Henry Cowell
Henry Dixon Cowell (/ˈkaʊəl/; March 11, 1897 – December 10, 1965) was an American composer, writer, pianist, publisher, teacher [1][2][3] and the husband of Sidney Robertson Cowell. Earning a reputation as an extremely controversial performer and eccentric composer, Cowell became a leading figure of American avant-garde music for the first half of the 20th century — his writings and music serving as a great influence to similar artists at the time, including Lou Harrison, George Antheil, and John Cage, among others.[4][5][6] He is considered one of America's most important and influential composers.[2][7]
For the California state park, see Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park.
Henry Cowell
Cowell was mostly self-taught and developed a unique musical language, often blending folk melodies, dissonant counterpoint, unconventional orchestration, and themes of Irish paganism. He was an early proponent and innovator of many modernist compositional techniques and sensibilities, many for the piano, including the string piano, prepared piano, tone clusters, and graphic notation.[1][8] The Tides of Manaunaun, originally a theatrical prelude, is the best-known and most widely-performed of Cowell's tone cluster pieces for piano.
Early life[edit]
Childhood[edit]
Cowell was born on March 11, 1897, in rural Menlo Park, California, a suburb of San Francisco.[6] His father, Henry Blackwood "Harry" Cowell, was a romantic poet and recent immigrant from County Clare, Ireland.[9] His mother, Clara "Clarissa" Cowell (née Dixon), was a political activist, author, and native of the American Plains, who was 46 when she gave birth to Henry in addition to being over ten years older than her husband.[9][10][11][12] Clarissa's ancestry was similarly Scotch and Irish, although her paternal lineage had been in America for centuries, with figures including astronomer Jeremiah Dixon, one of the surveyors behind the American Mason–Dixon line.[13] After meeting for the first time, the two quickly wed and undertook bohemian lifestyles, residing in a small, crude cottage (later demolished in 1936) Harry had built on the outskirts of the city — where Henry would eventually be born. It was in his first few years that Henry had his first exposures to music.[14]
Musical career[edit]
New music and first tours[edit]
Beginning in the early 1920s, Cowell toured widely in North America and Europe as a pianist, with the financial aid of his former tutors — playing his own experimental works, seminal explorations of atonality, polytonality, polyrhythms, and non-Western modes.[33][6] He gave his debut recital in New York, toured through France and Germany, and became the first American musician to visit the Soviet Union,[2] with many of these concerts sparking large uproars and protests.[34] It was on one of these tours that in 1923, his friend Richard Buhlig introduced Cowell to young pianist Grete Sultan in Berlin. They worked closely together — an aspect vital to Sultan's personal and artistic development. Cowell later made such an impression with his tone cluster technique that prominent European composers Béla Bartók and Alban Berg requested his permission to adopt it.[35][36]
Later life[edit]
Seclusion and style shift[edit]
Despite the pardon — which allowed him to work at the Office of War Information, creating radio programs for broadcast overseas — his arrest, incarceration, and attendant notoriety had a devastating effect on Cowell.[80] Conlon Nancarrow, on meeting him for the first time in 1947, reported, "The impression I got was that he was a terrified person, with a feeling that 'they're going to get him.'"[81] He was often pestered by reporters to comment on the circumstances of his crimes and arrest, but often refused to do so.[82] The experience took a lasting toll on his music: Cowell's compositional output became strikingly more conservative soon after his release from San Quentin, with simpler rhythms and a more traditional harmonic language.[83]