a few.35
Everyone seemed to understand that Cowell's futurist pieces
linked him to Omstein. In 1922 Cowell's friend Dane Rudhyar identi-
fied Cowell and Omstein as the two composers who had "imperilled
[the] existence" of "the musical unit, the note," which, until then,
had stood "undefiled." Why? Because both used tone clusters, albeit as
"tentative efforts . . . still very empirical in character."36 That same
year, Associated Music published nineteen of Cowell's compositions,
ten of which featured clusters; they all contained back-page ads both
for Omstein's music and for a recently published biography of Orn-
stein. In announcing the publication of these pieces, Cowell's home-
town newspaper briefly recounted his life, noting that in New York he
had met Leo Omstein.37 And in 1924, Paul Rosenfeld wrote that
clusters, or, as he called them, "concordances of many close-lying
notes," had first been used by Omstein, then by Cowell, whose special
contribution, he explained, was "to demonstrate completely the qual-
ity of sound to be produced on concert grands by the deliberate appli-
cation to the keyboard of muscles other than those of the
fingertips. "38
What Cowell was doing just before and just after his meeting
with Omstein sent his clusters in a different direction. In the summer
of 1916, shortly after his mother's death, Cowell joined the Temple of
the People, in Halcyon, California, a beachside theosophical commu-
nity that mingled mystic lore, socialist politics, and parascientific
experimentation. That summer and during the following year (after he
had returned from New York) Cowell began to involve himself with
the Temple, whose quirky mixture of science and the occult nurtured
many of Cowell's most unusual enterprises, including the rhythmicon,
the "rotary piano" (an instrument with brushes turning against the
strings), and the "harmonious speaking cave" (a giant concrete resona-
tor which could broadcast Cowell's experimental music along the
seashore).39 Like many of his generation, Cowell was mildly drawn to
theosophy, but the Temple's peculiar flavor of theosophy gave him
some imagery that seemed to correspond precisely with chapter 3 of
Adventures in Harmony.40
Ellen Veblen, to whom he had dedicated his Adventures, was
herself a devout member of the Temple. Cowell also had even closer
friends there, the Varian family-later well known for their electronic
innovations, many of which were concocted at Halcyon. Cowell had
known the Varians in Palo Alto and had been virtually adopted by
the family patriarch, John Varian, an obsessive writer who wrote
reams of poems, plays, and essays based on Celtic mythology, the
occult, and a hodgepodge of progressivist thought. Early in their
acquaintance, Varian began asking Cowell to set his poetic and dra-
matic texts to music--an enterprise that Varian hoped would continue
forever, as he wrote to Cowell in the fall of 1916: "I see that I have a
whole cosmos full of the best kind of material for you to make music
to. . . . I see now that I can easily supply you with perhaps 40 or 50
operas for the open air or indoors & every one connected up before &
behind with the others & every one vital & independent in itself."41
The first of these "operas for the open air" was to be The Building
of Banba (or Bamba).42 Throughout this work, produced at the Tem-
ple in the summer of 1917, Cowell needed to depict Manaunaun, the
god of waters, with, in Varian's words, "calm, ponderous, leisurely
thundering waves [and] rumbling drumming accompaniment."43 To
achieve this sound, Cowell simply adapted the low, pulsating grave
espressivo macroclusters of Adventures in Harmony. These have since
become Cowell's best known clusters, via the instrumental prelude to
Banba, The Tides of Manaunaun.
Similar clusters appeared in many of Cowell's piano works con-
nected with Varian and the Temple through the 1920s. These works
depicted different aspects of Irish mysticism and myth under titles that
included The Hero Sun, The Voice of Lir, The Vision of Oma, The Vron
of Sorrows, The Fire of the Cauldron, The Harp of Life, March of the
Feet of the Eldana, The Trumpet of Angus Og, March of the Fomer, The
Battle of Midyar, and Domnu, Mother of Waters. The mystic style of
these works relies on a small repertory of cluster techniques. It fore-
goes almost entirely the rhetoricism and virtuosic devices of the futur-
ist style in favor of low gonging clusters, macrocluster backbeats,
measured arpeggiations of large clusters, and slow scalar passages in
two-octave clusters alternating black and white keys (played with only
one arm).44
The mystic style clusters usually appear beneath a traditionally
harmonized modal tune. In other words, these Varian-inspired works
exchange the abrupt juxtapositions of his futurist style for a superposi-
tion of two musical layers-one, Irish folk music, the other primal
throbbing.45 In this way, the pieces expressed a peculiar aesthetic
based on one of Cowell and Varian's favorite Irish legendary figures,
the father of the gods, Lir. Because he had only half a tongue, only
half of Lir's directions for creating the universe could be understood,
went the legend; thus, "for everything that has been created there is
an unexpressed and concealed counterpart."46 The simple tunes and

harmonies represented the understood; clusters the incomprehensible
mystery. If his futurist cluster pieces evoked the drama of modem life,
his mystic cluster pieces evoked a slower, subtler cosmic drama, in
which one sensed something ineffable struggling to achieve a voice.
Although when compared with Cowell's futurist style the mystic
style seemed regressive--"audaciously conservative," Slonimsky called
it47 - the mystic style's frequent allusions to cosmic wave motion led
to a crucial innovation: Cowell's first attempt to orchestrate his clus-
ters. His pencil sketch for The Birth of Motion contains gonging chords
with crescendo and diminuendo signs beneath them, suggesting a
surging motion impossible to achieve at the piano. In realizing this
sketch, Cowell transcribed those clusters for string orchestra. The
resulting score, probably produced before 1920, strikingly foreshadows
the swelling string clusters-cum-glissandi later used by "sound-mass"
composers such as Krzysztof Penderecki (see Ex. 2).
As we have seen, Adventures in Harmony used conventional noteheads

for both micro- and macroclusters. Since the noteheads were too
numerous and dense to be written out continually, Cowell routinely
used the shorthand "simile" or "sempre" (and the colloquial "like last")
in connection with the verbal notations "hand" and "arm." It must
have been clear to him even then that, if he were to continue using
clusters, he would have to create a simpler way of signifying them.
Measured arpeggiations and microclusters, even those to be played
with the fist, could still be written with normal noteheads, but clusters
of an octave and more posed a problem that only a new notation
could solve.
The chart below (Ex. 3) shows the progress of his attempts to
create just such a notation. Sometime in 1916, probably while work-
ing on the pencil score to Dynamic Motion, he created his first type of
new symbols for clusters. According to this notation, the sort of clus-
ter to be played between two pitches was signified by right angles
protruding from the stem to the left, to the right, or both. Even in his
pencil score to Dynamic Motion, however, he began to vary this nota-
tion by relaxing the angles; by the time of Building of Banba the lines
were all completely rounded.48 Probably around 1920, Cowell devised
his second, and considerably simpler type of new symbols for clusters:
upright cigar shapes, topped by a sharp or flat if a black-key cluster
'~~~~~- Cr 1 ___
I --- - - - -
r~tr
_ _ __ _~`-r-~--~~~
11. Nr. 46. R 1"4

&Wh7/
Example 2. The Birth o

17-18
was called for, topped by a natural sign if a white key cluster. He used
this notation in manuscripts of the 1920s--including the final draft of
Dynamic Motion--as well as in a chart of cluster techniques probably
prepared for lectures at Halcyon.49 A typeset version of this notation
appeared throughout the "Tone-clusters" chapter of Cowell's New
Musical Resources (mostly written in 1919, published in 1930). A
variant notation appears in Cowell's published cluster pieces from
1922 on: clusters whose duration is a quarter note or less consist of a
white keys black keys white and

black keys
First Type
First Type, variant - < i>
Second Type
Second Type, variant

Q) L'VW
Example 3. Cowell's clust
thick vertical beam between noteheads. It is this variant that has

become standard in considerations of Cowell's work.s5
But new notation was only the first step toward turning clusters
into a new musical system. In 1916, just as Cowell was beginning his
studies with him, Seeger wrote that "one can no longer ignore the
persistent demand from a younger generation, born and bred in an age
of increasing scientific activity, for reasons and explanations instead of
* . . dumb rules and empirical subterfuges."s5 That remark fit Cowell
well. Raised in the intellectual environs of Stanford University and
Carmel, Cowell had studied philosophy and the sciences under his
mother's tutelage, roamed the local avant-garde in pursuit of new
ideas, and obsessively catalogued all the bugs and flowers he could
collect in the foothills of Menlo Park. It was predicable that in legiti-
mizing his childlike piano methods, Cowell would want to give them
the aura of intellectualism, full of reasons and explanations, if not
always free of empirical subterfuges.
He began this legitimization with Samuel Seward, a Stanford
English professor. Seward had been one of Cowell's earliest patrons--
as early as January 1914 he had inaugurated a fund to help Cowell get
training.52 During the following years, with Cowell teaching in a
studio just a block from Seward's house, the professor encouraged
Cowell to improve his writing by submitting short essays on music to
him. When, by coincidence, the two men served together at Camp
Crane in Allentown, Pennsylvania (1918-1919), Cowell apparently
began to assemble what would become a short book manuscript enti-
tled "The Unexplored Resources in Musical Effects."53 He probably

completed a full draft within months of his discharge.
Cowell's first published article, however, -the article that intro-
duced the term "tone cluster" to the world-was written not with
Seward, but with Robert Duffus, one of the more prominent literati of
the Stanford area. The article, entitled "Harmonic Development in
Music," attempted to explain that development by tracing the ear's
gradual acceptance of new overtones and the arithmetic ratios they
represented. This appeal to the overtone series typified Cowell's own
training; the textbook written by Seeger and Edward Stricklen (1916),
two of Cowell's teachers, began with a study of the ratios represented
in the overtone series and the harmonic intervals they represented.54
What was new in Cowell's article was the notion that his tone clusters
were simply the next step in the ear's gradual acceptance of more
remote overtones - presumably the thirteenth through fifteenth over-
tones, which is where the first "cluster," as Cowell here defined the
term, would appear.55
"Tone cluster," the article explained, was "a convenient term to
indicate two or more minor seconds in juxtaposition, struck simulta-
neously and used as a unit."56 Because a cluster consisted of minor
seconds, the article continued, it was incapable of any intervallic
shifting-all its members were as close as possible. Hence the cluster
was a single psychological unit, albeit with a bias toward its outer
boundaries: "Experiment shows that clusters of which the outside lim-
its form a consonant interval are more pleasing than those which form
a dissonant interval."57 For example, the article explained, an octave
cluster would actually be less dissonant than a major second cluster.
"Real dissonance" would be obtained only when the outer notes
formed a dissonant interval. Of course, the argument here failed to
acknowledge the decisive role of register in one's sense of consonance
or dissonance--after all, the difference between an octave (consonant)
and a major seventh was vastly less apparent in the bottom octave of
the piano than in, say, the octave above middle C. More problemati-
cally, the definitions given in the article allowed neither for the arpeg-
giated clusters of which Cowell was so fond, nor for his strictly white-
or black-key clusters.
In lectures during the 1920s, Cowell defined "tone cluster" as "an
aggregate of sound, of all the major or minor [seconds] within an
octave or more."'"58 This definition differed from his earlier one in
three ways. First, it considered a cluster not as a superposition of
intervals, but as a filling in of an interval. Second, it gauged the mini-
mum breadth of a cluster as an entire octave. Third, it allowed for
clusters of differing qualities of seconds. Thus, Cowell explained, con-

tradicting his earlier pronouncements, "the shifting of tones within
the cluster has possibilities of great subtlety."59 Possibilities, yes, but
seldom realized in his music: his own shifting of tones within a cluster
was almost invariably the quite unsubtle shifting of white keys to
black.
In 1930 Cowell succeeded in getting a revision of his "Unex-
plored Resources in Musical Effects" published, under the leaner title
New Musical Resources. Here he formalized what would become his
final theory of clusters. Tone clusters, he said, were built from major
or minor seconds, derived from the overtone series. (Indeed, he
wrote, the overtones of simple chords already create "clusters" that are
"plainly audible to a sensitive ear.")60 As the intervals of triads vary,
so do those of clusters: "there is an exact resemblance between the
two systems, and the same amount of potential variety in each"61 -a
principle that is, of course, self-evident if major and minor thirds in
triads are compared to major and minor seconds in three-note clusters,
as Cowell did here. Thus, he wrote, there are four clusters that "are
the basis of all larger clusters"62--two minor seconds, a minor plus a
major, a major plus a minor, and two majors. These "basic" clusters,
of course, are what we have called here microclusters; common to
virtually every twentieth-century composer's work, they are probably
the least noteworthy harmonic elements in Cowell's music.
In New Musical Resources, Cowell also made some suggestions
about how to use clusters, suggestions that provided thoroughness of
treatment, though often at the expense of good logic. Consider the
following: It is acceptable, he wrote, to alternate clusters and other
kinds of chords, but it is "often better" to maintain a succession of
clusters. Why? "For the sake of consistency." Also, one may use
simultaneous clusters. Why? For "harmonic effect."63 At other times,
Cowell's arguments simply went without saying: he noted that the
white keys of the piano offered seven different "cluster chords"-C to
C, D to D, E to E, etc.--while black keys gave five possible; and as
for the motion of one cluster to another, he wrote, it "must be up or
down the scale, as in melody."64
New Musical Resources contained his most theoretically elaborate
definitions of "tone cluster," but was the least true to the music he
had written. Throughout his works, clusters were clearly not "built"
from seconds, but were the result of filling in larger intervals-as his
new notation itself suggested. His music likewise gave no indication
that large clusters derived from four "basic types." On the contrary,
the basic cluster of Cowell's works was the chromatically filled octave;
smaller clusters were either subsets of that basic cluster, or indepen-

dent microclusters. Cowell's extant sketches suggest that even the
specific interval of the cluster was not nearly so important as its regis-
tral placement and percussive effect.65 Finally, we should note that
the black-key clusters that appear in virtually all of his cluster pieces
are not clusters at all by any of his definitions of the term because
they consist of both seconds and thirds.
The irony of Cowell's cluster theory is that the clusters most
prominent in his own music derive not so much from the more remote
overtones as from the least remote. That is, the complicated ratios of
the higher overtones are typically employed as coloristic fillings of the
most basic interval, 2:1, the octave. In most of Cowell's music, the
octave is as much the intervallic source of clusters as is the second.
While New Musical Resources was being readied for publication, Cow-
ell produced his largest work to date, the Piano Concerto. Each of the
concerto's three movements took its title from Cowell's new musical
terminology: the first movement was called "Polyharmony," the second
"Tone Cluster," and the third "Counter-Rhythm." These titles refer to
devices used by the orchestra in the respective movements; mean-
while, the piano soloist plays clusters almost continuously throughout
this grueling seventeen-minute work. The first-movement cadenza
suggests the difficulty of the cluster technique (Ex. 4).66 Slonimsky's
remark that the concerto used "a full-fledged technique of tone-
clusters to the fullest advantage" surely missed the mark.67 In truth,
the Piano Concerto took Cowell's cluster technique to the limits of
feasibility. Clusters could not be used more forcefully, virtuosically, or
plentifully; there was simply nothing left in them for him to exploit.
Besides, Cowell had grown weary of being considered a musical
sideshow. Even though his fame as a composer and recitalist derived
primarily from his clusters, he complained in the 1920s that the public
was treating them as "merely . . . a gymnastic method of piano play-
ing"68 and a "freak way of gaining notoriety."69 Part of the problem
was that so many observers referred to his clusters as "elbow music."
Newspapers used the term, even in headlines;70 even Cowell's close
friends, including the Varians, used the term.71 Of course, what these
observers probably referred to was his forearm technique, in which the
left elbow defined the lower boundary or the right elbow the upper
boundary. At least one observer did report that "in a complicated rush
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of notes, hard pressed for an extra hand, [Cowell] strikes two or three
with his elbow";72 and several of Cowell's pieces seemed to allow for
such a gesture. But Cowell insisted that performers of his music not
use the elbow, in order to avoid the risk of "accent[ing] one of the
tones and separat[ing] it from the others." He added, "I never use my
elbow, despite rumors to the contrary."73
While he publicly scorned keyboard gymnastics, Cowell was less
discreet in private. Jules Eichorn recalled vividly Cowell playing in a
way that suggested he was as well versed in the pianisms of minstrelsy
and vaudeville as he was in his cluster music. At a small recital at
Ansel Adams's studio, Cowell "said he would like to play an excerpt
from Tannhauser but that he needed a whisk broom. Mystified, but
complying, Ansel produced the article he wanted. Then Cowell began
to play . . . forcefully with his left hand while holding the whisk
broom in his right hand. Then with a dusting of the keys motion, he
imitated the cascading sound of the treble part. . . . The effect was
electrifying! It sounded like a full orchestra, which heightened the
effect that Cowell wanted and at the same time it was poking fun at
Wagner's music. . . . To top it off, Henry then performed Chopin's
'black-key etude,' op. 10, no. 5, in the same manner, only using an
orange in his right hand instead of a whisk broom. This object he
oscillated rapidly back and forth to produce the desired melodic
effect.""74 These mannerisms, it should be noted, were rather common
tricks of the trade. (Slonimsky even recalls using them at the St.
Petersburg Conservatory in the 1910s.)75 And they could not help but
make Cowell's clusters seem like just another gimmick.
Throughout the early 1930s, Cowell's career shifted its direction.
On one hand, he devoted more and more of his energies to promoting
the works of other composers, through performances and publications
sponsored by his New Music Society and through concert reviews and
celebratory magazine articles. On the other hand, he got more com-
missions and performances from chamber and orchestral ensembles,
enabling him to survive professionally without having to perform con-
stantly his cluster pieces for bemused audiences. While not denying
his musical personality, Cowell attempted to move his music into the
mainstream, coordinating his style with those of his peers. The trend
in American music after 1930-including his own-was, in his words,
a trend toward "an amalgamation of the techniques introduced from
about 1908 to about 1930, combined with the familiar elements, pro-
ducing a literature with more substance, but less individual distinc-
tions."76
And then came the death knell for Cowell's clusters: in the
spring of 1936, Cowell was jailed for homosexual conduct, and for
four years he had almost no access to a keyboard. As he wrote to

Ernst Bacon in 1938, "There is . . . no opportunity to try anything
over [on the piano] so I can't check up to make sure that everything
will really sound the way I hope it will when composing; and some-
times we all make miscalculations, and are surprised at the results, as
all composers know. . ... I have found it so far more difficult to write
for piano than for anything else in here [since] I always tried over
piano works, and changed them after experiment."77
If in the succeeding years Cowell abandoned composing with
clusters--at least with those pianistically conceived clusters that had
defined his most notorious music-he took increasing care to ensure
his historic position as their proprietor. Even though many of his peers
had independently used "tone clusters" as Cowell defined the term, he
almost never applied the term to the harmonic structures of anyone
but himself during the 1920s and 1930s. He downplayed the contribu-
tions of those who may have composed with clusters before him: Orn-
stein, he said, had used "combinations which might be said to be tone
clusters," but only in "an unstudied and incidental" way.78 He never
mentioned "clusters" in Ives's music during this period; he did write
that Ives had imitated the sound of drums on the piano as early as
1886, but "perhaps not very seriously."79 He illustrated an article on
Edgard Varese with at least one chord that contained what he had
defined as a cluster, but his discussion of the chord never invoked the
term.80 Claude Debussy's sustained, resonant whole-tone scales consti-
tuted arpeggiated clusters just as much as Cowell's diatonic, penta-
tonic, and chromatic scales did, yet Cowell never mentioned them as
such. And despite his intense interest in American vernacular music,
Cowell never seems to have taken note of the clusters that appear in
the piano playing of many of his contemporaries in the domains of
blues, gospel, and jazz.81 Shortly after his release from prison in 1940,
Cowell unabashedly stated that "all music is based upon three har-
monic systems, building tones in thirds, which is the accepted form;
building them in fourths and fifths, which Schoenberg and his follow-
ers explored; and my way of doing it."82 In later years Cowell opened
the field somewhat; in 1955, for example, he wrote that Ives, Seeger,
Ornstein, and himself had all "independently discovered and used
what I called 'tone clusters.' "83
But by then, as we have seen, Cowell had already rolled back
the dates of his early cluster pieces, making them far more competitive
in their claims for historical priority. Cowell apparently felt that he
needed not only to have created the term "tone cluster," but also to
have patented the phenomenon itself. Whether to express his imag-
ined sounds, to portray his mother's fairy tales, to set a mystic text, or
to get the piano to project outdoors, Cowell had not merely co-opted
an infantile technique, he seemed to say, but had created something
utterly new. The revision of dates on his early cluster pieces, together
with his constant claims to have "discovered" clusters independently
of others, made it seem that he had transcended influence.
However, Cowell's insistence on creating a theory of clusters and
his references to his technique as a "system" showed his discomfort at
being merely an individualist. If Cowell was to join the historic com-
munity of music, he needed to show his pedigree. His theory of clus-
ters linked his ingenuous hand and arm chords to a long historical
chain of musical science. Tone clusters became a stage in a harmonic
evolution, a step up the overtone-ladder in pursuit of new musical re-
sources. Thus, his childlike "playing" at the piano became "experimen-
tation"; his "adventures" in harmony became "inventions" of harmony;
he had not merely "discovered" clusters, but "constructed" them.
Cowell's treatment of his clusters suggests an enduring paradox in
the American character--that insatiable need to be both an individual
and a conformist, self-sufficient yet bound to the canons of civiliza-
tion. As de Tocqueville described them, American individualists "ac-
quire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone";
democracy, he wrote, separates every man from both his ancestors and
his contemporaries. The peril comes when individualism "throws him
back forever upon himself alone"84--a peril Cowell tried to escape by
affixing his innovations to an authoritative tradition of musical ratio-
nalization.
His aspirations notwithstanding, however, Cowell's use of palms,
fists, and forearms represented neither a true harmonic system nor a
particularly flexible technique. The real importance of his clusters was
perhaps best described by an anonymous reviewer in 1929: "Henry
Cowell has invented new ways of experiencing sound. Instead of
observing it objectively and analytically, as with the old music, you
must enter the whole wave of it, become drowned in it, become over-
whelmed in its mass and volume. To separate it into its component
parts, pitches, intervals . . . is irrelevant and of the old order of lis-
tening."85 Ultimately, Cowell's clusters had subtly reconfigured the
experience of listening to music by filling it with what Eric Salzman
calls sonic "agglomeration," what Mauricio Kagel calls "a kind of anti-
harmony."86 The cluster pieces revived in Cowell's hearers a hedonis-
tic response to raw sonority, the pure, primal pleasure one may take in
booming and crashing. Cowell's clusters crossed the threshold into a
new-or rather, very old-area of musical space, a realm where com-
posers could revel without inhibition in what he once called "the joys
of noise."87
Notes
Versions of this paper were delivered at musicology colloquia, University of California

at Berkeley and Stanford University, 1992. I thank Steven Johnson for his indispens-
able assistance.
1. Gilbert Chase, America's Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present, 2nd ed. (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 578.
2. See Richard Taruskin, "Stravinsky and the Traditions," Opus 3 (1987): 10-17;
Maynard Solomon, "Charles Ives: Some Questions of Veracity," Journal of the Ameri-
can Musicological Society 40 (1987): 443-70; Michael Hicks, "John Cage's Studies with
Schoenberg," American Music 8 (1990): 125-40.
3. In locating many of the sources for what follows, I have relied heavily on Martha
Manion, Writings about Henry Cowell: An Annotated Bibliography (Brooklyn: Institute
for Studies in American Music, 1982); and William Lichtenwanger, The Music of
Henry Cowell: A Descriptive Catalog (Brooklyn: Institute for Studies in American
Music, 1986).
4. Henry Cowell, "The Process of Musical Creation," American Journal of Psychology

37 (1926): 235.
5. "The Reminiscences of Henry Cowell," interview by Beate Gorden, 1962-1963,
typescript, Oral History Research Office, Columbia University.
6. Cowell, "The Process of Musical Creation," 236.
7. Homer Henley, "Music: The Anatomy of Dissonance," Argonaut, 27 May 1932,

10.
8. Cowell, "Jazz Today," Trend 2 (1934): 164.

9. Marion Todd, "The Boy Who Heard the 'Music of the Spheres' Astounds Art-
ists," Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 19 Apr. 1925.
10. "Henry Cowell Tells of Music Career that Began in P.A.," Palo Alto Times, 26
May 1954. For a similar account, see Ev Grimes and Steve Cellum, Tribute to Cowell
prepared for National Public Radio, 24 Oct. 1976, recording, Yale Oral History
Archives.
11. Madeline Goss, Modern Music-Makers: Contemporary American Composers (New

York: Dutton, 1952), 268. (In the preface, Goss claims to have gotten her informa-
tion directly from the composers she treats.) Goss adds that the pageant in question
was produced at Carmel's Forest Theatre in about 1912. According to its records, the
Forest Theatre billed no such work during 1912; the following year, however, Cowell
did write music for two plays produced there: Mary Austin's Fire and Takeshi Kanno's
Creation Dawn (see the theatre records in the Carmel Pine Cone, 30 June 1921). Nei-
ther of these plays is Irish in conception, but the latter certainly treats creation myths
in a way suggestive of Cowell's Tides of Manaunaun. In the opening scene, for exam-
ple, Kanno uses tidal imagery to describe the formation of matter from chaos, the
"waves of ecstasy dashing" amid the "boundless ocean of Love Creation" with its
"mystic tides" (Kanno, Creation-dawn [a vision drama] [Fruitvale, Calif.: Kanno, 1913],
16-17). A writer for the Pine Cone (29 Aug. 1930) did recall that the music Cowell
wrote to accompany those texts was "in a manner so new, so ultra modern, that [the
piano] seemed another instrument." But none of the surviving incidental pieces Cow-
ell wrote for Kanno's play contains clusters.
12. David Ewen, comp. and ed., Composers of Today, 2nd. ed. (New York: H. W.
Wilson, 1936), 53.
13. Sidney Cowell, telephone conversation with Steven Johnson, 15 Feb. 1990.
This is also the source for the quotation that follows ("quite a few usable notes"),
which she attributes to someone else, unnamed.
14. Lewis M. Terman, The Intelligence of School Children (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1919), 248; cf. Cowell, "Process of Musical Creation," 235.
15. Eight of the nine textbooks I recently consulted on this matter place Cowell's
first use of clusters in the year 1912; of these eight, four--and indeed, the four most
recent--identify the first cluster piece as The Tides of Manaunaun.
16. Sidney Cowell, letter to Dorothy Varian, 12 Jan. 1983, Varian Papers, Stanford
University Libraries Special Collections.
17. Lichtenwanger, 54-56. There is even some circumstantial evidence that Tides
might not have been written down until 1918: although the piece was supposedly
played as the prelude for John Varian's Irish pageant The Building of Banba (or
Bamba-see n. 42), the extant score to the piece seems to begin without Tides, and
Varian wrote to Cowell in 1918 expressing his hope that Henry would soon finish the
"prelude"--in the context of the letter, apparently the "prelude" to Banba.
18. Sidney Cowell to Dorothy Varian.

19. I say arpeggiation, though "glissando" would be an equally appropriate term; in
secundal harmony on the keyboard, arpeggio and glissando are the same.
20. Joscelyn Godwin, "The Music of Henry Cowell" (Ph.D. diss., Comell Univer-
sity, 1969), properly says that these clusters "are harmonic in intention, while those
[earlier in the piece] are coloristic" (25).
21. Anna Cora Winchell, "Lad Shows Signs of Real Genius," San Francisco Chroni-
cle, 6 Mar. 1914.
22. Redfem Mason, "Work of Merit at Concert of Local Society," San Francisco
Examiner, 6 Mar. 1914.
23. Charles Seeger, letter to Joscelyn Godwin, 13 Dec. 1974. Seeger discusses the
type of pieces that Cowell brought during his lessons; see also Seeger, interview with
Rita H. Mead, 15 Nov. 1974, typescript, Institute for Studies in American Music,
conservatory of Music, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, 37; and See-
ger, "Henry Cowell," Magazine of Art 33 (1940): 289.
24. Probably the handiest source for an introduction to futurist musical aesthetics is
the collection of documents in Nicolas Slonimsky, Music Since 1900, 4th ed. (New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971), 1294-1304.
25. Charles L. Buchanan, "Omstein and Modem Music," Musical Quarterly 4

(1918): 178.
26. Review of 30 Mar. 1914, as cited in Vivian Perlis, "The Futurist Music of Leo
Omstein," Notes: Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association 31 (1974-75): 739.
27. Lawrence Gilman, "Drama and Music: Significant Happenings of the Month,"
North American Review 201 (1915): 596.
28. Buchanan, 177.
29. Omstein quoted in Terence J. O'Grady, "A Conversation with Leo Omstein,"
Perspectives of New Music 23 (1984): 128.
30. "Henry Cowell," Globe and Commercial Advertiser (New York), 31 Jan. 1920.
31. "Cowell Plays Own Music for Club," San Francisco Call and Post, 19 June 1919.
32. See, for example, the review by Louise Vermont, The Greenwich Villager, 15
Apr. 1922: "At the finish of [Dynamic Motion] three women lay in a dead faint in the
aisle and no less than ten men had refreshed themselves from the left hip."
33. Admittedly, Cowell's log book is probably not complete, but it is hard to imag-
ine that he would omit his more daring cluster pieces from the log, while including so
many trivial (and often extremely brief) pieces.
34. What I call arpeggiations here, David Nicholls calls "addition clusters" when
each note of the arpeggiation is sustained until all have sounded. See his American
Experimental Music, 1890-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 157.
His terminology echoes that of Mauricio Kagel, "Tone-Clusters, Attacks, Transi-
tions," trans. Leo Black, Die Reihe V: Reports, analyses (Bryn Mawr, Penn.: Theodore
Presser, 1961), 43-44. Kagel's is so far the most exhaustive treatment of how clusters
might be used, but is not strictly based on how Cowell used them. Oddly, he defines
clusters as "only those sounds which are at least a major third broad and filled out with
major and/or minor seconds" (43, emphasis mine).
35. The manuscript to Conservative Estimate bears twenty-three such colloquial pro-
spective titles (see Lichtenwanger, 86-87). Incidentally, Cowell's best known piece in
this idiom is Tiger, a primitivist title given to a work originally bearing the futurist
title Dash. The change of title simply confirms the proposition that, in musical terms,
futurism and primitivism are the same. The "futurist" Omstein suggested as much
when he said that he devised clusters to "project the dark brooding quality . . . in
prehistoric man" (quoted in Chase, 578.)
36. D[ane] Rudhyar, "The Relativity of Our Musical Conceptions," Musical Quar-
terly 8 (1922): 108-9.
37. "Young Composer's Works Being Published," Palo Alto Times, 3 July 1922.
38. Paul Rosenfeld, "Musical Chronicle," Dial 76 (1924): 390.

39. Temple documents show that in the late 1910s and 1920s, Cowell attended
meditation meetings and conventions, gave lectures and classes in harmony and coun-
terpoint, authored a piano course for the children of the Temple, assisted in music-
therapy experiments at the Temple's sanitorum, wrote for the Temple magazine, and
played recitals there, at least one of which (May 1917) featured Omstein's Impressions
of Notre Dame (see the recital programs written on the inside back cover of a John
Varian manuscript poetry book, Varian Papers). For details on Cowell's involvement
with the Temple, see Steven Johnson, "Henry Cowell, John Varian, and Halcyon,"
American Music, 11 (Spring 1993): 1-27.
40. Seeger gives a unique account of how Cowell first made the link between the
Temple's religious exercises and his music. As he tells it, Cowell went to a meeting
where the community sang some of their hymns concerning the oneness of man and
the universe. Afterward he 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" (Seeger interview, 15 Nov. 1974, 31).
41. John Varian, letter to Henry Cowell, 18 Nov. 1916, holograph in Varian
Papers.
42. Lichtenwanger always uses the spelling "Bamba," as Cowell does in his score to
the piece. Varian seems to have preferred "Banba," as his holographs and publica-
tions attest; see "The Building of Banba," in "Doorways Inward" and Other Poems
(Halcyon, Calif.: Halcyon Temple Press, 1934). The Temple Artisan, Halcyon's
official magazine, uses "Bamba" in its 1917 account of the production; in describing
other productions by Varian, it vacillates on the spelling. In this article I have fol-
lowed Varian's spelling.
43. Varian, "Doorways Inward," 23.
44. Nicholls properly concludes that in the Varian-related works cluster technique is
"essentially decorative," though I think he goes too far in claiming that it "adds noth-
ing of real importance to the musical substance" (156). Godwin traces all of the mys-
tic pieces to Cowell's early fascination with what he calls the "Grand Manner"-
Cowell's version of bombastic pseudo-Lisztian concert music (133).
45. There may also be an implicit difference in tonalities between the two layers, as
one sees in Tides, for example (see Godwin, 28-29).
46. From the epigraph to the published version of Cowell's The Voice of Lir.
47. Slonimsky, "Henry Cowell," in American Composers on American Music: A Sym-

posium ed. Henry Cowell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1933), 62.
48. In the manuscript to Dynamic Motion, Cowell has an explanatory note that
defines the cluster notation as angular; in the equivalent note to Banba, the cluster
notation is unambiguously curved.
49. See the Halcyon-related manuscript entitled "Clusteriana No. 1: Analysis of

Tone Cluster Examples in the Form of Movement of One Cluster," discussed in Licht-
enwanger, 319-20. This manuscript seems to contain examples of different kinds of
clusters and their movements, similar to those that would appear as examples in New
Musical Resources.
50. In Music Since 1900, Slonimsky likens Cowell's notation to one created by
Vladimir Rebikov, a "special columnar notation, indicating that the conglomeration
of keys are [sic] to be encompassed with the edge of the palm of the hand"; the piece
for which he devised it is named as Hymn to the Sun, published 1912 (199). Later in
the book, Slonimsky says that Rebikov's cluster notation was "identical" to Cowell's;
here the piece is called Hymn to Inca (1498). Which, if either, of these is correct I
cannot say; I have been unable to locate a copy of this piece.
51. Charles Seeger and Edward Stricklen, Harmonic Structure and Elementary Compo-
sition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1916), introduction.
52. "Youthful Wonder Has Charm of Genius," Palo Alto Times, 23 Jan. 1914, calls
for interested donors to bring money for Cowell to Seward's home on Kingsley Ave-
nue, just a block from where Cowell would later set up a studio (see Cowell's adver-
tisements for piano lessons in the Palo Alto Times, spring 1916, passim).
53. This is the title given in "Young Composer's Works Being Published." The
manuscript and its revisions are currently sealed among Cowell's papers at the New
York Public Library. For more on the effects of Cowell's army experience on his ideas
and theories, see my "Henry Cowell and the Boundaries of Difference," paper deliv-
ered at the Eighteenth Annual Meeting of the Sonneck Society, Baton Rouge, LA,
16 Feb. 1992.
54. Seeger and Stricklen.
55. Cowell and Robert L. Duffus, "Harmonic Development in Music," Freeman 3

(1921): 112-13.
56. Cowell and Duffus, 111.
58. Cowell, "The Impasse of Modem Music," Century 114 (1927): 676-77.
59. Cowell, "The Impasse of Modem Music," 677.
60. Cowell, New Musical Resources, (New York, Knopf, 1930), 119.
61. Cowell, New Musical Resources, 117.
63. Cowell, New Musical Resources, 119-123.
65. See, for example, the sketch to Sound March, which abounds with the vertical
cigar-shapes of his cluster notation, but with completely vague intervallic boundaries.
66. The printed score provides yet another variant of Cowell's second type of cluster
notation, this time merely with stems thickened so as to denote clusters.
67. Slonimsky, "Henry Cowell," 61.
68. Cowell, "The Impasse of Modem Music," 677.

69. "Cowell Concert Is Revelation of Genius," Palo Alto Times, 8 Nov. 1920.
70. See, for example, the article on Cowell entitled "Elbow Music!" Emanu-el and
the Jewish Journal, 8 July 1932; also, the biographical note to Henry Cowell, "Kept
Music" (Panorama 2 [1934]), refers to Cowell as "the inventor of 'tone clusters,' a
method of increasing the sonority and expressiveness of the pianoforte by playing with
the elbows as well as with the fingers and hands" (6).
71. Russell Varian, in a letter to his parents (12 Nov. 1920, Varian Papers) refers to
Cowell's "elbo music" (sic); Redfern Mason, "Persinger in Music Honors Elias Hecht,"
San Francisco Examiner, 20 Oct. 1927, notes that Cowell's method of playing "has
been called his 'elbow technique' "; Cowell's neighbor Angela Kiefer recalled that
Cowell "can play the piano with his feet or his elbows if he wants to" (quoted in
Margaret Moore, " 'Youngsters Over 50' Gather to Exchange Talk About Old Times
in Menlo Park," Menlo Park Recorder, 11 Oct. 1951). Seeger, as late as 1974, referred
to Cowell's early cluster works as "elbow pieces" (Seeger Interview, 31).
72. Todd, "The Boy Who Heard the 'Music of the Spheres.' "
73. Jay S. Harrison, "Cowell: Peck's Bad Boy of Music," New York Herald Tribune,
22 Nov. 1953. Joan Peyser, The New Music: The Sense Behind the Sound (New York:
Dell, 1971), is the most recent book I have found to mention elbows: "In 1912 Cow-
ell banged his fists and elbows on the piano and created tone clusters for the first
time" (151).
74. Reminiscence of Jules Eichorn, signed and dated Oct. 1976, typescript, Cowell
Collection, Menlo Park Historical Society.
75. Slonimsky, Perfect Pitch: A Life Story (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988),
20.
76. "Public Unafraid of New Music, Composer Says," Houston Post, 15 Nov. 1955.
77. The long quote is a conflation of two passages from Henry Cowell to Ernst
Bacon (8 Apr. 1938, and 29 Sept. 1938, respectively), in Ernst Bacon Papers, Stan-
ford University Libraries Special Collections. For an account of this portion of Cow-
ell's life, see my "The Imprisonment of Henry Cowell," Journal of the American
Musicological Society 44 (1991): 92-119.
79. Cowell, "Charles Ives," Modern Music 10 (1932): 30. Ives's "piano drumming"
did indeed consist of clusters, though the date of its first use remains in doubt. Ives
explains the origins of his piano drumming in Charles E. Ives: Memos, ed. John Kirk-
patrick (New York: Norton, 1972), 42.
80. Cowell, "The Music of Edgar Varese" (sic), Modern Music 5 (1928): 10.
81. While microclusters abound in these improvisatory black styles, broad left-hand
clusters may be found in the performances of Elder Charlie Beck at least as early as
the 1920s. See, for an impressive example, the last forty seconds of Beck's "Drinking
Shine" (1930), available on Preachin' the Gospel: Holy Blues, Columbia-Sony Legacy
CD #46779.
82. Cowell, quoted in Ruth K. Nolan, "Henry Cowell, Pioneer Among Modem
Composers, Plays With Arms, Plucks Strings, Pounds Case To Produce Massive 'Tone
Clusters,' " White Plains Daily Reporter, 17 July 1940. He adds, with some circularity,
"When chords are constructed my way, the tones just naturally cluster together."
83. Cowell, "A Note on Wallingford Riegger," Juilliard Review 2 (1955): 55.
84. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve, 2 vols. (New
York: Colonial Press, 1900), 2:106.
85. "P.S.G.," "The Mystic in the Machine Age," The Carmelite, 21 Aug. 1929.
86. Eric Salzman, Twentieth-Century Music: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974), 137; Kagel, 46.
87. Cowell, "The Joys of Noise," New Republic, 31 July 1929, 287-88.

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Cowell's Clusters

Author(s): Michael Hicks

None of Henry Cowell's innovations was more praised or more vilified

Concerning the origins of clusters, only one fact is certain: throughout

keyboard. In 1926 Cowell wrote that as a child he received frequent

Figure 1. Henry Cowell in a publicity photo from the Copland-Sessions conc

universe out of chaos. To portray the waves musically, Cowell tried

Figure 2. Cowell, ornate flatware in hand, poses for a publicity picture,

uncontrollable clenching of the hands that results in

infantilism to which modem art routinely surrendered, a return to

Cowell's earliest extant manuscript to call for clusters in the

Example 1d. Adventures in Harmony (1913), chap

Example l e. Adventures in Harmony (1913), chapte

fern Mason's review of this recital for

Table 1. Dates assigned by Henry Cowell to his early cluster pieces

Piano works (listed in ACA/PAU, PMHC) CD ACA/PAU PMHC

Tides of Manaunaun [not listed] 1912 1911-1912

The dates listed under CD come from "Composito

down on the keyboard perpendicularly in ramrod fashion as hard as

ated cluster, for example, is produced by a tilting of the arm. Sympa-

improvisatory, shallow in structure; correspondingly, he tended to give

an unexpressed and concealed counterpart."46 The simple tunes and

As we have seen, Adventures in Harmony used conventional noteheads

11. Nr. 46. R 1"4

Example 2. The Birth o

white keys black keys white and

First Type, variant - < i>

Second Type, variant

Example 3. Cowell's clust

thick vertical beam between noteheads. It is this variant that has

tled "The Unexplored Resources in Musical Effects."53 He probably

clusters of differing qualities of seconds. Thus, Cowell explained, con-

smaller clusters were either subsets of that basic cluster, or indepen-

.I.. .. I I"A IIf- 1I . 1

? r. 8 - - -.. ---- o,- -

-" iE"rl l U" ,, IH , "

I . - - - - 4 -1' o r - i S OL_ s o' I' -I' 1 . ' ' S ir

Am , I -_ I,,,-m ,,-o- m,'

, - , - -., ,,- , -H_

four years he had almost no access to a keyboard. As he wrote to

Versions of this paper were delivered at musicology colloquia, University of California

4. Henry Cowell, "The Process of Musical Creation," American Journal of Psychology

6. Cowell, "The Process of Musical Creation," 236.

7. Homer Henley, "Music: The Anatomy of Dissonance," Argonaut, 27 May 1932,

8. Cowell, "Jazz Today," Trend 2 (1934): 164.

11. Madeline Goss, Modern Music-Makers: Contemporary American Composers (New

18. Sidney Cowell to Dorothy Varian.

25. Charles L. Buchanan, "Omstein and Modem Music," Musical Quarterly 4

28. Buchanan, 177.

38. Paul Rosenfeld, "Musical Chronicle," Dial 76 (1924): 390.

43. Varian, "Doorways Inward," 23.

47. Slonimsky, "Henry Cowell," in American Composers on American Music: A Sym-

49. See the Halcyon-related manuscript entitled "Clusteriana No. 1: Analysis of

54. Seeger and Stricklen.

55. Cowell and Robert L. Duffus, "Harmonic Development in Music," Freeman 3

56. Cowell and Duffus, 111.

57. Cowell and Duffus, 112.

59. Cowell, "The Impasse of Modem Music," 677.

61. Cowell, New Musical Resources, 117.

62. Cowell, New Musical Resources, 118.

63. Cowell, New Musical Resources, 119-123.

64. Cowell, New Musical Resources, 121.

67. Slonimsky, "Henry Cowell," 61.

Cowell's Clusters

Cowell's Clusters