The Music of Henry Cowell

The Music of Henry Cowell
Author(s): Hugo Weisgall

Source: The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 45, No. 4 (Oct., 1959), pp. 484-507
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/740598
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THE MUSIC OF HENRY COWELL
By HUGO WEISGALL
INCE his formal New York ddbut in 1924, Henry Cowell has been
a major creative force in American music. His musical gifts and
the range of his energy, the scope of his music, the breadth of his in-
fluence and the recognition he has achieved, combine to make of him
a figure a little larger than life, a kind of Paul Bunyan in music. Aside
from his life as a composer, Cowell has lived several other full lives
as champion of new music, impresario, performer, lecturer, critic, editor,
teacher, and sponsor of the young.
These activities contribute much to a portrait of Cowell, but the

music itself demands more critical attention than it has had. One cannot
point to another composer on the American scene who has submitted

himself with such confidence to the entire gamut of musical experience
and who has created such an impressive amount of work embodying
so many different kinds of musical ideas, techniques, and sounds.
The last word on so rich a personality will not be written for some
time to come, but with the help of Cowell's most recent works one can
venture to trace certain trends from their origins, and gain thereby a
much-needed consistency of view.1
At certain periods it has been taken for granted that composers

should write in a great range of styles and idioms. Since the 19th century,
however, the idea of stylistic diversity has been frowned upon, and in
our day composers who are not satisfied only to "express themselves"
have been critically suspect.
As to Cowell, despite what may seem at first a great diversity of

musical impulses, it becomes clear that his music is of a piece, the
product of a single personality. There is a perceptible consistency in the
1 The author wishes to acknowledge the assistance of Alan Stout in the pre-
liminary research for this article.
484
The Music of Henry Cowell 485
choice of musical materials, and within a recognizab
is an equal consistency in the handling of these materials
can always apprehend Stravinsky by the instrumental so
how different the music, or Bart6k by the rhapsodic fre
form he gives to tightly concentrated musical ideas,
find Cowell's signature in the integration of ideas and te
from a conventional point of view seem disparate. Wh
gave the impression of extreme eclecticism is the variety
Cowell has known how to accept as taking-off points,
of his music that uses similar ideas in different ways. Eac
each movement, can be regarded as an enthusiastic syn
musical experience Cowell has just undergone, written
sense of immediacy. That this consistency in variety
crippling is apparent when one considers some of his
where he brilliantly combines elements never related bef
Henry Cowell was born in Menlo Park, near San Fra

March 11, 1897. He was eight years old when his health r
he abandon a first strenuous career as violin prodigy; he
to become a composer. His attention was directed to th
heard around him: the noise of the wind and the sea, of tr
speech intonations, neighborhood singers and pianists;
of Oriental children, his mother's Iowa folk tunes, his fath
and dances-and the Chinese opera (because it was f
led him to suppose that these sounds were not all equally
terial for his own music, and quantities of his early comp
from a very wide assortment of such aural experience.
The boy began to write music in 1908. The second t

piano piece Antinomy is the only surviving fragment fr
it was originally part of a long melodic setting of Longfe
Legend, never finished. "Commissioned" at the age o
write music for a pageant based on legends from Irish
Cowell hit upon a device he called "tone clusters" in the a
duce music on the piano suitable for the sea-god Man
music was first performed at a public concert in San
March 10, 1912, when Cowell was fifteen, and The Tid
naun is still the most often performed of Cowell's short
Tone clusters are groups of adjacent tones (three or

twelve), played simultaneously. Cowell soon came to th
creating a system of harmony based on the interval of a
486 The Musical Quarterly
of a third; the term came from their appearance o
in the notation he devised for them. Most of th
pieces that first attracted international attentio
and caused scandals at their early performances (
conventional material and even more unconvention
nique) come from the decade 1911-1921.2 In thi
these secundal chords are sounded along any chosen scale line -
diatonic (The Trumpet of Angus Og, Tides of Manaunaun), penta-
tonic (Amiable Conversation, Exultation), or chromatic (Advertisement,
Antinomy), and they were used either homophonically (Harp of Life,
Reel) or polyphonically (Dynamic Motion) almost from the first.
Although this fruitful device was originally derived from the piano,
it appears in Cowell's orchestra music after about 1917 (Some More
Music). Perhaps its fullest orchestral use comes in the second movement
of the Piano Concerto (1929). Cowell continues to find secundal har-
mony and counterpoint expressive for his symphonic purposes today,
more frequently however in the modal pieces than in the chromatic
dissonant ones.
Cowell has been called a self-taught composer, but this is true only
in the sense that he had already written more than a hundred pieces
before he began his first formal training in composition at the age of
sixteen, under the wing of Charles Seeger, who was then head of the
Department of Music at the University of California in Berkeley. Cowell
could not matriculate at the University because he had had no formal
schooling at either the elementary or high-school level. After an intro-
ductory interview in the spring of 1913, Seeger undertook to arrange
that the boy be given special status at the University so that he might
initiate his theoretical studies under E. G. Strickland. Seeger also ar-
ranged for him to study counterpoint with Wallace Sabin, a San
2 Cowell's penchant for recounting the more surprising incidents of his career
has obscured the success he had from the first in Europe with a few dignified critics
and musicians of the first rank, men independent enough to respect an American who
felt his music must be shaped by his experience of sound as he found it in his
own country. Early supporters of his music were Artur Schnabel and Bart6k, who
arranged the concerts that introduced him to Berlin and Dessau, and Paris, respec-
tively. Friendly reviews came from Adolf Weissmann in Berlin, Erwin Felber in
Vienna, Georges Migot in Paris, Edward Dent in London, and soon thereafter,
in New York, from Pitts Sanborn and Lawrence Gilman. Seventeen of the tone-
cluster piano pieces were published by Breitkopf & H~irtel in 1922. Cowell's five
European concert tours (in which he played only his own music) took place in 1923,
1926, 1928, 1931-32, and 1933; all but the first one paid for themselves.
Francisco organist. It was further agreed that Cowell s

free composition for a year; meanwhile weekly meetin
were to be devoted to a discussion of new ideas in music.
Cowell went away immensely invigorated from this first meeting

with one of the most acute musical intelligences that the United States
has produced. Here for the first time Cowell was encouraged by a man
sympathetic to the notion that music might reasonably include th
kind of thing that he liked to write. He spent an intensely productive
summer, and the pieces he brought to his first formal session with
Seeger in the fall of 1913 represented an explosion of fresh musica
energy; in them can be found elements of polytonality, dissonant coun
terpoint and harmony, and atonality. Coweil still remembers Seeger's
surprise and pleased excitement at some of this music, and he recall
being shown Schoenberg's Opus 11, with the tactful remark: "You
might like to see how someone else has handled similar problems."
It was soon clear to Seeger that a meaningful discipline, for so

determined an autodidact as the boy had already become, could only
be derived from his own music. So Seeger made two suggestions:
First he urged that Cowell work out a systematic technique for any
unusual musical material he wanted to employ; and second, he pointed
out that it is for the innovator himself to create the initial repertory
embodying his innovations. Both suggestions suited Cowell perfectly,
and ever since he seems to have visualized his life's work in these terms.
Following his early intense concern with the problems and possibilities
of secundal harmony and counterpoint, Cowell turned to consider
parallel developments in rhythm. His book New Musical Resources,
written in 1919 and revised somewhat for publication in 1929, is the
theoretical exposition of the possibilities for orderly development of
rhythmic structures in relation to melodic and harmonic ones. The basis
of this relationship lies in the vibration ratios expressed in the overtone
series, ratios that Cowell found might be used to define rhythmic inter-
vals as well as tonal ones.3 In the early twenties Cowell also turned
his attention to what he considered to be the neglected possibilities
inherent in the piano strings. Directly on them he proceeded to produce
3Cowell's most complete use of the idea was in his Quartet Romantic (1914
or 1915). The carrying over of serial relationships from the pitch element to other
elements of music can be found in more than one contemporary style. In 1959
Karlheinz Stockhausen told Cowell that after he and his colleagues had been work-
ing with this idea for some time, he was astonished to have Cowell's book called
to his attention by a young composer from Argentina.
harmonics, muted tones, and pizzicati of variou
applied to them various mechanical mutes and ham
gong beaters, rubber bands, coins, and so on, to va
of what he sometimes called the "string piano."
Cowell's formal theoretical training in the Wester

covered about eight years of the usual studies. H
mately the same length of time studying other mu
famous Oriental teachers in Berlin, New York, and
32 he had a Guggenheim Fellowship for study un
at the University of Berlin.4 To this must be a
(1956-57) spent in Asia with the primary purpose o
the music of the chief Asian cultures.
All of Cowell's inquiries into new theoretical resources in music,

whether physical (acoustical, instrumental) or cultural (various kinds
of folk and formal musics of the Orient), have been undertaken for the
same reason: to find intellectual justification for procedures he had
already begun to use instinctively, and which he was repeatedly told
were "not music." He wished to satisfy himself about all the various
things that had been considered music in other times and places, for
one thing. And as to what music might become, through an abstract
theoretical approach, he wrote in the preface to New Musical Resources
(1929):
My interest in the theory underlying new materials came about at first through
wishing to explain to myself, as well as to others, why certain materials I felt
impelled to use in composition, and which I instinctively felt to be legitimate,
have genuine scientific and logical foundation . . . Some of the results of the
investigation convinced me that although my music itself preceded the knowledge
of the theoretical explanation, there had been enough unconscious perception so
that the means used were . . . in accordance with acoustical law.
The relationships he noticed among expanding resources for music

in the West as he conceived them, the music of other parts of the world,
and his own music, led him to the concept of music as a single world-
wide art, which uses the same basic elements everywhere but which has
simply developed these elements to differing degrees or has combined
them differently, in different places. This suggested a new kind of
musical internationalism, of which Cowell wrote in 1948:
* It was during this Berlin period that Schoenberg invited Cowell to play for
his master classes and to visit his lectures, which were devoted over a period of
months to the analysis of a single string quartet of Mozart. Cowell never studied
composition with Schoenberg.
Dodecaphonic internationalism eliminates everything that has
as a national style in the handling of musical materials. Thus it h
its own associations and traditions according to its own inner log
the tighter because it is not conditioned by the vagaries of custo
of "internationalism" seems possible to me, however, in which m
developed in a single culture are carried beyond the customs of
cording to a logic inherent in the basic materials themselves. In
kind of musical treatment is extended, instead of being elimin
purely nationalistic aspects are limited. Such a concept of exten
example, be applied to rhythm; this will practically always resu
which can be found in Africa or Indonesia (where rhythm is far
developed and systematized than it is with us). My admiration
of foreign musical cultures have led me to welcome types of mu
which show the close relationships between our musical concep
veloped by other people. The composer's problem here, as alway
musical materials together in accordance with their own nature and
* *
The difficulty a crit

he must attempt to d
only point out that C
musical languages; and
be prepared to place
The vast amount of

forty years has been
combinations, and at v
materials drawn from
by means of nearly as
remarkable fecundit
been temperamentall
work anything offere
wholeheartedly; he do
or others.5
The quantity of Cow

fact that any dissatisf
SThe mass of the music
like a genealogical table. T
of segregation is never
take place both within an
traits, some of which rem
through several generatio
be developed in turn into
not a revision but a new work. Moreover, he is c
small pieces employing a particular type of mate
specific idea that later undergo metamorphosis and
works. He is also forever writing music for special
people, and these too are more often than not e
enlargement and more elaborate use.
Unfortunately no catalogue raisonne exists, but m

made of thirteen symphonies, twenty-nine other w
ments for orchestra, a dozen or so single-movement
ten quartets, of which six are for strings, three qui
two-to-five-movement works for various solo instr
or harpsichord, six two-to-seven-movement works f
or voice and two instruments, nine stage works, thr
and orchestra or band, five concertos for piano and
recent Concerto for Percussion and Orchestra.6
One may trace two principal currents in Cowell's music. One of

these is a consistent use of chromatic dissonant material, usually ex-
pressed polyphonically; the other is a broad extension of modal prin-
ciples, frequently utilizing "exotic" scales, rhythmic forms, and instru-
ments. Neither of these tendencies is more "experimental" than the
other, and both of them, separately or together, appear from time to
time since Cowell's earliest compositions.
One cannot divide Cowell's work into limited chronological "periods"

because there has never been a time when he has devoted himself con-
sistently to a single thing. Yet one can trace, with respect to any one
musical notion, various experiments, permutations and combinations
that move in a general way from the simple to the complex.
So it is possible to say that from 1919 to about 1931 Cowell devoted

himself with increasing intensity to the concepts of rhythm and dis-
sonant chromaticism that he developed in his book New Musical Re-
sources (1919; 1929). From the mid-thirties to the late forties there
appears a marked concentration on the reworking of modal (Eastern
as well as Western) musical materials, and since about 1950 the two
tendencies are more often combined than not-never, however, the
same way twice.
SThe twelve hymn and fuguing tune pieces go through several of the categories;
furthermore this form can be found providing parts of the Violin Sonata, of Sym-
phonies 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, and 12, of the Set of Five, of String Quartet No. 5, and
of A Thanksgiving Psalm, for men's chorus and orchestra.
Among Cowell's chief works for orchestra there are peaks
the best clues, perhaps, to the general topography. I cite the S
(1924; 1928), the Sixth Symphony (1950), and the Eleventh and
Twelfth Symphonies (1955 and 1956) in particular, since I consider
them landmarks in that aspect of Cowell's style which can be most
consistently traced in its development throughout his creative life.
Other works, but far from all of them, will be mentioned in connection
with Cowell's musical interests and the procedures I attempt to describe.
Cowell's early dissonant chromatic works, which are least known

today, are certainly among the most significant contributions to musical
literature that he has made. This style begins with Dynamic Motion
and What's This? (both for piano) in the summer of 1913; it can
also be found in some of his earliest music for orchestra (Some More
Music, 1916). The first fully "realized" piece in this style is the Sin-
fonietta for chamber orchestra, first composed for string quintet (and
called Ensemble) in 1924, and arranged for orchestra in 1928. There
followed Synchrony for large orchestra (1929-30) and the Piano Con-
certo (1930). The style is not developed significantly further until after
1950, when it assumes a new dimension in the Sixth, Eleventh, and
Twelfth Symphonies and in the Septet.
The Sinfonietta, in three movements, is certainly one of Cowell's

strongest, most concise, and best-constructed works. So discerning a
musician as Anton Webern included it on his programs in Vienna
in 1932.
The first and longest movement is an extended fantasia, of a sort

that appears also in Synchrony and as the first movement of the Sixth
Symphony. It is based on two short motifs. Its rhythm (like that of the
third movement too) moves in a steady succession of halves and
quarters, with only occasional eighths; the pulse alternates between five
and six quarters to the measure and there is an occasional cross rhythm,
two against three; it cannot be said to develop any active forward
motion. The second movement is a Classical scherzo, fresh and rhythmi-
cally alive. The third movement is somewhat like the first in form, but
not in spirit; it too is a fantasia based on a single motif. The orchestral
writing is as fine as anything Cowell has ever done.
While the Sinfonietta's harmonic sound at any given moment is

not unlike that of Hindemith's music of the same period, the total
effect is at once warmer, more expressive and more human. Despite
the abundance of Wagnerian leaps and sharp dissonanc
chaste and the listener is not expected to become passi
The whole work is of perfect consistency of style.
Synchrony (1929) is a single movement for large

entire piece derives formally from a trumpet solo a
opening; it is a fantasia on a single motif. It was c
Martha Graham for a Metropolitan Opera perform
took place. Stokowski's playing of it with the Philad
in 1932 was Cowell's first major orchestral perform
(Synchrony had however been performed earlier ab
Sinfonietta.) The third large work of the period 192
certo for Piano and Orchestra, a fiendishly difficult pi
chords for the orchestra and a finale of great rhyth
(There were a number of shorter dissonant pieces for
this general period, now either lost or regarded by th
some misgiving.)
It is in these three major works that Cowell firs

effectively (and surprisingly early) with the problems
forms out of dissonant germinal motifs. Everything is
closely reasoned, and the music achieves neatly and eff
it sets out to do. These works form one of the landmark
they stand up with our most impressive music today.
From about 1936 to 1950, when the Sixth Symph

Cowell was almost entirely preoccupied with various kin
music; folk music of the five continents and seven seas,
classic traditions of Asia. It is at this time that Cowell first becomes
articulate on the subject of what may be called the search for a

ecumenical music-for a style or styles that will have meaning to
many different peoples, for a more widely communicative music
and also, possibly, for an intellectually satisfying channel for indulgin
his natural melodic gift.
An intensely personal statement written in 1936 to accompany th

publication of his United Quartet gives expression to ideas relat
to much of the music he was to write in the next fifteen years:
The Quartet should be easy to understand, without following any known pat
way, but it should be understood equally well by Americans, Europeans, Orient
or higher primitives; or by anybody from a coal miner to a bank president. T
main purpose of it, of course, is not in its technique, but in the message whi
of course, is not suitable for expression in words. It may be sa
human and social relationships. The technique is for the purp
the message to the widely differentiated groups who need to
relationships.
The work is original in spite of its simplicity, because the si

from the whole world, instead of from the European tradition
tradition. It is not an attempt to return to the primitive, to retu
to be neo-classical, nor to be ultra-modern. There are in it el
from every place and period. For example, the classical feelin
not by the employment of a classic form, but in building up a ne
planned. A carefully planned form is a classic concept. Primi
resented, not by imitating it, nor by taking a specific melody
some tribe, but by using at times a three-tone scale and exhau
ferent ways the three tones can appear (a procedure of some
and by its underlying rhythmic beat-like primitive music, b
specific instance. The Oriental is represented by modes which
as Oriental modes are constructed, without being actual modes
cultures. From Western culture, the archaic is represented by
monic intervals of fifths, fourths and octaves. The romantic i
the emotional outpouring of the melodies. The modern is repr
of unresolved discords, by free intervals in two-part counterpo
that the whole result is something new - and all that is new is
This manifesto pinpoints a vast amount of music wri

1930 - approximately after Synchrony and the Piano
1950, before the Sixth Symphony. Not all of this m
successful from every point of view, of course. There is m
many beautiful individual movements, a host of bold
sallies in one direction or another, and great masses of
music, unproblematic to the listener but not unexperime
For pure musical charm and spontaneity it would be har
upon the Comallye ballad tunes, the Irish-American d
various pieces or movements that appear during this
has since become firmly entrenched as the Cowell s
Cowell what the waltz was to Tchaikovsky.) One shou
American Country Set (1937), lively pieces marked by
then little-recognized traits of rural American music: th
the long initial notes of phrases, the frequent tonic wh
would use the dominant. Toccanta (1938) for three in
voice without words, and its orchestral version (Symphon
written a year later, is somewhat more sophisticated mus
Middle Eastern melodic styles. Two of the best works
are for band: Animal Magic, whose three-note motif
in Cowell's music an actual tune, from the Green
Schoonthree, a poetic piece whose form is dictated
which means The Music of Sleep - the music
deepens and fades away as the sleeper wakes. Of Co
fine melodies, one of the most memorable dates
Is Song, a setting of a brief poem by his father, H
circulates also in a version for violin and piano. T
posed upon a little piece written in 1923 for the st
Other songs and choral pieces written during th
most part skillful, direct, and attractive in their sim
regarded as foreshadowing the Septet as well as suc
and orchestra as the Thanksgiving Psalm from t
and ". .. if He please," all written in the fifties.
much of this music, aside from its nearly unfailin
lies partly in the contributions Cowell was to levy
tegration into works of broader scope and greater in
Many of the longer works of this intermediate period

redundant in one spot or another, a surprising thin
writing. Several of the symphonies suffer from the
last-movement trouble - a difficulty Cowell wa
solve during this period than most of his contem
case, the trouble may possibly stem from the fact t
works he has set himself the apparently insoluble p
a full-blown theme generate a multi-movement stru
not fatal in the early movements, but seems to ma
build up the expected tension at the close of the wo
agree that it is necessary to leave the hearer with a
satisfied expectation at the close of a large work, a
once, as in the Violin Sonata, deliberately provid
chaos, in which the energies of the music complete
the last movement ends. Other long works tend to
to the beginning, which establishes a perfectly rea
but one that, to this writer at least, is not at all sa
structural terms.
However this may be, Cowell was at the same time (after 1941)
consistently exploring the possibilities of the hymn-and-fuguing-tune
combination; this he eventually established as a highly successful neo-
Baroque form. Cowell regards the two-movement form, "something
slow followed by something fast," as valuable partly because it is so
widespread a type of musical structure, but the speci

terials developed in this series come from the Britis
American hymnody. Cowell combines the modal styl
tunes that were appropriated for hymns in the souther
with the fuguing tune idea that is associated with Billin
was employed by many colonial American composers. Th
is particularly well suited to Cowell's expansive melod
coincides remarkably with his diatonic modal taste. A
clusters and dissonant counterpoint and harmony e
created a body of works of different lengths and complex
treatment that establish their own consistent theoretical basis. For
example, he may expand the basic melodic material by orderly kinds
of modal modulation: using the same mode on different tonics; or
different modes on the same tonic; or different modes on different
tonics. New modes are derived from tetrachord changes, either conjunct
or disjunct. In the polyphonic sections, in-mode notes are treated
as consonant, with fifths, octaves, or triads sitting at the cadence.
These are procedures that Cowell had already occasionally used with
Oriental modal materials, and which after 1956 he was to apply more
elaborately to Iranian, Indian, and Japanese musical styles again.
In the late forties Cowell's four- and five-movement works began

to use hymns and fuguing tunes for first and/or last movements, with
ballads and jigs between them for the slow movements and scherzos.
The first such piece was the Violin Sonata (1945), followed almost
immediately by the Fourth Symphony (1946). The Fifth Symphony
(1948) is an essay in using several exotic-seeming techniques to bring
into symphonic form a theme of a type common to many different
cultures - a work full of lovely music but whose "symphonic character"
has been sometimes disputed.
Symphony No. 6 (1950) is of much larger and tighter conception.

In its opening movement one finds the single example of deliberate use
of a twelve-tone row in Cowell's music. The row undergoes develop-
ment, but not the whole row as in the Schoenbergian tradition: instead
Cowell takes motifs from it for development in symphonic fashion.
No. 7 applies some dissonance to the hymn-and-fuguing-tune idea, in
a dignified work full of beautiful writing, called by a Viennese critic
(Erich Jantsch) in 1955 "symphonic music in our own terms, full of...
pleasure in making music." No. 8 is a series of colorful simple move-
ments for an international festival, written to be done by combined
Ohio college orchestras and chorus at Wilmingto
missioned by an amateur orchestra in Green Bay
of fine melodies; it has an unforgettable opening
development of the hymn-and-fuguing-tune style. T
of which Nos. 6, 7, and 10 are major creative dev
written in a great burst of energy between the fall
1953; there followed immediately a year that w
to Symphony No. 11.
Since 1941, a dozen or so two-movement wor

under the title of Hymn and Fuguing Tune: No.
and 5 for string orchestra (the last also for voices)
orchestra and oboe; No. 3 for large orchestra, a h
gives the brass a touch of swooping, syncopated Sal
band music; and the others for solo instrument
vocal or instrumental combinations. Some fifty
pieces are woven through this very productive perio
for family anniversaries and for Christmas, in whic
sonance can be plainly traced, even more consistent
of hymn-and-fuguing-tune symphonies, Nos. 4,
sonance reappears gradually in diatonic music; to
more often in the orchestra. Tunes contract and
again as germinating factors in symphonic moveme
the Sixth Symphony.
By the time the Eleventh Symphony is reached,

dissonance is fully re-established as a compositional
begins the period of synthesis of the elements most
maturity, drawn with consistent taste and mastery
sonal creative activity during the preceding forty
The Eleventh Symphony is subtitled "Seven Ritua

it takes its form from the interweaving of seven th
stands for one or another of the great human occas
struggle, death, and initiations into work, love, a
ence - whose rituals have everywhere and always be
music. Although there is not one traditional "sonat
piece, it is considerably more symphonic as an enti
appear. The printed list of movements suggests a sui
the music does not; the themes are elaborately interw
and no single theme is limited to a single movemen
elsewhere more than once, in either a reminiscent or
All the themes are brought together in the brief requiem
closes the work.
This is a masterful integration of superficially disparate elements of

style and technique, for a unified musical (as well as programmatic) pur-
pose. The Impressionism of the first movement is in no way contra-
dicted by the strenuous Expressionism of the third; nor does the almost
pictorial use of percussion (in the second, fourth, and sixth movements)
oppose the glissandi of the fifth or the fugal structure of the last move-
ment. The non-Western materials in the music are not so obvious
as in the Fifth Symphony; the Eleventh is in every way a subtler wo
The Twelfth Symphony (1956), as yet unperformed, is in ma

ways the climax of Cowell's career as a symphonist. It solves faultle
the problem of applying chromatic dissonance techniques to the hy
and-fuguing-tune genre. Like all the best of Cowell's "long" works t
one is short. In pattern it runs slow, fast, fast, slow-fast. The f
movement is a hymn, and in feeling it harks back to the Movement
String Quartet (1934), yet the rhythmic flow here is far more supp
and not at all four-square. The acerbic harmonies of the earlier w
are somewhat tempered. The second movement rather elaborately rec
the second movement of Cowell's Ninth Symphony, and for once
Cowell scherzo is in 2/4, with a delightful Mendelssohnian flavor. T
6/8 jig is not, however, forgotten; it appears as the trio. The fi
movement is an especially beautiful hymn-and-fuguing-tune, remar
able for the chromatic character of its fuguing theme; it perfectly p
vides the sense of climax and completion required by a large wor
Cowell returned in September 1957 from a year spent listeni

to the varied music of Asia, and several subsequent works were gene
rated by what he describes as "submitting himself to the contag
of old music in Persia, South India, and Japan. Much of this mu
ties as neatly into his taste for modal variation as the American relig
styles have done, with the added interest of a great rhythmic complex
and Cowell has been enjoying the challenge of making the near
monodic styles of the Orient interesting for the symphony orchest
without denaturing them. His Thirteenth Symphony, for instance, ado
the Indian method of melodic variation which treats a single ton
if it were a motif. In Tokyo Cowell was taken to hear a rehearsa
the Emperor's musicians by a young Japanese composer who smiling
pointed out "Cowell's tone clusters" on the sho in the old gagaku,
seventh-century court music of Japan. Cowell was surprised tha
Japanese noticed the similarity of techniques, but i
and already incorporated into the piece he was t
second Louisville Commission, later entitled On
since performed in both the United States and Jap
was written for the twelve instruments of the mixed East-West orchestra
of the new Radio Tehran. The composer aimed it at a Middle Eastern

radio audience that likes its familiar folk-tune styles "straight," and at
performers some of whom had comparatively little experience in per-
forming from Western notation. Cowell of course conformed to the
request of the Iranian Minister of Fine Arts that he use no actual
Iranian tunes, since he sympathizes with the feeling that if Iranian
music is to be introduced abroad, Iranian composers who are being
trained in Tehran today naturally wish to write it themselves.7
At sixty-two Cowell has no intention of abandoning active explora-

tion of whatever music he may decide to make his concern. His technical
resources are richer than ever, and happily he has had, since 1954,
much more time to compose. Trying in 1955 to explain to an inter-
viewer why he has never been dedicated to any single musical style or
technique, Cowell exclaimed with some heat: "I want to live in the
whole world of music! . .. I have never deliberately concerned myself
with developing a distinctive 'personal' style, but only with the ex-
citement and pleasure of writing music as beautifully, as warmly, and
as interestingly as I can. If I am to develop the 'personal' style that
seems to be the aim of so many composers today, I've always felt the
music itself must do this for me, and that my job is simply to go on
making music.
"If a man has a distinctive personality of his own, I don't see how
he can keep it out of his music. And if he hasn't, how can he put it in?"
7 Resentment of Rimsky-Korsakov's use of Persian tunes in the Scheherazade

suite was often expressed to Cowell by Iranian musicians. It seems that the Russian
composer took down actual folk melodies on a visit to Esfahan (where they may still
be heard). That these tunes circulate as Russian music seems to Iranians a profound
injustice.
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A page from Henry C

in the composer's h
COMPOSITIONS CITED AND RELATED WORKS
Date Title and First Performance P

1908 Golden Legend MS l
An "opera" - melodic
1911 Adventures in Harmony MS
Pieces for piano; first use of
Musical Club, composer at pi
1912 Tides of Manaunaun Breitkopf & H
For piano; introduction to a pagea
March 10, 1912, San Francisco Mu
1912-25 Piano Works, Vol. I (1959), Vol. II (to appear).
1913 Dynamic Motion Breitkopf & H~
What's This?
For piano; chromatic dissonant counterpoint.

1914-15 Quartet Romantic M
For 2 flutes, violin, an
according to ratios of
Resources. 16 pp., com
cept perhaps electronic
1914-20 Vestiges MS - Flei
For large orchestra; el
1915 Quartet Euphometric MS - Fl
For string quartet. Meters de
special note lengths: 1/5, 1/
perhaps electronically. Simp
produce very complex met
movement.
Date Title and First Performance
1915-16 Some Music MS- Fle
Some More Music
Two brief very dissonant pieces for large orchestra. Massive to
for orchestra, used polyphonically against each other.
1916-17 Symphony No. I in B minor MS -

A student work, indebted to Mahler.
1923 Aeolian Harp Quincke - S
First piece for the strings of
1924 Ensemble
For string quintet. MS - Fl
For chamber orchestra (1925)
Composers Guild, Vladimir Shavi
into the Sinfonietta, q.v.
For string orchestra (1959).
Carlos Surinach, cond.
Movement for solo 'cello ace. by
string orchestra version.
1924-25 Irish Suite: Fairy Bells, Leprechaun, Banshee MS

Solo played on piano strings, acc. by chamber orche
Chamber Orch., N. Slonimsky, cond., composer at p
small mutes and hammers.
1926 Morceau pour piano avec cordes Courrier

For piano, using piano strings and piano key
Paris, composer at the piano.
1928 Sinfonietta Adler-Heinrichsh

A development for small
First movement, Marked
ber Orch., N. Slonimsky,
1931, Boston Chamber Orc
1928 Concerto for Piano and Orchestra Se
Dec. 28, 1929. Havana Phil., Ped
1929-30 Synchrony Adler-Heinrichs

For large orchestra. June 6, 1931,
cond.
1930 or Suite for Woodwind Quintet (sometimes Ensemble for.. .) M

1931 1934, New York. Georges Barrbre and his ensemble.
1934 String Quartet No. 2: Movement for String Quartet Priv
Summer, 1934, Mills College, Calif. Pro Arte Quartet.
1936 String Quartet No. 4: United Quartet Private

?1936, Philadelphia, Stringart Quartet.
1937 Old American Country Set: Blarneying Lilt, Comallye, Charivari (Shivare
Meeting House, Cornhuskers' Hornpipe.
For large orchestra. ?1938, Kansas City Phil., Karl Krueger, cond.
1938 Toccanta Arrow - Boosey

For flute, soprano (vocal
Otto Luening, flute; Eth
Gregory Tucker, piano.
1938-39 Symphony No. 2: Anthropos (Mankind)
For large orchestra. April 26, 1945, Rochester,
Orch., Howard Hanson, cond. (last mvt. only).
1938-39 Celtic Set G. Schir
For band. Also for orch
Francisco. Goldman Ban
1939 Shoonthree Mercu
For symphonic ban
Goldman Band, Rich
1939 Symphonic Set, Op. 17 Arrow- Boo
Version of Toccanta (1938) for large orches
has given a work: it was his 17th work for
Chicago. Illinois Sym. Orch., Izler Solomon
1942 Symphony No. 3: Gaelic A
For band with strings or orchest
1942 How Old Is Song Ernest Williams
For high voice and piano strings; text by
For violin and piano. 1944, New York
Cowell, piano.
1942 Hymn and Fuguing Piece (for piano)
1943 Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 1 (for sym
York. Goldman Band, Edwin Franko Goldm
1943 Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 1 (for piano)
All three have the same fuguing tune; the ite
a different hymn because the one originally writ
was mislaid.
1944 Animal Magic Lee
For symphonic band
conducting.
1944 Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 2 A
For string orchestra. Oct. 8, 1944, Ne
Daniel Saidenberg, cond.
1944-45 Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 3 A
For large orchestra. Jan. 26, 1954. Bost
cond.
1944-45 Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 4 A

For recorders or any 3 voices or instru
For 5 voices or instruments. April 14
David Randolph, cond.
For string orchestra. Oct. 26, 195
Stokowski, cond.
For symphony orchestra. Expanded to
playable separately. Jan. 16, 1958, St
1945 Sonata No. 1 for violin and piano A
Commissioned by Joseph Szigeti, at w
added to the original four. Nov. 10
Angeles. Sol Babitz, violin; Henry Cow
For piano. Incorporated into last m
1946 Symphony No. 4 AM
Oct. 24, 1947, Boston S
1946 Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 7 Pee
For viola and piano. Dec. 10, 1947, Univ.
Series. Milton Preves, viola; Henry Cowell,
1947 Hymn, Chorale and Fuguing Tune No. 8

For string quartet. Material used in Symphony N
and-fuguing-tune form. May 11, 1948, Tallahas
School of Music Faculty Concert.

Commissioned by Hans Ki
tional Sym. Orch., H. Kindl

For 'cello and piano. Material used in
hymn-and-fuguing-tune form. Nov. 16
Anniversary Concert, New School. Sidn
piano.
1950-55 Symphony No. 6 A

Nov. 14, 1955. Houston Sym.

For small orchestra. Nov
Stewart, cond.
1952 Symphony No. 8 A

For chorus (SATB) and or
All-Ohio High School Fest
1952 Set of Five AC
Commissioned by Mar
5 mvts. for violin, p
Maro and Anahid Ajem
1952-53 Symphony No. 9 AM
Commissioned by Otto Kaap. For
Wis. Green Bay Symphonette,
Fuguing Tune No. 9.
1952-53 Symphony No. 10 AM
Commissioned by Vienna Sym. Or
record unknown. Mar. 1, 1957,
See Hymn and Fuguing Tunes Nos
1953-54 Symphony No. 11: Seven Rituals of Music
Louisville Commission. May 29, 1954, Louisville Orch., Robe
cond.

For strings and oboe. Sept. 10, 1955, Santa Ba
Music Festival, Stokowski, cond.
1956 Variations for Orchestra A
Commissioned by Thor Johnson.
Johnson, cond.
1955-56 Symphony No. 12 A
1955-56 A Thanksgiving Psalm, from
For men's chorus and orchestr
Club and Boston Sym. Orch., Hu
Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 11
1955-56 String Quartet No. 5 Pet

Commissioned by the Coolidge
Critics' Circle Workshop, Juilli
1955-56 Septet AC
For 5 voices witho
Baltimore Chamb
Music Society, Hu
1956-57 Persian Set Pete
For 12 instruments
1957, Tehran. Minn
Metropolitan Museu
For 3 horns. Performance record unknown.
1957 Music for Orchestra, 1957 A

Sept. 7, 1957, Athens, Greece
cond. Nov. 1, 1957, Minneapo
1957 Ongaku ("Music" or "The Art & Science of Sound")
Louisville Commission. Mar. 26, 1958. Louisville Or
cond.
1957-58 Symphony No. 13: Madras Symphony P

For small orch. with 3 Indian instruments,
Madras, India, auspices Music Academy
Society, Thomas Scherman, cond., with In
tarang and the tablatarang. Oct. 19, 1959
cond.
1958-59 Antiphony AC
For divided orche
City Phil., Hans S
1958-59 Concerto for Percussion and Orchestra P
Solo (concertante) for percussion (4-5
1959- Symphony No. 14
Koussevitzky Foundation Commission. Work in progress.

The Music of Henry Cowell

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The Music of Henry Cowell

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The Music of Henry Cowell

Author(s): Hugo Weisgall

These activities contribute much to a portrait of Cowell, but the

point to another composer on the American scene who has submitted

At certain periods it has been taken for granted that composers

As to Cowell, despite what may seem at first a great diversity of

Henry Cowell was born in Menlo Park, near San Fra

The boy began to write music in 1908. The second t

Tone clusters are groups of adjacent tones (three or

Francisco organist. It was further agreed that Cowell s

Cowell went away immensely invigorated from this first meeting

It was soon clear to Seeger that a meaningful discipline, for so

Cowell's formal theoretical training in the Wester

All of Cowell's inquiries into new theoretical resources in music,

The relationships he noticed among expanding resources for music

The difficulty a crit

The vast amount of

The quantity of Cow

Unfortunately no catalogue raisonne exists, but m

One may trace two principal currents in Cowell's music. One of

One cannot divide Cowell's work into limited chronological "periods"

So it is possible to say that from 1919 to about 1931 Cowell devoted

Cowell's early dissonant chromatic works, which are least known

The Sinfonietta, in three movements, is certainly one of Cowell's

The first and longest movement is an extended fantasia, of a sort

While the Sinfonietta's harmonic sound at any given moment is

Synchrony (1929) is a single movement for large

It is in these three major works that Cowell firs

From about 1936 to 1950, when the Sixth Symph

articulate on the subject of what may be called the search for a

An intensely personal statement written in 1936 to accompany th

The work is original in spite of its simplicity, because the si

This manifesto pinpoints a vast amount of music wri

Many of the longer works of this intermediate period

widespread a type of musical structure, but the speci

In the late forties Cowell's four- and five-movement works began

Symphony No. 6 (1950) is of much larger and tighter conception.

Since 1941, a dozen or so two-movement wor

By the time the Eleventh Symphony is reached,

The Eleventh Symphony is subtitled "Seven Ritua

This is a masterful integration of superficially disparate elements of

The Twelfth Symphony (1956), as yet unperformed, is in ma

Cowell returned in September 1957 from a year spent listeni

of the new Radio Tehran. The composer aimed it at a Middle Eastern

At sixty-two Cowell has no intention of abandoning active explora-

7 Resentment of Rimsky-Korsakov's use of Persian tunes in the Scheherazade

Obo~s I. II. __ _____

b..too I.t _______

III ________ ______

A page from Henry C

Date Title and First Performance P

For piano; chromatic dissonant counterpoint.

1916-17 Symphony No. I in B minor MS -

1924-25 Irish Suite: Fairy Bells, Leprechaun, Banshee MS

1926 Morceau pour piano avec cordes Courrier

1928 Sinfonietta Adler-Heinrichsh

1929-30 Synchrony Adler-Heinrichs

Obo~s I. II. ___

III __