Henry Cowell and John Cage: Intersections and Influences, 1933–1941Author(s): LETA E. MILLERReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 59, No. 1 (Spring 2006), pp. 47-112Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jams.2006.59.1.47 .Accessed: 05/02/2012 05:47

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Henry Cowell and John Cage: Intersectionsand Influences, 1933–1941

LETA E. MILLER

In July 1940 John Cage sent Henry Cowell a program from a percussionconcert at Mills College in Oakland, California. Cage and his colleagueshad performed Cowell’s Pulse on 18 July, along with works by Lou

Harrison, William Russell, Amadeo Roldán, José Ardévol, and Cage himself.In the lower right corner of the program, enclosed in a box for emphasis,Cage had inserted a quotation by Cowell predicting the future of music: “Ihonestly believe and formally predict that the immediate future of music lies inthe bringing of percussion on one hand, and sliding tones on the other, to asgreat a state of perfection in construction of composition and flexibility ofhandling on instruments as older elements are now,” Cowell proclaimed (seeFig. 1). Though he was pleased to receive this program, Cowell was appar-ently quite mystified by the quotation, whose source he could not recall. Cagewrote to him on 8 August 1940: “I am sorry that I didn’t let you know aboutusing the quotation for the program. I had used it on a program in Seattlealso. It comes from one of your letters to me, and I am glad that you seem toagree with it.”1

The letter to which Cage referred (sent by Cowell from prison in 1937 andtranscribed in Appendix B) has been buried for some years in the voluminousCowell papers at the New York Public Library. Examination of materials in

Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 59, Number 1, pp. 47–112, ISSN 0003-0139, electronic ISSN 1547-3848. © 2006 by the American Musicological Society. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission tophotocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, atwww.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.

This article developed from a paper I read at the Annual Meeting of the American Musico-logical Society in Seattle in November 2004. I am very grateful to the Committee on Researchand the Arts Research Institute of the University of California, Santa Cruz, for their financial assis-tance, and to many individuals who commented on drafts or offered help on this project. Thanksespecially to Amy Beal, George Boziwick, Sam Brylawski, Rob Collins, Peter Elsea, MichaelHicks, Laura Kuhn, Fredric Lieberman, Janet McKee, Gordon Mumma, David Nicholls, NancyRao, Christopher Shultis, Kenneth Silverman, and Richard Teitelbaum.

1. Letter, Cage to Cowell, 8 August 1940 (New York Public Library [NYPL] Cowell Col-lection, box 2, folder 44). All quotations from Cage’s letters are used with the permission of theJohn Cage Trust.

48 Journal of the American Musicological Society

this collection (which has only recently become available to researchers)2

serves not only to enhance our understanding of Cowell’s life and works but

2. Access to the Cowell Collection prior to the year 2000 was restricted by the will ofCowell’s widow Sidney. The library has attempted to assemble both sides of the correspondence;therefore some letters from Cowell cited here are copies.

Figure 1 Program for Cage’s second percussion concert at Mills College, 18 July 1940

Henry Cowell and John Cage 49

also to reveal and/or verify the extent of his impact on numerous figures inthe new music world, among them John Cage.

That Cage was influenced by Cowell is hardly news. Cage’s biographerscite his study with Cowell in 1933–34, although the exact timing and curricu-lum have heretofore been a matter of speculation.3 Some authors also men-tion professional interactions in the succeeding years and a few speculate ondirect influence, based on Cowell’s New Musical Resources (1930) or analysisof individual works. David Nicholls and David Bernstein, for example, havepointed to similarities in instrumentation and/or rhythmic structure betweenCowell’s Ostinato Pianissimo, United Quartet, and Pulse on the one hand andCage’s Metamorphosis, Imaginary Landscape No. 1, and three Constructionson the other.4 Cage himself, as well as numerous commentators, cite the impact of Cowell’s adventurous inside-the-piano works on Cage’s preparedpiano.5

Through an examination of primary sources, the present article reinforcessuch evidence of professional and artistic linkage. Indeed these sources docu-ment interaction between the two composers in nearly every area Cage ex-plored during the 1930s and 1940s: recording technology, percussion, dance,performance indeterminacy, sliding tones, extended instrumental techniques,and formal structures based on rhythmic organization. In pursuing this lin-eage, I am not positioning Cowell as the sole (or even primary) influence onCage in all of these areas. Questions regarding the transmission of ideas mustalways be approached with some caution. In Cage’s case in particular, stimulihave been shown to emanate from numerous sources, creating a fuzzy web ofinterconnections, cross-influences, and intertextual linkages. Nevertheless,there is value in untangling this web to focus on a single strand—in this case,the Cowell-Cage connection—not to suggest a simple cause-and-effect rela-tionship, but rather to illuminate the complexity of the transmission process itself.

3. James Pritchett’s article on Cage in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians isunclear on this matter (2nd ed. [2001], 4:796). Michael Hicks correctly concluded that Cagestudied in New York in 1934 (“John Cage’s Studies with Schoenberg,” American Music 8[1990]: 126–27).

4. See, for example, David Nicholls, American Experimental Music (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1990), 169, 173–74, 192–94, 207–8, 211; and his article “Henry Cowell’sUnited Quartet,” American Music 13 (1995): 195–217, esp. 214–15; and David Bernstein,“Music I: To the Late 1940s,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Cage, ed. David Nicholls(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 65, 69, 75.

5. Cage, “How the Piano Came to Be Prepared,” in Empty Words: Writings ’73–’78 (Middle-town, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1979), 7. Cage particularly cites Cowell’s Banshee, notingthat he acted as one of what Lou Harrison called Cowell’s “pedal boys.” Despite the authority ofCage’s article, his recollections contain several errors. The performance of Bacchanale took placeat Seattle’s Repertory Playhouse, not in the Cornish School Theater. Cage also implies thatBacchanale was the first work in which he inserted a screw between the piano strings, although hehad used the same preparation in the Second Construction, as discussed below.

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Cowell shared his ideas freely, not only with Cage, but also with numerouscomposers, performers, publishers, and patrons, as well as friends outside ofmusic. He treated his ideas rather like community property, hastily dashing off exuberant letters about various concepts, some of which were only in their formative stages. Cowell’s motivation was partly social, partly aesthetic,and partly practical; and in many cases his correspondence generated concretefinancial support. Charles Ives, in particular, funded numerous projects—some groundbreaking (such as New Music), others impractical (such as therhythmicon)—in response to Cowell’s letters.

Cowell himself seems to have been genuinely pleased when others usedtechniques or concepts he developed—though he was hardly hesitant aboutclaiming credit for his originality.6 Perhaps for this reason, as well as his habitof sharing ideas as soon as they popped into his head, he sometimes failed tocredit others, notably his own teacher, Charles Seeger.7 Thus Cowell was notbothered by any use Cage (or anyone else) may have made of the ideas he of-fered; nor is Cage’s own originality thereby diminished. But it does confirm,as David Nicholls put it, that neither Cage nor any other composer can beseen as an orphan.8

6. An interesting example is an undated letter from Cowell to Béla Bartók (probably ca.1924–25), also mentioned in David Nicholls’s article on Cowell in The New Grove Dictionary ofMusic, 2nd ed. (2001), 6:621. Cowell notes that he would be delighted if Bartók used tone clus-ters. He writes: “I am delighted to hear you have found an entirely different use for them, becauseI think that the more different ways that are found to employ them, the better they will establishthemselves. They sound so natural to me, it is surprising that no one seems to have thought ofthem before, but so far as I know I ‘invented’ the idea and the name, and how to write themdown.” (The letter is in the NYPL Cowell Collection, box 16, folder 497.) Cowell briefly reviewshis use of clusters, concluding that “they certainly never sounded like noise to me either! Sincemajor and minor seconds are to be heard in the overtone series I think they will come to soundlike music to the people who now find them too dissonant to bear.” (The justification of toneclusters as deriving from the overtone series is posited by Cowell in New Musical Resources [NewYork and London: Alfred Knopf, 1930; repr., ed. David Nicholls, Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1996], 114–16.) Quotations from Cowell’s letters and other unpublished mate-rials are used with the permission of the David and Sylvia Teitelbaum Fund, as successors toHenry and Sidney Cowell.

7. Seeger’s statement (in “Henry Cowell,” Magazine of Art 33, no. 5 [May 1940]: 288) thatCowell “swiped many of his best (and some of his worst) ‘ideas’ from me, and occasionally ac-knowledges it” has been quoted by many authors. For example, see David Nicholls’s essay accom-panying the 1996 reprint of Cowell’s New Musical Resources, 163. An acknowledgment to Seegeras “my friend and former teacher” in the preliminary, unpublished version of New MusicalResources (ca. 1919) was omitted in the published version (1930). Some of the ideas Cowell trans-mitted to his students seem to have come from Seeger. For instance, the opening section of LouHarrison’s Music Primer (New York: C. F. Peters, 1971) deals with “composing with melodicles(or neumes).” Harrison credits his source (“Henry Cowell taught me most of this”) but the concepts seem to have come from Seeger; see Charles Seeger, Studies in Musicology II: 1929–1979,ed. Ann M. Pescatello (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1994),138–49.

8. David Nicholls, “Cage and the Ultra-Modernists,” paper presented at the Annual Meetingof the Society for American Music, Fort Worth, TX, 12 March 1999; published in German trans-

Henry Cowell and John Cage 51

Questions of direct influence aside, Cowell’s and Cage’s approaches to mu-sical composition were often at the root quite different. Cowell’s inventivenesswas fed by his insatiable appetite for new approaches to composition, espe-cially those he could derive from non-European musics. He seems always tohave been chasing a new idea. Cage, on the other hand, frequently focusedconsiderable time and energy on the systematization of a single concept: hebuilt overarching theories and precompositional systems by carrying the aes-thetic implications of novel ideas to logical, yet often radical conclusions.Despite their contrasting personalities and approaches, however, the two mennourished each other’s creativity. In fact, Cage’s theories, some of them builton ideas pioneered by Cowell, in turn influenced Cowell’s work. (A chronol-ogy of events mentioned in this article is given in Appendix A.)

Initial Contacts and Influences, 1933–35

Cage first met Cowell in 1933 after sending his Sonata for Clarinet for possi-ble publication in New Music. Cowell rejected the piece for that purpose, butsuggested that it might be played at a New Music Society Workshop in SanFrancisco.9 In a 1975 interview with Rita Mead, Cage recalled hitchhiking toSan Francisco only to find the clarinetist woefully unprepared. So, to theamusement of those present, he picked out the sonata with one finger on thepiano.10 The precise date of this event is undocumented, but it most likelytook place between mid-April 1933, when Cowell returned to California fromNew York, and mid-July of the same year, when Cage’s name and phonenumber appear in Cowell’s personal calendar.11

lation as “ ‘Nicht jedermann kann ein Waisenkind sein’: John Cage und die Ultramodernen,”MusikTexte 106 (August 2005): 26–30.

9. The workshops were organized in February 1933; an article by Marjory Fisher in the SanFrancisco News, 18 Feb. 1933 (“New Projects Promise Aid to Composers”), announced the orga-nizational meeting. See Rita Mead, Henry Cowell’s New Music, 1925–1936: The Society, the MusicEditions, and the Recordings (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1978), 227.

In the Henmar Press works catalog Cage describes the Sonata for Clarinet as “an unaccompa-nied chromatic work in three movements, the last of which though not rhythmically is a retro-grade canon of the first” (John Cage [Catalog of Works; New York: Henmar Press, 1962], 24, no. 6753).

10. Mead cites the recollections of Ray Green in a 1976 interview (Henry Cowell’s NewMusic, 228). Cage also tells this story in “A Composer’s Confessions,” an address he gave atVassar College on 28 February 1948, which is published in Musicworks 52 (Spring 1992): 6–15,esp. 9; reprint in John Cage, Writer: Previously Uncollected Pieces, selected and ed. RichardKostelanetz, 27–44 (New York: Limelight Editions, 1993).

11. Cage’s name and phone number are entered on 14 July. Many of Cowell’s calendars arein the NYPL Cowell Collection, box 72. Cage’s name and address in Los Angeles also appear on31 August. (The entries on particular days are often not linked to specific times.) That Cowell waspresent for this informal concert is confirmed by Cage, who wrote Weiss that he “saw” Cowell

52 Journal of the American Musicological Society

Despite this less-than-successful first impression, Cage was (typically) per-sistent. At the end of October 1933 he wrote to Cowell in New York, describ-ing his in-progress Sonata for Two Voices and asking for career advice: mightCowell be able to suggest any solution to the “economic problems of thecomposer” that would give Cage “leisure to study and write”?12 Cowell sug-gested that Cage contact Adolph Weiss in New York to prepare for study withSchoenberg, who had just emigrated to the U.S. and was considering movingfrom Boston to New York City.13 (Instead of settling in New York, of course,Schoenberg moved to Los Angeles in 1934, where Cage caught up with himthe following year.) Cowell seems to have referred students to Weiss routinely:in a letter of 7 March 1934, for example, he told Weiss that, following a lec-ture, “two young ladies asked me with whom to study in the East, and I gavethem your address. . . . They wished to coach for Schoenberg, I think. . . .”14

Weiss replied that he was “now Schoenberg’s assistant. I take his pupilsthrough harmony and counterpoint and [I include] such outsiders as are will-ing to join the class.”15 That spring Cage wrote to Weiss asking for lessons,but also (with some boldness) requesting a scholarship, since he had nomoney to pay for the instruction.16

By fall 1934 Cage was in New York studying with Weiss for a dollar anhour, followed by bridge matches involving Weiss, his wife Mitzi, Cowell, andCage or Wallingford Riegger.17 At the same time Cage enrolled in Cowell’scourses at the New School. His name appears (c/o A. Weiss, 23 W. 8th St.,

there. In “A Composer’s Confessions” (p. 9), Cage also says that he “met” Cowell on this occasion.

12. Letter, Cage to Cowell, 26 October 1933 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 2, folder 44).Composed in 1933, the six-minute Sonata for Two Voices is written for “any two or more instru-ments encompassing the following ranges: I: c� to c� and II: c to c�” (John Cage [Catalog ofworks, 1962], #P6754).

13. On 18 March 1934 Weiss wrote to Cowell that Schoenberg “is coming to N.Y. nextmonth to stay. He will probably take up residence in Forest Hills, so that we can get in a lot oftennis” (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 16, folder 460). Weiss had studied with Schoenberg inGermany beginning in the mid-1920s.

14. Letter, Cowell to Weiss, 7 March 1934 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 18, folder 538).15. Letter, Weiss to Cowell, 18 March 1934 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 16, folder 460).16. Letter, Cage to Weiss, undated, but probably March 1934; transcribed in William

George, “Adolph Weiss” (PhD diss., University of Iowa, 1971), 267–68. George suggests a dateof 1933, which Michael Hicks has shown to be too early. Hicks places it more realistically inMarch 1934 (“John Cage’s Studies with Schoenberg,” 136n7).

17. Letter, Cage to William George, 14 February 1965, transcribed in George, “AdolphWeiss,” 46. See also Richard Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage (New York and London:Routledge, 2003), 7. I have found no evidence to support Cowell’s claim that Cage “studied dis-sonant counterpoint and composition with me for a season in California” before going to NewYork to work with Weiss (Cowell, “Current Chronicle,” Musical Quarterly 38 [1952]: 124;reprinted in Richard Kostelanetz, comp., John Cage [New York and Washington: Praeger, 1968],94). Since Cage’s name appears in Cowell’s 1933 calendar twice, however (see note 11 above), it is possible that some instruction took place in this year.

Henry Cowell and John Cage 53

N.Y.C.) among the twenty students on the enrollment sheet for Cowell’s“Primitive and Folk Origins of Music,” twelve hour-and-a-half lectures inwhich Cowell promised to show “the beginnings of music and its slow devel-opment through folk music, Oriental cultivated music and early European cul-tivated music into our present system” (see Fig. 2).18 The charge for the classwas $10 (equivalent to nearly $145 in 2005) but Cage received one of tenscholarships offered by Cowell, compliments of Ives.19 Cage later recalled alsotaking “Modern Harmony” and “Survey of Contemporary Music.”20 The lat-ter course was probably Cowell’s “Contemporary American Music,” whichconsisted of presentations by leading composers of the day. Cage might alsohave sat in on Cowell’s “Work Course in Music,” entitled “New Possibilitiesin Piano Playing,” where Cowell demonstrated extended techniques on thekeyboard. Among Cowell’s class lists in the New York collection, however,Cage’s name appears only on the one for “Primitive and Folk Origins ofMusic.”

Cowell’s objective in this course was to show that the history of musiccould be studied laterally. As he later explained: “Music in every stage of devel-opment exists somewhere today”;21 its origins could be seen in what at thetime was often called (with no pejorative or patronizing intent) “primitive music,” and its development could be traced through the cultivated traditionsof Asian musics and through folk music (which both influenced and was influ-enced by art music) into the work of modernist composers. The course in-cluded units in “Primitive Music” (musics of the Eskimos, Bushmen, Indiantribes, South Sea Islanders, Africans); “Oriental Music” (ancient Indian andChinese musics, Japanese, Siamese, Balinese, and Javanese musics); “FolkMusic” as a “hybrid between primitive and cultivated systems”; and “Euro-pean cultivated music” (how it grew from “Oriental and folk sources” and its

18. Most references to the course Cage took from Cowell cite its title as “Music of theWorld’s Peoples,” which was a different class (with a similar but not identical syllabus). The enroll-ment sheet for “Primitive and Folk Origins of Music” is found in the NYPL Cowell Collection,box 146, folder 91. The course description is taken from the New School catalog, Fall 1934.

19. Cage mentions the scholarship in his interview with William George (George, “AdolphWeiss,” 47). The funding of the scholarships by Ives is mentioned in a letter from Cowell to Ives,2 October 1934 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 18, folder 539): “A thousand thanks for this ad-ditional $100 check. I . . . offered ten scholarships to modern music courses at the New School.Since there have been lots of applicants I may give five more, the $50 to be taken out of the sur-plus which you write will be available later. I feel that these students who apply, and have nomoney to pay for the education in modern music which they sincerely desire, should be encour-aged as far as we possibly can.”

20. For the Birds: John Cage in Conversation with Daniel Charles (Boston and London:Marion Boyars, 1981), 70. Cage later recalled that Cowell “presented regular informal concertsthat brought about a parade of modern composers, their music and ideas, that was more to myliking than anything offered by the League of Composers or the International Society forContemporary Music” (Kostelantez, John Cage, 118).

21. Cowell, liner notes to the LP recording “Music of the World’s Peoples,” Ethnic FolkwaysLibrary Albums FE 4504–8, 1951–55.

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development from Palestrina to the modern era). One is struck by Cowell’s al-most postmodern linkage of what H. Wiley Hitchcock called the cultivatedand vernacular traditions,22 as well as his concern with commonalities amongthe world’s musical cultures. (In this vein, it is interesting to recall Cowell’srole in the prehistory of the American Musicological Society. On 29 January1930 “a small group of men [including Cowell, Joseph Schillinger, CharlesSeeger, Joseph Yasser, and Otto Kinkeldey] interested in the rapprochement

22. H. Wiley Hitchcock, Music in the United States: A Historical Introduction (EnglewoodCliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969).

Figure 2 Enrollment sheet for Henry Cowell’s course, “Primitive and Folk Origins of Music,”New School for Social Research, Fall 1934 (Reprinted by permission of the David and SylviaTeitelbaum Fund, as successors to Henry and Sidney Cowell)

Henry Cowell and John Cage 55

of science and music met . . . with the purpose of organizing a purely local so-ciety.” At meetings of this organization, members read scholarly papers focus-ing not only on the Western art music tradition, but also on world musictopics.23 At the New York Musicological Society, precursor of the AmericanMusicological Society, Cowell read three papers on theory and comparativemusicology in 1932 and 1933.)24 During his 1934 course at the New School,Cowell illustrated his lectures by hosting live performances of world musicsand playing numerous recordings he had brought back from Germany duringhis studies at the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv in fall 1931 and fall 1932.

By the time Cowell went to Germany in 1931, the Berlin institution hadbecome the world’s preeminent archive of recordings of indigenous musicsfrom around the world.25 Cowell had the opportunity there to study Indianand Indonesian music with noted specialists, and to listen critically to numer-ous recordings in the collection. He reported excitedly on his sonic journeyaround the world in letters to his family, Ives, and Carlos Chávez. In October1931, for instance, Cowell described to his stepmother Olive his “very inter-esting work with Prof. Sam[b]amoorthy, of Indian music at the U. of Madras,here on visit” and reported that he was allowed to borrow recordings fromthe archive’s collection to take home for study.26 On 7 November he wrotethat he was “working with records from Malacca (north of Singapore) and [I]will switch today to Central Africa records.”27 A week later he ecstatically reported to Ives that “the African Pygmy music with which I am working is

23. Bulletin of the New York Musicological Society, no. 1 (Nov. 1931): 1. On the evolution ofthis organization into the New York Musicological Society (1931) and then into the founding ofthe AMS (1934), see Richard Crawford, The American Musicological Society, 1934–1984: AnAnniversary Essay (Philadelphia: American Musicological Society, 1984), 8–9. On 5 March 1931Cowell read a paper at the meeting of the New York Musicological Society that dealt with hisrhythmicon.

24. For a list of papers read at the New York Musicological Society, see Nancy Yunhwa Rao,“American Compositional Theory in the 1930s: Scale and Exoticism in ‘The Nature of Melody’by Henry Cowell,” Musical Quarterly 85 (2001): 598–99. More details are found in the Bulletinof the New York Musicological Society. On 10 January 1932, Cowell read a paper, “Some Aspects of Comparative Musicology,” in which he discussed his study of Javanese music in Germany. On 9 January 1933 he presented a paper entitled “Evidence against Some Axioms of MusicalTheory,” in which he illustrated, with thirty-three examples, “the present divergence of theoryand practice.” On 26 November 1933 he spoke on “Hybrid Forms in Comparative Musicology,”in which he reviewed “the importance . . . of the mixed styles resulting from the meeting of diverse musics” (Bulletin of the New York Musicological Society, nos. 2 and 3 [Nov. 1932 and Nov.1933–34]).

25. For a history of the archive, see the notes accompanying the recording The Demonstra-tion Collection of E. M. von Hornbostel and the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv (Ethnic FolkwaysLibrary FE 4175).

26. Letter, Henry Cowell to Olive Cowell, 27 October 1931 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box17, folder 519).

27. Letter, Henry Cowell to Olive Cowell, 7 November 1931 (NYPL Cowell Collection,box 18, folder 520).

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really unbelievably attractive! It is based on a set of pipes tuned to the har-monic series from the 4th to the 14th . . . , and they play two or three partharmony, often very dissonant, and complex rhythms, often an apparent osti-nato, but each measure of the repeat changed in rhythm.”28 By the end of themonth, Cowell had moved on to New Guinea,29 and in early December hewrote to his parents that he was “studying every day, for two hours, withRaden Mas Jodjana, Javanese music. . . . I also am studying the Balinese pointof view with A. F. Roemahlaiselan, the wonderful young Balinese dancer andmusician here. . . . Outside of this, I have been working on records of the mu-sic of Colombian and middle Brazilian Indians, Carolina Islands, andGreenland esquimos.”30 In the same letter, Cowell reported that he had man-aged to obtain $100 from the New School to purchase a copy of the Berlinarchive’s 120-cylinder “demonstration collection.” (In 1959 this collectionwas transferred to Indiana University. Along with a second set of cylinders, itformed the basis for an LP recording of excerpts from the collection, present-ing music recorded between about 1900 and 1913.)31 The following year,when Cowell returned to Germany to continue his studies and perform con-certs, he happened on an exceptional opportunity to buy discs of uniquerecordings of world musics for one mark each. He bought 300 for the NewSchool, another 300 for himself, and an additional set for Chávez.32

The cylinders were extremely fragile and they deteriorated with each play-ing. So upon returning to the U.S., Cowell began investigating ways of copying them. In January 1933 he reported to his parents that he had renteda machine with which he could rerecord rare records and transfer old cylindersto discs. To Ives, Cowell wrote that he had found a machine not only to copyold recordings, but also to “make our own records [that] . . . can be dupli-

28. Letter, Cowell to Charles Ives, 14 November 1931 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 18,folder 520).

29. Letter, Henry Cowell to Olive Cowell, 21 November 1931 (NYPL Cowell Collection,box 18, folder 520).

30. Letter, Henry Cowell to Harry and Olive Cowell, 11 December 1931 (NYPL CowellCollection, box 18, folder 521). Cowell wrote a similar letter to Ives on the same day.

31. The Demonstration Collection of E. M. von Hornbostel.32. On 14 December 1988 Sidney Robertson Cowell wrote an annotation on a letter from

Henry Cowell to Carlos Chávez from 11 September 1932 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 18,folder 528): “Henry Cowell had discovered in Berlin a treasure trove consisting of hundreds ofsingle copies of recordings made in remote parts of the world where a German concern (Odeon?)that made playback equipment had sent its salesmen, only to find that nobody wanted it unlessthey could hear their own music on it. The salesmen then made small editions of local perfor-mances in order to sell their machines, and they sent the head office in Berlin a single copy of eachsuch recording as evidence of diligence—largely before World War I. The music was often unadul-terated and extraordinary, and the records were being sold for one mark each in 1932—about 5 cents. Henry bought 300 for the New School, 300 for himself and this letter has to do with anoffer to do as much for Carlos Chavez’ collection of music in Mexico.” Chávez replied expressingstrong interest.

Henry Cowell and John Cage 57

cated perfectly.”33 Thus began the New Music Recordings scheme, with theever-generous Ives funding the purchase of the machine and the ever-resourceful Cowell arranging and supervising the recording sessions. On 22 November 1933 Cowell reported to Slonimsky that the first session hadbeen held “yesterday,” during which the musicians recorded the Andante(third movement) of Ruth Crawford’s String Quartet (her ground-breakingstudy in dynamic counterpoint) and Adolph Weiss’s Three Songs for voice andstring quartet.34

The New Music Recordings project was at the center of Cowell’s attentionthroughout 1934, as he drummed up subscribers. So when Cage studied withCowell in New York that fall, among the skills he learned was how “to run therecorder,” as Cowell recalled four years later.35 Thus Cage learned a mechani-cal skill that would have far-reaching consequences both for his own composi-tional development and for the new music community in general. When hemoved to Seattle in 1938, Cage had access to a broadcasting studio in whichhe not only recorded his percussion ensemble but also explored recordedsounds as a compositional resource.

A second concern of Cowell’s in 1933–34 was percussion music. In March1933 he published William Russell’s Fugue for Eight Percussion Instruments inhis New Music Orchestra series,36 and followed up the next spring withVarèse’s Ionisation. Even before publishing Varèse’s influential work, however,Cowell took a leading role in facilitating its premiere (6 March 1933) at a PanAmerican Association concert in New York. Nicolas Slonimsky conducted andCowell played the piano.37 As the concert approached, Cowell and Slonimsky

33. Letters, Henry Cowell to Harry and Olive Cowell, 8 January 1933; and Cowell to Ives,10 January 1933 (both in NYPL Cowell Collection, box 18, folder 531).

34. Postcard, Cowell to Slonimsky, 22 November 1933 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 18,folder 537): “I had made yesterday the first records for the new series of recordings which I will issue beginning Jan. 1st. $5.00 per year for four 12 in. records. Will you subscribe? Do help mewith this! The records are standard and of the best quality. The first, of Crawford quartet andWeiss quartet with voice, are wonderful!” An undated letter to Ives appears to stem from the pre-vious day: “I hoped to see you at the recording place this morning, but suppose you were keptbusy. I will not know how my record sounds for a week or so, but from some of the tests theyplayed back to me, I think it should give some idea of the composition, anyway. I hope you willreally start practising [sic] your pieces, and make records of them soon. . . . The recording com-pany gives you a chance to practise [sic] over your things and get warmed up, and will make al-most an indefinite number of attempts at a record if the first are no good . . .” (NYPL CowellCollection, box 21, folder 647). Rita Mead, citing an invoice from 7 December 1933, writes thatthe “first recording . . . was made at the Capitol Sound Studios on December 1, 1933” (HenryCowell’s New Music, 263). Perhaps she is referring to the actual pressing of the record. See alsoJudith Tick, Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer’s Search for American Music (New York andOxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 185–86.

35. Letter, Henry Cowell to Sidney Robertson (Cowell), 8 August 1938 (NYPL CowellCollection, box 97).

36. On determining the month of the publication, see Mead, Henry Cowell’s New Music, 226.37. Mead (ibid., 436n153), lists the composers who volunteered as performers (which she

derived from liner notes to the recording Nicolas Slonimsky: History Making Premieres; Orion

58 Journal of the American Musicological Society

exchanged a number of letters regarding the needed instruments and how togather them. (“A bongo is an Antillian drum, such as I have here in my of-fice,” Cowell explained in a letter of 14 February. “A Tarole is a special sort offlat, small snare drum. I am going tomorrow to Fisher’s to find out about allthe instruments. . . . Yours strikingly but non-percussively. . . .”)38 Slonimskyrepeated Ionisation at the Hollywood Bowl four months later (16 July); andon this occasion Cage was in the audience.39 The following year (28 May1934) Cowell himself directed a performance of the work on a New MusicSociety concert in San Francisco for which he included dancers from BettyHorst’s “concert dance group.”40

In early 1934 Cowell began composing his own percussion ensemblework, Ostinato Pianissimo, stimulated by a request from Slonimsky in anticipa-tion of another Pan-American Association concert on 15 April. Cowell wroteon 23 January: “I forget if I wrote you that I will be delighted to work on apercussion work, specially for your concert, and will start next week.”41 InMarch, he told Ives that he was “just finishing a piece for Nicolas for percus-sion” and Slonimsky told Cowell that he was “all a-twitter” about it, notingthat performances of percussion music were much easier to arrange than or-chestral concerts.42 However, when all was said and done, the piece was notincluded on the April program, and in the fall—while Cage was studying inNew York—Cowell and Slonimsky were still corresponding about how andwhere to present it.43

Whether Cowell showed Cage the score for Ostinato Pianissimo cannot bedetermined, but his preoccupation with arranging for the work’s premiereduring the time Cage was studying with him suggests that the topic of percus-sion ensemble music would likely have surfaced. Despite their best efforts,

7150). A second performance of Ionisation took place on 15 April 1934; Cowell was in Californiaat the time. Howard Thompson wrote in a New York Times review that Ionisation “suggestedpossibilities, but in itself it could hardly be called music” (“New Music Given by Pan-Americans,”New York Times, 16 April 1934).

38. Letter, Cowell to Slonimsky, 14 February 1933 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 18,folder 532).

39. Cage mentions hearing the concert in For the Birds, 73, but remembers the year as 1935.The concert actually took place at 5:15 p.m. on Sunday, 16 July 1933 (Los Angeles Times, displayad on 16 July and article by Isabel Morse Jones, “Father Finn Accomplishes Hardest Tasks withSmile: Dinner Party, Choir Rehearsals Both Reveal Pleasant Adroitness; Bowl Programs for ThisWeek Discussed,” on the same day).

40. A copy of the program is reproduced in Mead, Henry Cowell’s New Music, 285.41. Letter, Cowell to Slonimsky, 23 January 1934 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 18, folder

538). For an analysis of this piece, see H. Wiley Hitchcock, “Henry Cowell’s Ostinato Pianis-simo,” Musical Quarterly 70 (1984): 23–44.

42. Letters, Cowell to Ives, 14 March 1934 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 18, folder 538);and Slonimsky to Cowell, 7 March 1934 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 13, folder 387).

43. “The percussion concert is difficult to arrange, but I am trying,” Slonimsky wrote toCowell on 14 October 1934 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 13, folder 387).

Henry Cowell and John Cage 59

Cowell and Slonimsky were unsuccessful in arranging a performance ofOstinato Pianissimo in 1934, and it remained for Cage himself to pick up theball, presenting the work’s premiere nine years later in a highly publicized concert at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The performance, sponsored by the League of Composers and given full-court press in Life, tookplace on 7 February 1943.44

After his 1934 study in New York, Cage returned to California, where hebegan to compose his own works for percussion ensemble. He often cited asthe immediate stimulus for his first piece, Quartet (ca. 1936),45 a remark byfilmmaker Oskar Fischinger (1900–1967) that “the spirit which is inside eachof the objects of this world” could be liberated by its sound.46 ThoughFischinger may have served as the immediate catalyst, however, it is hard tobelieve that Cage was oblivious to the musical influences around him: notablyVarèse’s Ionisation, Cowell’s publications of percussion works in New Music(which Cage later used in his own concerts in Seattle), and even, perhaps,Ostinato Pianissimo.47

Cowell’s percussion works were frequently associated with dance, just asthose of Cage and other composers would be in the ensuing years. In January1934, for example, Cowell began teaching a “rhythm course” at AnnMundstock’s dance studio in San Francisco.48 By 1935 he was working in asimilar capacity for Hanya Holm, founder of the Wigman School in NewYork,49 as well as for Tina Flade, another Wigman student who was teachingat Mills College in Oakland. (Flade was originally trained as a concert pianist.)Mary Wigman (1886–1973), who opened her first school of dance in

44. “Percussion Concert: Band Bangs Things to Make Music,” Life, 15 March 1943, 42 and 44.

45. Quartet is dated 1935 in the Henmar Press catalog of Cage’s works (John Cage, 1962)and on the published score, but this date appears to be too early. (The date on the manuscriptseems to have been entered long after the composition was completed.) Evidence points to thepiece having been composed in 1936 or even early 1937. I would like to thank András Wilheimand Christopher Shultis for calling my attention to the possible dating error of this work.

46. Cage, For the Birds, 73. See also Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 8; Cage, Composer’sConfessions, 9; and Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors: The Heretical Courtship inModern Art (New York: Viking Press, 1965), 86.

47. David Nicholls suggests that Ionisation might have been a less important stimulus forOstinato Pianissimo than William Russell’s Fugue and the non-European musics Cowell had beenstudying. He cites as evidence the repeating ostinato patterns that form the underlying structureof Cowell’s work (Nicholls, American Experimental Music, 168 and 189). Cage was strongly in-fluenced by Russell, whose ideas he characterized as “always musical and exciting” (Cage, letter toPeter Yates, 24 December 1940 [Yates Papers, Mandeville Special Collections Library, Universityof California, San Diego]).

48. In a letter of 4 October 1933 Cowell told his parents that he had “accepted to give arhythm course for Ann Mundstock’s school” beginning in January 1934 (NYPL Cowell Collec-tion, box 18, folder 536).

49. Holm opened this school in 1931. After 1936 it became the Hanya Holm School ofDance.

60 Journal of the American Musicological Society

Dresden in 1920, often performed with percussion accompaniment, and hercourse of study included training in percussion instruments. Her powerfulwar-memorial Das Totenmal (Requiem), set to poetry by Albert Talhoff, fea-tured a percussion orchestra.50

By the end of the fall semester 1934, Cage had become so friendly withCowell that he rode from New York back to California in Cowell’s car.51

During the long trip they would have had ample time to discuss Cowell’s pri-mary interests at the time: recording technology, world musics, the relation ofmusic and dance, and percussion. The two were in California by 30 Decem-ber, when Cowell wrote to his stepmother: “Am in L. A. Will stay over a dayor so—see Schönberg—am organizing N. M. [New Music] Society here thru John Cage.”52 The changed relationship between Cage and Cowell isclear from a letter of March 1935. No longer addressing his teacher as “Mr. Cowell,” Cage opened: “Dear Henry, Your card and you are too goodto me. I cannot describe how much I feel towards you of warmth and love.”53

Cage described his recent job in “scientific research,” his French horn lessons,and his anticipation of studying with Schoenberg. “I will also have a littlemoney to begin operations and I shall begin more immediately the work forthe [New Music] society,” he promised. This work consisted of arranging ahouse concert in Hollywood on 13 April 1935 by the shakuhachi playerKitaro Nyohyo Tamada, a florist Cowell had met in Mountain View, Cali-

50. For a statement by Wigman about the role of percussion in this dance, see Katherine M.Brown, “The Work of Mary Wigman” (MS thesis, University of Utah, 1955), 52. The role ofpercussion in the Wigman School is also discussed in Leta E. Miller and Fredric Lieberman, LouHarrison (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006, forthcoming), 37.

51. In a letter to his stepmother on 1 December 1934, Cowell said he would probably drivewest with Cage and Mary Weiss (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 18, folder 540). In another letter,dated 15 December (without a year, but related to this trip), Cowell said: “Start back thisThursday—John Cage and Don St. Paul will be with me” (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 21,folder 640). “Don St. Paul” is Don Sample, an artist Cage met in Paris in 1930 who returned tothe U.S. with him; the two men lived together for several years. See Christopher Shultis, “Cageand Europe,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Cage, ed. David Nicholls (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press), 22–24; and Thomas S. Hines, “ ‘Then Not Yet “Cage” ’: The LosAngeles Years,” in John Cage: Composed in America, ed. Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junkerman(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 84–86 and esp. 97n37. For more onthe relationship of Don Sample, John Cage, and Harry Hay, see Stuart Timmons, The Troublewith Harry Hay: Founder of the Modern Gay Movement (Boston: Alyson, 1990), which containssome dating errors; and (more reliably) Catherine Parsons Smith, “Athena at the ManuscriptClub: John Cage and Mary Carr Moore,” Musical Quarterly 79 (1995): 356–58. On the cross-country car trip, see also Cage’s interview with William George in Goerge, “Adolph Weiss,” 48.

52. Postcard, Henry Cowell to Olive Cowell, 30 December 1934 (NYPL Cowell Collection,box 18, folder 540).

53. Letter, Cage to Cowell (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 2, folder 44). The letter is un-dated but can be placed near the end of March 1935 from internal evidence. Cage refers to an up-coming concert by the Abas String Quartet, sponsored by Pro Musica and featuring Schoenberg’sthird quartet, which took place at the home of Mrs. H. A. Everett in Pasadena on 26 March 1935(“Reception Set by Pro-Musica,” Los Angeles Times, 26 March 1935, A7).

Henry Cowell and John Cage 61

fornia, a year earlier. Tamada performed “Buddhist Temple music rangingfrom about 700 to 1785 A.D.,” according to a preview article in the LosAngeles Times.54 (Tamada also presented a New Music Society members-onlyconcert in San Francisco at the Cowell house two weeks before the LosAngeles performance.)55

Cage described the venue for the Los Angeles concert—the “famouslyavant-garde King’s Road house” of Rudolph Schindler—as having a Japanesequality because of its “warm and quiet beauty” and “luxuriant bamboo.”56

He had announcements printed on Japanese paper, which he mailed to thosewhom Cowell recommended. Cowell accompanied Tamada to Los Angelesfor the performance.

By the end of 1935, Cowell had begun to develop a regular pattern ofclassroom teaching and dance studio accompanying on the West Coast to bal-ance his work each fall in the East. His courses at the New School in New York(which began with individual lectures in 1928 and regular classes in 1930) hadexpanded to include an array of offerings in theory and harmony, the theoryand practice of rhythm, the “creation of music,” and world musics.57 To this

54. Isabel Morse Jones, “Words and Music,” Los Angeles Times, 7 April 1935, A10. The as-sumption that Tamada operated a vegetable stand, which comes from an interview flutist RachelRudich conducted with Sidney Cowell in 1994, appears to be incorrect (liner notes to the record-ing The Universal Flute [Music and Arts CD-1012]). In a letter of 14 March 1934, Tamada in-vited Cowell to come to “my flower shop” and then to dinner the following week (NYPL CowellCollection, box 14, folder 411). Cowell composed The Universal Flute for shakuhachi solo in1946 and dedicated it to Tamada; see William Lichtenwanger, The Music of Henry Cowell: ADescriptive Catalog (New York: Institute for Studies in American Music, 1986), no. 699.

55. See Mead, Henry Cowell’s New Music, 316–17 and 582; she includes a facsimile of the invitation to this 1 April 1935 event. The Cowell house was the home of Cowell’s father Harryand stepmother Olive. Lou Harrison, who was present for the concert, recalled that it included anensemble of koto, shamisen, shakuhachi, and singer (Harrison, interview with Leta E. Miller andFredric Lieberman, 31 March 1994). A copy of the announcement for this concert is found in theNYPL Cowell Collection, box 143. That collection also contains an announcement for a programon 26 February [1935] at the International House in Berkeley, featuring Tamada on shakuhachiand Cowell playing his own piano works.

56. The quotations come from an interview Thomas Hines conducted with Cage in 1992(Hines, “ ‘Then Not Yet Cage,’ ” 65); and a letter from Cage to Cowell in 1935 (NYPL CowellCollection, box 2, folder 45, undated but dealing with this concert). Cage wrote to Cowell: “Theconcert, April 13th at 8:30 p.m., 835 N. Kings Rd., Hollywood. That is Saturday. And the house. . . is very beautiful and has been built by R. M. Schindler. Although the architecture is modern, ithas a very warm and quiet beauty; there is a quality about it which is Japanese and Japanese peo-ple, when they have seen it, have loved it. There is, for instance, a great deal of luxuriant bambooand the house opens completely into the outside, so that the bamboo will actually be there. I amhaving Ward Ritchie print some announcements on Japanese paper. . . .” Cage and Don Sampleoccupied a guest apartment at the Schindler house for a short period. Hines (“ ‘Then Not YetCage,’ ” 81–84) describes the house in detail and includes a photo of the apartment. TheSchindler House is still used as a concert venue for new music (http://www.MAKcenter.org [accessed 15 June 2005]).

57. In an unpublished interview with Louis Vaczek on his work at the New School, Cowellsaid, “I was invited first in 1928 to give single lectures. One was on the music of Russia before we

62 Journal of the American Musicological Society

had any diplomatic relations” (18 June 1962, transcript in NYPL Cowell Collection, box 72).Catalogs for the New School are in the NYPL Cowell Collection.

58. The most thorough discussion of Cowell’s arrest and imprisonment is Michael Hicks,“The Imprisonment of Henry Cowell,” this Journal 44 (1991): 92–119. Hicks also discusses thematter in Henry Cowell, Bohemian (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 134–43, the most complete and carefully researched source on Cowell’s early life, where he takes asomewhat harsher view of Cowell’s criminal culpability.

59. The warrant was dated 21 May but not served until 22 May, when Cowell returned froma night out in San Francisco. The letter from Strang is dated 26 May (NYPL Cowell Collection,box 96).

60. Letter, Cage to Cowell, 18 June 1936 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 95).

demanding schedule Cowell added rhythm classes at the New York WigmanSchool. In California, he arranged for courses in rhythm and the history ofmusic for the dance at both Mills and Stanford, and he taught his world musicsurvey at the University of California Extension in San Francisco. But Cowell’sprospects of steady employment were suddenly cut short in May 1936 by hisarrest on a morals charge.

Interactions in 1936–37: Percussion Music and Elastic Form

This article is not the place to review the details of Cowell’s imprisonmentfrom 1936 to 1940, which have been discussed extensively in recent litera-ture.58 But highly significant to our purposes is his interaction with Cage dur-ing the years of his incarceration. Four days after Cowell was taken to theRedwood City Jail by the San Mateo County Juvenile Officer,59 Gerald Strangwrote to Olive Cowell from Los Angeles: “All [Cowell’s] friends down herehave been calling me to offer their assistance—Schönberg, Weiss, Cage,Buhlig, Kuhnle. . . .” On 18 June Cage wrote to Cowell directly, apparently inresponse to a card he had received. His distress is apparent even through hisvaliant attempt to be encouraging:

Receiving your card was very fine, and it put me directly into what might becalled another world that I have been living in for you,—sometimes uncon-sciously, because I know that you are all right. I refuse to be downhearted. It isonly those who do not know you who will suffer. Maybe I am evading some-thing. Maybe I don’t understand. But I cannot but believe that you are as youalways are. Perhaps I shouldn’t say anything. But I want to say something thatyou may know that I am stronger than ever your friend.60

Prison rules severely restricted the number of letters Cowell was allowed tosend, but he nevertheless managed to keep up a lively correspondence withmany in the new-music world. On 23 March 1937 he sent a long letter toCage, filled with advice that helped focus the direction of Cage’s work overthe next several years (see Appendix B). “I was pleased to hear that you are

Henry Cowell and John Cage 63

interested in percussion developments,” Cowell wrote. “I was just on thepoint of trying to form a sort of symphonic percussion ensemble in SF and an-other in NY before my arrest. . . .”61 Cowell offered to lend Cage his percus-sion instruments, housed at Mills, Stanford, or with his parents in SanFrancisco. Most importantly, however, Cowell predicted that the future ofmusic lay in the “perfection” of percussion and sliding tones, a statement sub-sequently quoted by Cage on two concert programs (as described at the be-ginning of this article). The first step, Cowell explained, was for Cage to locatea shop that could build percussion instruments; he advised Cage to developnew and practical instruments and arrange them so that a single player couldcontrol several at once: “Try making a water drum—shaped like tympani, a little water in lower kettle part. . . . Circle water gently for glissandi. It is one of[India’s] more effective instruments.” Cowell also advised Cage to collaboratewith dancers (“all dance studios want [drums]”), and he recommended Cageto Mundstock for dance studio work. Although Cage didn’t build a waterdrum or go to work for Mundstock, he began collaborating with dancers inLos Angeles and later Seattle, and he developed new instruments, amongthem the water gong (through a commission to write music for synchronizedswimmers).62 When lowered into the water, the vibrating gong created slidingtones.

Three months previously, in January 1937, the Dance Observer had pub-lished Cowell’s article “Relating Music and Concert Dance.” For a number ofyears, Cowell had been struggling to develop methods by which music anddance could meet on an equal footing, rather than having one art act in a sub-servient capacity to the other. At first he attempted to create a contrapuntal relationship between music and dance in the work Synchrony (1930), writtenfor Martha Graham and premiered in a concert version by Slonimsky.63 In his 1937 article, however, Cowell proposed an entirely different—and quiterevolutionary—solution: writing music in an elastic form that would allow thecomposition to be expanded, contracted, or rearranged to suit the choreogra-phy. “While the dance errs on the side of too great a tendency to possess vaguestructure, and to be improvised in creation,” Cowell wrote, “music today undoubtedly errs in the opposite direction of being too rigid.” He proposed

61. Letter, Cowell to Cage, 23 March 1937 (the original is in the NYPL Cowell Collection,box 115, folder 3 of 3; there is a copy in box 97).

62. John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press,1961), 86.

63. Synchrony was never performed with dance, but Slonimsky presented the concert version in Paris in June 1931. Stokowski conducted the American premiere in Philadelphia on 1 and 2 April 1932. Critical reception was very cool. For more on this work, see Leta E. Miller,“Henry Cowell and Modern Dance: The Genesis of Elastic Form,” American Music 20 (2002):3–4. Synchrony was issued on an LP recording in 1967 (CRI 217) and remastered on CD forCitadel CTD 88122 (1997). A short-score manuscript of the original version is at the Library ofCongress.

64 Journal of the American Musicological Society

instead a “middle ground” between the typical fixed musical work and onethat was “so freely improvised as to be vague and purposeless, wanderingformlessly.”64

Cowell’s aim was both pragmatic and artistic. His previous method ofworking with dance entailed watching the choreography, taking down the“counts,” and then writing music to fit. Cage (and many other composers)worked in the same manner.65 However, this compositional method provedunsatisfactory for a number of reasons. Not only did the music function as aservant to the dance, but the choreography itself was rarely finalized when thecomposer began to write; as the dance evolved, its rhythmic structure mightchange, requiring musical alterations. Even if those issues could be solved,Cowell was clearly in no position to visit dance studios and observe choreogra-phies in 1937. Yet dancers wanted him to compose for them, even from hiscell in San Quentin. Elastic form solved all of these issues: music and dance re-tained independence while the score allowed for adaptability; and the com-poser had no need to observe the dancer’s physical motions.

Though the stimulus for Cowell to develop elastic forms arose from thesepractical—and idiosyncratic—circumstances, the concept also held a fascina-tion for him on purely aesthetic grounds, and the precedents he cited for itcrossed historical and generic boundaries. “There is much evidence that thetroubadours and minnesingers never sang their products twice exactly alike,”he wrote. “. . . It was the differences in each performance that interested theauditors. . . . Folk-music develops in the same way.”66 At the end of 1937Cowell wrote to Percy Grainger:

Do you think there might be a greater amount of minstrel-like freedom intro-duced into musical composition? Lately it would seem that modern music hasgone in the direction of more and more exact writing down of notated details,making the performer more than ever a reproducer of each minute factor as di-rected by the composer. I seem to react strongly against this, and wish to com-pose works so flexable [sic] in form that a fine performer can legitimatelycontract or expand the form. . . . I am working to make such an apparently fan-ciful idea practical. Bardish freedom about a central theme, so presented as tobe practical for modern musical situations is the aim. The advantage is in notfreezing the work into a set figure, and in giving the performer as creative a jobas the originator (both are composers). The performer would have to be bold

64. Cowell, “Relating Music and Concert Dance,” Dance Observer 4, no. 1 (January 1937):7–8.

65. See, for example, Cage, “Composer’s Confessions,” 10. Lou Harrison noted that “al-most always, in working with dancers, I have composed music after the dance has been com-pleted, which has led to some problems, but also has been a pleasure in a way, because you knowwhat’s to do. . . .” However, Harrison also cited instances in which he composed music to fit thedancer’s counts only to find that the music “didn’t fit” because the dance had changed in the in-terim (interview with Leta E. Miller and Fredric Lieberman, 29 December 1993).

66. Cowell, “Relating Music and Concert Dance,” 8.

Henry Cowell and John Cage 65

enough to take the challenge, and perhaps this would be a very good idea—itwould eliminate the musically impotent!67

The key to writing a successful elastic composition was devising an organi-zational principle that would admit flexibility, yet retain structure. If the workfollows the guidelines in Cowell’s 1937 article, it “will, in any of its ways ofpresentation, have form; but it may be easily adapted to the changes and free-doms so essential to the dancer’s creation.”68 The trick was to create a musicalcomposition that maintained coherence under whatever manipulation itmight undergo in service to the dance. Cowell composed a piece to illustratethis idea, and, though it was not printed in the Dance Observer, it survives inmanuscript along with six pages of detailed performance instructions. SoundForm No. 1 (1936) is characterized by a “rhythm theme” (> > o —) that oc-curs as given, inverted (o o > —), or in retrograde (— o > >) on three met-ric levels: quarter notes, measures, and four-measure units (see Ex. 1). AsCowell noted in his instructions, “the larger sections follow the same plan ofaccents and dynamics as will be found within smaller divisions.”69 (Cowell’sinstructions provide no explanation for the three symbols. On the beat levelthey clearly indicate accentuation, but on the larger metric levels, they appar-ently represent relative dynamics: strong [>], moderate [—], and soft [o].) Asimilar layering of accent/dynamic patterns is found in his United Quartet,dating from the same year as Sound Form No. 1. The > > — > — accent pat-tern appearing on the beat level at the beginning of the quartet is mirrored dynamically and in other ways on the measure level, the organization of thefirst movement, and even the structure of the entire five-movement quartet.70

Cowell explained that in Sound Form No. 1 major sections, four-measureunits, or individual measures could be repeated, extended, shortened, or omit-ted, and yet the “unity of form is preserved” by the repetition of the dynamicpattern on multiple metrical levels.

In the spring of 1937 Cowell wrote a second dance piece in elastic form forMartha Graham, who visited him in San Quentin.71 He composed for her aSarabande to accompany a dance about the Spanish Civil War entitledImmediate Tragedy. (The premiere took place on 21 July 1937.) Cowell’smusic, which is lost, consisted of two basic phrases for oboe and clarinet, each

67. Letter, Cowell to Grainger, 3 December 1937 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 97).68. Cowell, “Relating Music and Concert Dance,” 9.69. From Cowell’s handwritten notes accompanying the manuscript of Sound Form No. 1

(Cowell Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress). 70. See David Nicholls, American Experimental Music, 169–71, and “Henry Cowell’s

United Quartet.” A typed copy of Cowell’s own analysis of the piece (included with the first pub-lished score) is found in the NYPL Cowell Collection, JPB 01-63.

71. On 20 March 1937 Graham wrote to Olive Cowell, asking if she could set up a visit toSan Quentin the following month when she would be in San Francisco (letter, Martha Graham toOlive Cowell [NYPL Cowell Collection, box 95]).

66 Journal of the American Musicological Society

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Henry Cowell and John Cage 67

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68 Journal of the American Musicological Society

in two-measure, three-measure, and five-measure versions; these phrases couldbe arranged as needed to suit the dance.72

That Cage knew about Cowell’s elastic forms before he moved to Seattle inthe Fall of 1938 is confirmed by a letter from Sidney Robertson to Cowell,sent from San Francisco on 19 September 1938. She wrote:

Speaking of amazing ideas, I had dinner with the Cages, and John told meabout your elastic composition notion for the dance, and I really think that’sone of the most exciting things I’ve heard in a long time. It’s as completelyoriginal an idea as if it were a pure revelation. . . . It seems to me a very goodidea . . . regardless of its convenience under the special circumstance [i.e.,Cowell’s imprisonment]: It’s high time the dancer had a greater share in the composition of his music—you may have freed the dancer as well as the musician.73

How did Cage learn about elastic form? Cowell made no reference to it inhis March 1937 letter, despite his article in the Dance Observer three monthsearlier, which Cage might well have read. But Cage’s description of theprocess to Sidney Robertson nineteen months after this article appeared suggests that the issue was fresh in his mind, pointing to the likelihood of ad-ditional correspondence with Cowell in the interim. Cowell, in fact, had facilitated the meeting of Cage and Robertson (Cowell’s future wife). On 8 August 1938 he wrote to Robertson, recommending Cage as an assistantfor an unidentified “project” (probably the California Folk Music Project shesupervised for the University of California under the auspices of the WPA andin coordination with the Library of Congress).74

Other indications also suggest that Cage and Cowell corresponded be-tween March 1937 and Cage’s move to Seattle a year and a half later. In latespring or early summer 1938 Cage left Los Angeles for northern California.

72. Information about this piece comes from Norman Lloyd, who, along with Louis Horst,arranged Cowell’s music for Graham’s performance. See Lloyd, “Sound-Companion for Dance,”Dance Scope 2, no. 2 (1966): 11–12. The Graham company is still performing this work, but withdifferent music. In addition to Sound Form No. 1 and the Sarabande, Cowell composed theseelastic-form pieces for dance: Ritournelle, 1939, for Bonnie Bird’s Marriage at the Eiffel Tower(discussed below); Ritual of Wonder, 1939, for Marian Van Tuyl (score assembled by LouHarrison); and Chaconne, 1939–40, also for Van Tuyl.

73. Letter, Sidney Robertson to Henry Cowell, 19 September 1938 (NYPL Cowell Collec-tion, box 95).

74. Letter, Cowell to Robertson, 8 August 1938 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 97): “Per-haps John Cage would be a good one—do you know him? He is in the middle twenties, married,and lives at 545 Swarthmore, Pacific Palisades, Cal. He is a composer, very intelligent, studiedwith me in NY (and learned to run the recorder) and knows something of the interests in nativemusic, has studied with Schoenberg for some time, and then broke away.” (It was in response tothis letter that Sidney wrote on 19 September about having dined with the Cages and learnedabout elastic form.) On the WPA project, see Cornelius Canon, “The Federal Music Project ofthe Works Progress Administration: Music in a Democracy,” PhD diss., University of Minnesota,1963, 161–62.

Henry Cowell and John Cage 69

When he arrived in San Francisco he showed up unannounced at LouHarrison’s apartment on Francisco Street. Harrison recalls opening the doorto a stranger, who said, “I’m John Cage. Henry Cowell sent me.”75 Thoughthe date of this meeting is not documented, it certainly took place before 10 July, since Harrison introduced Cage to dancer Bonnie Bird, who was inCalifornia for only two weeks beginning 26 June. (Bird, a Graham protégée,had come to California from Seattle’s Cornish School to teach at the MillsCollege summer dance program.) Bird offered Cage a position in Seattle,which he accepted; he moved to the Northwest with his wife Xenia that fall,soon after his dinner with Sidney Robertson. Cage was in Seattle by 7 Octoberat the latest, when he accompanied Bird in a public demonstration.76

Whatever the source through which Cage learned about elastic form, theidea ultimately had a profound effect on his musical development, though itsimpact was not manifest until the 1950s. In 1959 Cage acknowledged thatCowell’s ideas on elasticity presaged compositions indeterminate in terms ofperformance.

Henry Cowell . . . was not attached . . . to what seemed to so many to be theimportant question: Whether to follow Schoenberg or Stravinsky. His earlyworks for piano, long before Varèse’s Ionization [sic] (which by the way, waspublished by Cowell), by their tone clusters and use of the piano strings,pointed towards noise and a continuum of timbre. Other works of his are inde-terminate in ways analogous to those currently in use by Boulez and Stock-hausen. For example: Cowell’s Mosaic Quartet, where the performers, in anyway they choose, produce a continuity from composed blocks provided byhim. Or his Elastic Musics, the time lengths of which can be short or longthrough the use or omission of measures provided by him. These actions byCowell are very close to current experimental compositions which have partsbut no scores, and which are therefore not objects but processes providing ex-perience not burdened by psychological intentions on the part of the composer.77

Although Cage thus positions Cowell’s musical elasticity as a harbinger ofthe indeterminate works of the 1950s (and beyond), his reference to the 1935Mosaic Quartet is not quite accurate. Cowell authorizes the five short move-ments of this work to be played in any order and/or repeated at will; other-wise, however, the quartet is not assembled from “composed blocks.” Cagemay have confused or conflated this quartet with other compositions byCowell, namely the Sarabande for Martha Graham cited above, or—even

75. Lou Harrison, personal communication to the author, 1994.76. The school term at Cornish began on 12 September after a registration period of 1–10

September. On Cage’s work in Seattle, see Leta E. Miller, “Cultural Intersections: John Cage in Seattle (1938–40),” in John Cage: Music, Philosophy, and Intention, 1933–1950, ed. DavidPatterson, 47–82 (New York and London: Routledge, 2002).

77. Cage, “History of Experimental Music in the United States,” in Silence: Lectures andWritings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 71. (The essay was originally pub-lished in German in the 1959 issue of Darmstädter Beiträge.)

70 Journal of the American Musicological Society

more likely—Ritual of Wonder (1939), which was composed in precisely themanner Cage describes. Cowell wrote Ritual of Wonder in prison for dancer/choreographer Marian Van Tuyl. He provided thirty-seven cells (mostly onemeasure in length) to be used to construct most of the work. Cowell then en-trusted Lou Harrison with the task of developing a full-scale composition thatwould meet the demands of the choreography.78 Although there is no conclu-sive evidence that Cage saw the completed score of Ritual of Wonder, thework was performed at Mills College on 10 January 1941 along with Cage’sown Fads and Fancies in the Academy and other pieces. Cage played the pianoduring this performance. Since he collaborated closely with both Harrison andVan Tuyl in 1940–41, Cage most likely heard about the compositionalprocess of Ritual of Wonder from them.

In regard to indeterminacy—as in other areas—Cowell provided but onemodel for an approach that later became a hallmark of Cage’s work. Begin-ning in the 1950s, Cage would increasingly explore the possibilities of indeter-minate performance and composition processes, the influences for which aremanifold: his interactions with Merce Cunningham on the linkage of musicand dance, the ideas and works of New York composers Christian Wolff,Morton Feldman, and Earle Brown, and the impact of visual artists such asMichel Duchamp, to name but a few.79 In this context Cowell’s elastic works,written more than a decade earlier, began to take on new relevance in Cage’sevolving aesthetic, which increasingly aimed at the subordination of his ownintentions to external compositional determinants or the input of numerouscollaborators. Typically, then, Cowell toyed with a compositional idea that hedid not pursue (he stopped writing elastic works after his release from prison),but which provided an early model for Cage and others to develop in waysCowell may not have anticipated.

Cage’s Years in Seattle, 1938–40

Cage’s first project after moving to Seattle in 1938 was to form precisely thetype of “symphonic percussion ensemble” Cowell had described in his letterthe previous year. Cage’s group presented three public concerts at the CornishSchool and two at Mills in 1938–40; the “Cage Percussion Players” alsotoured in Idaho, Montana, and Oregon.80 For their initial performance on

78. I present a detailed discussion of Ritual of Wonder, with examples of Cowell’s cells andHarrison’s use of them, in “Henry Cowell and Modern Dance,” 12–16.

79. In a 1967 letter to Peter Yates, Brown complained about not getting enough credit forpioneering works indeterminate in terms of performance (letter, Earle Brown to Yates, 20 January1967 [Yates Papers, Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego]).

80. Cage’s Seattle percussion ensemble is discussed in detail in my articles “The Art of Noise:John Cage, Lou Harrison, and the West Coast Percussion Ensemble,” in Perspectives on Ameri-can Music, 1900–1950, ed. Michael Saffle, 215–63 (New York and London: Garland, 2000); and“Cultural Intersections: John Cage in Seattle (1938–40).”

Henry Cowell and John Cage 71

9 December 1938, which Cage later proclaimed to be “the first concert ofmusic for percussion instruments alone,”81 he drew on Cowell’s New MusicOrchestra Series volume 18 (1936) for the entire program, with the exceptionof his own Trio and Quartet, which he had composed before leaving LosAngeles. On the third Cornish program (9 December 1939), Cage featuredthe quotation from Cowell on the “future of music”—with attribution butwithout permission—extracted word-for-word from Cowell’s 1937 letter (seeFig. 3).

Micro-macrocosmic forms

The two major percussion works Cage wrote in Seattle (Constructions 1 and2), as well as a number of later works (for example, the third Construction,Double Music, the Sonatas and Interludes, and others), are based on a micro-macrocosmic system that also reflects ideas previously explored by Cowell. InCage’s highly developed system, the organization of small sections mirrorsthat of larger units—strikingly similar to Cowell’s unification principle inSound Form No. 1 and the United Quartet.82 There is no direct evidence thatCage knew Sound Form No. 1, but he may have received a copy of the quartetfrom Gerald Strang. On 26 September 1937 Cowell wrote to his stepmotherthat the United Quartet was “finally out in print” (in a special edition of NewMusic) and that he hoped that Strang would send copies to “everyone whomight use one. He has a list to send them to. . . .”83 Parts of the quartet—such as the first movement, which consists of five sections of twenty-five mea-sures each—bear similarities to Cage’s forms.

A more direct link between Cowell’s formal structures and Cage’s micro-macrocosmic system is Pulse, a percussion quintet Cowell wrote at Cage’s in-stigation. Cage knew this work intimately, since he presented its premiere in Seattle on 19 May 1939. Prior to this concert, he wrote to numerous com-posers around the country requesting percussion music. In response, Cowellsent Pulse and, later in the year, the sextet Return.

Cowell, of course, might have suggested that Cage program OstinatoPianissimo, which had still not been performed, but this work—requiringeight players—was probably too unmanageable for Cage’s ensemble. Cagehad only seven performers on his concert, and among them were some non-musicians, including his wife Xenia. Cage’s group repeated Pulse on their thirdconcert (9 December 1939), along with Return (see Fig. 3).

81. Cage, “Composer’s Confessions,” 10. Cage made a similar comment in a 1942 press re-lease, a copy of which is found among the documents in the Cage Collection at the NorthwesternUniversity Music Library.

82. David Bernstein suggests that works such as the United Quartet might have been influ-enced by Charles Seeger’s discussion of “verse form.” See Bernstein, “Music I,” 69; and Seeger,Studies in Musicology II, 196.

83. Letter, Henry Cowell to Olive Cowell, 26 September 1937 (NYPL Cowell Collection,box 97).

72 Journal of the American Musicological Society

Figure 3 Program for Cage’s third percussion concert at the Cornish School, Seattle, 9 December 1939

Henry Cowell and John Cage 73

Cowell finished composing Pulse at the end of March 1939, when he re-ported on his progress in letters to Slonimsky and Blanche Walton.84 Asshown in Figure 4, the work’s form bears strong similarities to the micro-macrocosmic system Cage would use in his own percussion pieces beginninglater that same year.85

Pulse is built around the number five. Written for five players, it containsfive large sections and a coda, with extra, non-thematic measures at the begin-ning, end of section B�, and end of the piece. Furthermore, four of the fivesections (A, B, B�, and C) contain five subsections and every subsection con-tains five measures. Divisions between one subsection and the next are markedby changes in instrumentation, as shown in Example 2. In section A, for

Figure 4 Schematic diagram of the form of Cowell’s Pulse (1939)

84. On 19 March 1939 Cowell wrote to Blanche Walton that he had just put the finishingtouches on the work. On 26 March 1939, he wrote to Slonimsky that he had just finished thepiece (both letters are in the NYPL Cowell Collection, box 97). The title of the work is not givenin Cowell’s letters, but it is clear that he is referring to Pulse. Cowell wrote to Walton, “I have justnow finished putting the finishing touches onto a larger work (twenty pages of score) for percus-sion instruments, for performance in an all-percussion concert to be given in Seattle in May.” On29 May he wrote to Slonimsky about the work’s premiere (Cowell to Slonimsky, NYPL CowellCollection, box 97). In the 26 March letter, Cowell described the work as requiring six players.The published score calls for five, but periodically Cowell specifies the need for an “extra player”who dampens instruments and takes doubled parts. It is not clear when Cowell wrote Return.Although Lichtenwanger (The Music of Henry Cowell, 169) states that Return was performed on19 May 1939, it actually was not played until the third concert at Cornish on 9 December.

85. David Nicholls also points out the relationship between Pulse and Cage’s Constructions,though I arrived at my conclusions independently (see Nicholls, American Experimental Music,173–74, 208).

74 Journal of the American Musicological Society

Example 2 Cowell, Pulse (Pulse 55-72072; Copyright © 1971 Music For Percussion, Inc.;copyright © 2001 Transferred to Colla Voce Music, Inc., www.collavoce.com. Reprinted by permission)

(a) Mm. 1–13 (beginning of section A)

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Henry Cowell and John Cage 75

Example 2 continued

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76 Journal of the American Musicological Society

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Henry Cowell and John Cage 77

Example 2 continued

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78 Journal of the American Musicological Society

instance, the first subsection features dragon’s mouths, tom-toms, gongs, andpipe lengths, while the second features woodblocks, drums, cymbals, andbrake drums. Section B (Ex. 2b) introduces a steady eighth-note themeplayed first on rice bowls, then on temple gongs. Cowell deliberately added astructural irregularity to his scheme, however, by omitting one of the expectedsubsections in A� The procedure bears notable similarities to his ideas on elas-tic form: one section of Pulse is shortened by five measures, but the composi-tion retains coherence by the repetition of the pattern of fives within eachsubsection. (Sidney Cowell noted that her husband “always liked the Indian

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Example 2 continued

Henry Cowell and John Cage 79

idea that perfection was not something a man could decently aspire to; it was akind of presumption or pretentiousness. He mentioned that while Indianswove or decorated silver with repetitive patterns they saw to it that there wasalways somewhere an irregularity which made the required ‘decent’ imperfec-tion in the work.”)86

In Cage’s micro-macrocosmic works, subsections similarly parallel the pat-tern of the larger units. The First Construction (in Metal), premiered nearlyseven months after Cage performed Pulse, contains sixteen sections, each withsixteen measures, plus a nine-measure coda. The sixteen sections are orga-nized into a large-scale pattern of 4, 3, 2, 3, 4, and each sixteen-measure sec-tion is subdivided in exactly the same way.87 The Second Construction (firstperformed in February 1940 at Reed College in Portland) also contains six-teen sections of sixteen measures, in this case subdivided into units of 4, 3, 4,and 5. Cowell delineated his subsections by timbre changes; Cage emphasizedhis by contrasts in rhythmic structure as well. As Example 3 shows, eachphrase is unified by a cohesive rhythmic character.

Though Cage may have been inspired by Cowell’s works in which largersections reflect the structure of smaller units, he (characteristically) developedthis idea into an overarching system that, in its dependency on rhythm as theprimary organizational principle, provided a viable alternative to the pitch- orharmony-based systems he had previously found limiting. His frustration withtwelve-tone serial composition on these grounds has often been cited. Hewrote in 1948: “I was convinced . . . that although 12-tone music was excel-lent theoretically, in making use of the instruments which had been developedfor tonal music, it had continually to be written negatively rather than straight-forwardly: it had always to avoid the harmonic relationships which were nat-ural to the tonal instruments. . . ; I was convinced that for atonal musicinstruments proper to it were required.”88

In the 1930s those instruments for Cage were percussion, a term he used“in a loose sense to refer to sound inclusive of noise as opposed to musical oraccepted tones.” In writing for such instruments, “structural rhythm” sup-planted pitch and harmony as the organizing principle. “In contrast to a struc-ture based on the frequency aspect of sound, tonality,” Cage explained, “thisrhythmic structure was as hospitable to non-musical sounds, noises, as it wasto those of the conventional scales and instruments.”89

86. Hitchcock, “Henry Cowell’s Ostinato Pianissimo,” 41n16. 87. First Construction (in Metal) has been analyzed by numerous writers. See, for example,

Nicholls, American Experimental Music, 206–9; Bernstein, “Music I,” 71–74; James Pritchett,The Music of John Cage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 16–17; and HeatherLeslie Sloan, “Percussion Music Is Revolution: The Treatment of Structure and Themes in JohnCage’s Three Constructions” (MA thesis, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1992).

88. Cage, “Composer’s Confessions,” 9.89. Quotations in this paragraph from ibid., 9–10; and John Cage, “Composition as Pro-

cess,” in Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 19.

80 Journal of the American Musicological Society

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Henry Cowell and John Cage 81

The prepared piano

Among the instruments Cage specified in Constructions 1 and 2 is the “stringpiano,” a term Cowell coined to indicate performance on the strings of agrand piano. In the First Construction Cage used some extended techniquespioneered by Cowell, such as having the pianist sweep the lower strings with agong beater or play on the keys with one hand while muting the strings withthe other.90 In the Second Construction the pianist mutes the strings of twolow notes with the fingers of the left hand, “which fingers slide along thestrings of the piano. . . , while the keys indicated are played by the right handon the keyboard.” (In The Banshee [1925] Cowell also has the performer slidealong the strings of the piano, although no notes are played on the keyboard.)In addition, a series of notes encompassing a tritone in the middle range of thepiano are muted by a piece of cardboard, and in one section, Cage asks the pi-anist to trill on the keyboard while sliding a metal cylinder along the strings,producing a “siren-like sound.” (Cowell had the pianist use a “flat metal ob-ject” on the strings in the third movement of A Composition for String Pianowith Ensemble [1925].)91 Most importantly, however, Cage used a techniquein the Second Construction that he employed often in later works and thatwould prove highly influential in the new music world: he instructs the playerto insert a screw between the strings of the note middle C.

Typically, Cage may have used Cowell’s terminology and techniques in thetwo Constructions, but he then extended his model in a revolutionary new di-rection. For Bacchanale, performed two months after the premiere of theSecond Construction, Cage devised a prepared piano to meet a practical need:the Repertory Playhouse in Seattle, venue for Syvilla Fort’s dance recital on 28 April 1940, was too small to accommodate his percussion ensemble. Onthe other hand, Cage did have access to a piano “at one side in front of thestage.”92 Though the requirements of the dance concert might have provided

90. Cowell used similar techniques in a number of works. For example, the pianist sweeps the strings with the fingers in The Banshee (1925). In Sinister Resonance (1930), Cowell instructsthat certain notes be muted by pressing on the strings while the same notes are played on the keyboard.

91. Nicholls draws a link between this piece and Cage’s prepared piano (American Experi-mental Music, 164).

92. Cage, “How the Piano Came to Be Prepared,” 7. This story is told by numerous writers,but the venue is often cited incorrectly as the Cornish School’s theater, stemming from Cage’sown erroneous recollection in the 1970s. Though Cage recounts that the need for him to use apiano instead of a percussion ensemble for Fort’s recital led to home experiments in which he putvarious objects inside the piano, Bonnie Bird recalled an additional stimulus: during one of herdance classes at the Cornish School a rod rolled onto the piano strings. Bird’s daughter, HeidiSmith, repeatedly heard this story from her mother and told it to the author in a private conversa-tion in 1998. Bird herself related the tale to William Fetterman, who quotes a 1991 interviewwith her in John Cage’s Theatre Pieces: Notations and Performances (Amsterdam, Netherlands:Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996), 8. The accounts by Cage and Bird are not necessarily con-tradictory, since the rod falling into the piano may have also stimulated the home experimentsCage described.

82 Journal of the American Musicological Society

the immediate catalyst, Cowell’s work was at the forefront of Cage’s mind. Ashe told Stephen Montague in 1982: “I remembered how the piano soundedwhen Henry Cowell strummed the strings or plucked them, ran darning nee-dles over them, and so forth. I went to the kitchen and got a pie plate and putit and a book on the strings. . . .”93 Many years later Cowell reflected thatCage “got an idea of writing for prepared piano by knowing my own thingsfor the strings of the piano very well.”94

Although Cage had inserted a screw between the piano strings in theSecond Construction, the instrument functioned in that work as one memberof a quartet. In Bacchanale, on the other hand, he created the sound of an in-strumental group controlled by a single player at the keyboard: by placing vari-ous objects at different locations within the instrument, Cage created acolorful palette of timbres. He later reflected that the prepared piano was “apercussion orchestra of an original sound and the decibel range of a harpsi-chord directly under the control of a pianist’s fingertips.”95 Cowell, in his1937 letter, had advised Cage to arrange percussion instruments so that oneplayer could control several at once. Cage did even better: he created a singleinstrument that could evoke the sound of an ensemble.

Sliding tones

At Seattle’s Cornish School, Cage was also able to conduct ground-breakingexperiments with recording technology. Nellie Cornish, founder and directorof the institution, began a radio school in May 1936 for which she built a stu-dio that Cage used when he arrived there two years later.96 Cage discoveredthat by varying the speed of the studio’s turntables between 331/3 and 78 rpmhe could create electronic sliding tones. While Cowell had looked uponrecording technology as a means for preserving rare musics and for capturingand distributing new music, Cage began to apply the technology to theprocess of composition itself, incorporating electronically generated soundsinto new works.

Cowell had been using vocal and instrumental sliding tones as expressivedevices since the 1920s. Though inspired in part by Asian musics (for instance,

93. Stephen Montague, “John Cage at Seventy: An Interview,” American Music 3 (1985):209–10. Cage does not mention the experience in Bird’s class during this interview. Other refer-ences by Cage in the Montague interview are somewhat confused. For example, he says that“when Lou Harrison came over and heard it, he said, ‘Oh dammit! I wish I’d thought of that!’ ”But Harrison was never in Seattle during this period and could have heard the prepared pianoonly months later, after Cage left Seattle and returned to the San Francisco Bay Area.

94. Cowell, interview by Beate Gordon (1962, transcript in NYPL Cowell Collection, box72).

95. Cage, “Composer’s Confessions,” 11.96. On the opening of the radio school, see Nellie C. Cornish, Miss Aunt Nellie: The Auto-

biography of Nellie C. Cornish (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964), 245–49.

Henry Cowell and John Cage 83

the Chinese opera productions he attended in San Francisco), he did not useslides to evoke concrete images of the Orient. At the same time, slides occa-sionally served programmatic ends, as in Atlantis (ca. 1926, which Cage couldnot have heard since it was first performed after his death),97 or The Banshee(which Cage knew very well). In these early works the slides project a wailingeffect—the weeping moon goddess Astarte and the drawing of the FeminineSoul into the ocean in Atlantis, and the “cries of the legendary Irish spirit” in The Banshee (though Cowell told Slonimsky that The Banshee’s title was anafterthought).98

Cowell also used sliding tones in non-programmatic works. He wrote inNew Musical Resources [1930]:

Natural sounds such as the wind playing through trees or grasses, or whistlingin the chimney, or the sound of the sea, or thunder, all make use of slidingtones. It is not impossible that such tones may be made the foundation of anart of composition by some composer who would reverse the programmaticconcept. . . . Instead of trying to imitate the sounds of nature by using musicalscales, which are based on steady pitches hardly to be found in nature, such acomposer would build perhaps abstract music out of sounds of the same cate-gory as natural sound—that is, sliding pitches—not with the idea of trying toimitate nature, but as a new tonal foundation.99

Cowell not only called for slides in instrumental works (for example, AComposition for String Piano and Ensemble [1925], the third movement of the Mosaic Quartet [1935], and later works such as the Symphony No. 11[1953]), but he also proposed a comprehensive system of classifying and notating them in “The Nature of Melody,” an extensive treatise he completedin prison but never published.100 In this theoretical work Cowell categorized

97. The score of Atlantis is unpublished, but the work is recorded on the CD Dancing withHenry: New Discoveries in the Music of Henry Cowell (Mode Records 101, 2001). The sliding fig-ures occur in both the voice parts and the string parts and are featured primarily in movements 1(“Introduction”), 3 (“The Weeping of the Arsete of the Moon”), and 7 (“Withdrawal of the SeaSoul to the Sea”).

98. The quotation is from Hicks, Henry Cowell, 115. On the title as an afterthought, seeNancy Rao, “Cowell’s Sliding Tone and the American Ultramodernist Tradition,” AmericanMusic 23 (2005): 295.

99. Cowell, New Musical Resources, 20.100. Cowell treated sliding tones in the section on the theory of scales. For a detailed discus-

sion and examples, see Rao, “American Compositional Theory.” Rao also discusses Cowell’s slid-ing tones in relation to Chinese opera and analyzes several instrumental works in “Henry Cowelland His Chinese Music Heritage: Theory of Sliding Tone and His Orchestral Work of 1953–1965,” in Locating East Asia in Western Art Music, ed. Yayoi Uno Everett and Frederick Lau,119–45 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004). Although Rao does not discuss TheBanshee in this article, she does talk about the slides in that work in “Cowell’s Sliding Tone,” 292–96. (In The Banshee, sliding the finger lengthwise along the string creates a pitch slide; crosswisesweeps of the strings create resonant clusters.) For an analysis of A Composition for String Pianoand Ensemble, see Nicholls, American Experimental Music, 159–64.

84 Journal of the American Musicological Society

various types of sliding tones that function as passing tones, appoggiaturas,and auxiliary notes; he also proposed a manner of notating a slide’s duration,pitch, boundaries, and angles. In New Musical Resources Cowell related pitchslides to tempo and dynamic slides as well.101 He also mentioned a slidingscale of tempo and dynamics in his unpublished “Rhythm Book,” written inSan Quentin. Cage later read the “Rhythm Book” and copied out its musicalexamples with a summary of part of the text, probably in New York during the1940s.102 Several authors have pointed to connections between Cowell’stempo slides and some of Cage’s early New York works (for example,Imaginary Landscape No. 4 and Music of Changes [1951]).103

Cage’s exploration of sliding tones dates back to the water gong he devel-oped in Los Angeles and later used in the first and second Constructions. Inhis early use of slides, Cage was most likely stimulated not only by Cowell’sadvocacy of them as a major force in the “future of music,” but also by Varèse’ssirens in Ionisation and other works.104 In Seattle, however, Cage extendedthe concept in a novel direction: for Imaginary Landscapes No. 1 (1939) andNo. 2 (1940), written to accompany dances by Bonnie Bird, he created elec-tronic glissandos that could be controlled precisely in terms of frequency andtime. (Imaginary Landscape No. 2 was eventually withdrawn, after whichCage used the same title for an entirely different composition.)105 Both of theImaginary Landscapes composed in Seattle call for four performers, two ofwhom play test-tone recordings on turntables. The players are instructed to change the machine’s speed with a “clutch” at precisely designated places.Assistants manipulating microphones control amplitude changes. The avail-ability of a radio studio was essential for the composition and realization of theImaginary Landscapes: 331/3 rpm was not available for home use in this era,but radio stations needed the long-play speed to record full programs for delayed broadcast.

101. Cowell, New Musical Resources, 83 and 94–96.102. The “Rhythm Book” cannot be dated definitively, but Cowell noted in letters from

prison that he was planning to write it after completing his melody book. Cage’s copies of the examples from the “Rhythm Book” are in the NYPL Cowell Collection, box 115, folder 3 of 3.Cowell’s letter of 23 March 1937 is attached to the copy of the examples. Rao concludes, fromthe placement of this letter, that Cage copied the material “in 1936–37, when [he] was a studentof Cowell’s in a course at the New School of Social Research” (Rao, “Cowell’s Sliding Tone,”317n15). Since Cowell was actually in San Quentin in this period, however, I think it more likelythat Cage copied out the examples after he moved to New York in 1942.

103. See, for example, Rao, “Cowell’s Sliding Tone,” 310–12, and Kyle Gann, “SubversiveProphet: Henry Cowell as Theorist and Critic,” in The Whole World of Music: A Henry CowellSymposium, ed. David Nicholls (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Harwood Academic Publishers,1997), 187.

104. Varèse also used sirens in other works, such as Amériques and Hyperprism, but thestrongest influence on Cage was Ionisation, which he cited frequently.

105. A facsimile of Cage’s manuscript, showing the beginning of the rejected ImaginaryLandscape No. 2, is reproduced in Miller, “Cultural Intersections,” 67.

Henry Cowell and John Cage 85

The influences that led Cage to develop electronic sliding tones by adjust-ments in turntable speed are numerous and intertwined. In addition to thecompositions and writings of Cowell and Varèse, the vision of a radio schoolby Nellie Cornish, and the inspiration of Bird’s choreographies, Cage was influenced by prior compositional experiments with electronic sounds. For example, he attended a concert in Berlin on 18 June 1930 (part of the NeueMusik Berlin festival) that concluded with works by Paul Hindemith andErnest Toch specifically for phonograph records. Hindemith’s two Trick-aufnahmen (“trick recordings”) in his Grammophonplatten-eigene Stücke in-cluded phrases transposed by the octave, an effect created by changes in theturntable speed; Hindemith also seems to have made use of what would laterbe called overdubbing. Toch’s Gesprochene Musik included three pieces,among them the Fuge aus der Geographie. In this original version of his now-famous Geographical Fugue, Toch recorded spoken voices and then manipu-lated their speed electronically.106

While Cowell used sliding tones for their affective qualities or to create amore “nature-based” scale that avoided the division of the octave into discretepitches, Cage used them in addition to help define and delineate elements ofform, as shown by a detailed look at Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (premieredon 24 and 25 March 1939).107 A schematic diagram of the work is shown inFigure 5. The piece is divided into four large sections, each containing threefive-measure subsections. The main sections are followed by interludes of increasing length (first one measure, then two, then three) and the entirework is concluded by a four-measure coda (thus continuing the expandingmeasure-length pattern of the interludes). Player 1 uses two constant-frequency records, one for sections 1, 2, and 4 and the other for section 3.Record 1 varies between 433 cycles per second (cps) at 331/3 rpm and ca.

106. In a letter to Peter Yates, 24 December 1940, Cage refers to Hindemith and Toch, aswell as to works by Antheil and Lopatnikoff in conjunction with his own Imaginary LandscapeNo. 1. (I would like to thank Michael Hicks for alerting me to this interesting document. In thearticle “Organized Sound: Notes in the History of a New Disagreement; Between Sound andTone,” California Arts and Architecture [March 1941]: 18, 42, Yates paraphrased much ofCage’s letter and quoted part of it.) For one discussion of the Berlin performance, see Mark Katz,Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London:University of California Press, 2004), 99–104 and 113. Cage told Toch’s grandson that he hadbeen captivated by the Berlin performance (Lawrence Weschler, “My Grandfather’s Tale,”Atlantic Monthly 278, no. 6 [December 1996]: 96). Cage also referred to Toch’s GesprocheneMusik in a letter to Cowell in January 1941, noting his desire to mount “a concert of music im-possible without records. Have two scores for such music already: my Imaginary Landscape . . .and Toch’s Gesprochene Musik for 4 groups of speaking voices, to be recorded 9 times as fast asperformed” (letter, Cage to Cowell, 8 January 1941 [NYPL Cowell Collection, box 2, folder 45]).

107. Like the First Construction, Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No. 1 has been treated by anumber of authors: see, for example, Pritchett, The Music of John Cage, 14–15; Nicholls,American Experimental Music, 204–6; and Susan Key, “John Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No. 1:Through the Looking Glass,” in John Cage: Music, Philosophy, and Intention, 1933–1950, ed.David Patterson, 105–33 (New York: Routledge, 2002).

86 Journal of the American Musicological Society

Figure 5 Schematic diagram of the form of Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939)

Henry Cowell and John Cage 87

1000 cps at 78 rpm (approximately a�–c�).108 Record 2 is much lower, rang-ing from approximately C at 331/3 rpm to about e � at 78 rpm.109 For Player 2,Cage identifies the record only by number (Victor Frequency Record 84522A) without providing any description of its sound. In fact, this record is ofcontinuously variable frequency, sounding a slow slide that begins at 10,000cps and takes five and a half minutes to reach 30 cps.110 Thus Player 2’s actions—using a multiple-speed turntable to alter the rpm of a variable-frequencyrecord—created electronic slides whose overall range descended as the pitchchanged on the original recording.

Cage employed two different forms of notation for the two turntable play-ers. As shown in Example 4, Player 1’s part is notated on various lines of thestaff, the lower line indicating the slower speed and the higher line the fasterone. (The lower-pitched record is indicated using the bottom two lines of thestaff. Eighth notes interspersed with rests are played by lifting and replacingthe tone arm.) Player 2’s part, on the other hand, is indicated on a single line;an x marks a change of turntable speed.

Although the performance procedure seems clear from Cage’s publishedinstructions, neither the exact sounds nor the reason for the two forms of no-tation can be deduced from his score.111 However, a recording Cage made ofthis piece before he left Seattle in 1940 clarifies both issues.112 This recordingreveals that all upward slides in the work are gradual (those of Player 1 spanabout two seconds), whereas the downward slides are always abrupt. Both ef-fects result from the inherent properties of the turntable motor. The slow up-ward slides are analagous to shifting a car from third gear to fourth, thenstepping on the gas (acceleration is gradual due to limited engine torque),whereas downshifting from fourth gear to third slows the vehicle rapidlythrough engine braking.

108. Cage’s published score reads 435 cps, but his manuscript and the record label specify433.

109. Cage’s instructions designate this record’s frequency as 84 cps at 331/3 rpm and “84+”at 78 rpm, but the actual pitch on the recording is about a major third lower—closer to 64 cps.

110. Information on exact cps readings is taken from the record’s label. The Library ofCongress owns a copy of this record in its Rigler and Deutsch Collection, reel 252, frames2138–2141. I am very grateful to Sam Brylawski, Bryan Cornell, Peter Elsea, Janet McKee, andGordon Mumma for their help in this part of the project.

111. The published score (dating from 1960) does not differ in any substantive way from theoriginal manuscript, which is housed at the New York Public Library.

112. The disc is recorded in the center-to-edge format, a process that was supplanted by theedge-to-center format by the late 1940s. Cage gave the record to Gordon Mumma in the early1970s. Mumma eventually donated it to the Stanford Archive of Recorded Sound. I am ex-tremely grateful to Gordon Mumma; Laura Kuhn of the John Cage Trust; Jerry McBride, headof the Stanford Music Library; and Aurora Perez of the Archive for Recorded Sound. This record-ing was played at a 1958 Town Hall concert in New York and can be heard on the CD set The 25-Year Retrospective Concert of the Music of John Cage (1994, Wergo WER 6247-2).

88 Journal of the American Musicological Society

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Henry Cowell and John Cage 89

Furthermore, for Player 2, the recording diverges considerably from thesounds suggested by the notation.113 Cage instructs Player 2 to begin at331/3, changing the turntable speed at the x indications, which always appearon downbeats—thus implying a regular alternation between the low and highpitches of each slide at the beginning of every measure (see Ex. 4). From therecording, however, it becomes apparent that the x actually represents astressed point of arrival on the low pitch at the conclusion of each ascent-descent cycle. Furthermore, the player begins at 78, rather than 331/3, andcreates slides far more frequently than indicated in the score. The effect of therapid downward slide is a strong accent, which occurs occasionally on down-beats, but more often on intermediary beats or even between the beats.

The essential revelation from the early recording is that the two turntableplayers create distinctive and contrasting sounds. Player 1 produces dronesand occasional repeated notes interspersed with rests, periodically changingfrom a low to a high pitch. Player 2, on the other hand, produces wavelike oscillating figures with strong accents on the low note of the wave every threeto five beats.

When we return to the diagram in Figure 4, it becomes clear that thesecontrasting electronic sounds help define the form of the work. Sections 1 and2 are nearly identical; the only variants are the piano figuration and the place-ment of the cymbal rolls. Section 4 contains many elements of sections 1 and2, but rearranged. (These correspondences are indicated by the letters x and yin the figure.) Section 3 stands out as a contrast: Player 1 changes to thelower-frequency record, Player 2 performs slides without interruption, andPlayer 3 is silent.

Imaginary Landscape No. 1 was composed to accompany a choreographyin which arms, legs, and heads were separated from bodies—an effect BonnieBird created by hiding the dancers’ bodies behind large boxes of variousshapes.114 (Interestingly, in view of Cowell’s comments in New MusicalResources about the ubiquity of slides in nature, the choreography for the sec-ond Imaginary Landscape was “a humorous interpretation of Trees.”)115

Although Cage may have intended the music of Imaginary Landscape No. 1to capture the surreal aspect of the Bird’s dismembered limbs, it does not portray the dance’s subject in the programmatic manner in which Cowell projected weeping and wailing in Atlantis or The Banshee. Why, then, did

113. Although the score corresponds quite accurately to Cage’s early recording for Players 1,3, and 4, there are minor exceptions. For example, in the first measure of letter D, Player 1 startsthe record at 78 and then drops to 331/3 in the second measure. In the first measure of letter H,Player 1 creates a rapid up-and-down wailing sound. Sounds on the recording that are not presentin the score are indicated by parentheses in Figure 5.

114. A photo from the original production is reproduced in Miller, “Cultural Intersections,”65.

115. Virginia Boren, “Cornish Dance Group Gives Refreshing Concert,” Seattle Times, 8 May 1940.

90 Journal of the American Musicological Society

Cage choose to use sliding tones? On a general aesthetic level, slides held aninherent intellectual appeal for him since they blur the pitch distinctions be-tween individual tones, thereby providing another alternative to what he sawas the constrictions of the twelve-note division of the octave. But electronicsliding tones offered an additional attraction, for they could be controlled pre-cisely in terms of rhythm and pitch, thus making them ideal as form-definingelements. Although Imaginary Landscape No. 1 does not employ the micro-macrocosmic form of the Constructions, Cage used electronic slides to definerhythmic motives and phrase lengths in order to elucidate a coherent musicalstructure.

Other interactions during Cowell’s prison years

Within a few months of moving to Seattle, Cage involved Cowell in projectsat the Cornish School. Bonnie Bird had decided to mount a production ofJean Cocteau’s Marriage at the Eiffel Tower (in English translation) with mod-ern dance; Cage, her accompanist, was charged with writing new music.116 Hechose to imitate the collaborative procedure of the famous 1921 Paris perfor-mance by having a team of composers provide the score, in this case Cage,George McKay from the University of Washington, and Cowell. Cowell wroteto his parents on 26 December 1938: “John Cage has made a success ofthings in Seattle, and he and Prof. George McKay, head of music at Washing-ton University [recte: the University of Washington], have founded a NewMusic Society; he wishes me to write for them. . . .”117 By the end of January1939 Cowell had completed four works for piano—“Hilarious CurtainOpener” and three Ritournelles—as well as a “Train Finale” for six percus-sionists, all in anticipation of the production on 24 and 25 March.118 Cowellwas particularly proud of the finale, “a conventional musical imitation of thestarting of a train,” but with a “new dodge.”

I have made an echo—I have often noticed in large city R.R. stations, when thetrain starts that the puffs are echoed from the far corners of the station. This hasnever, as far as I know, been put into one of these programmatic imitations inmusic before. All of the music, of course, is very different from anything I everattempted before, being saucy, amusing, and deliberately shallow in the bestCocteau tradition.119

116. Incidental music for Cocteau’s Les mariés de la tour Eiffel was famously supplied by fiveof the composers in the group that came to be known as Les Six (Auric, Honegger, Milhaud,Poulenc, and Tailleferre; Durey declined to participate).

117. Letter, Henry Cowell to Olive and Harry Cowell, 26 December 1938 (NYPL CowellCollection, box 97).

118. The performance was originally scheduled for 10 March but had to be postponed (let-ter from Henry Cowell to Olive Cowell, 4 March 1939 [NYPL Cowell Collection, box 97]).

119. Letter, Henry Cowell to Harry Cowell, 1 February 1939 (NYPL Cowell Collection,box 97). A facsimile of the manuscript for the “Train Finale” is printed in Cage’s Notations (New

Henry Cowell and John Cage 91

Although Bird liked the opening and closing numbers, she rejected theRitournelles (one of which was elastic) as too metrically regular for her chore-ography. Cowell later countered that it was often effective to have the music“flow along regularly” while the dancer “did irregular things.120

In response to all this activity, Cowell promoted Cage’s work to others inthe new-music community, as he had done for numerous other avant-gardecomposers (most notably Ives). In March 1939 Cowell reported on Cage’sSeattle activities to both Slonimsky and John Becker. He urged Becker to senda percussion work to Cage for the May concert.

I am now doing a work for percussion for John Cage—did you ever meet him?He worked with Schoenberg for quite a while and then reacted against hispedantry, and now he and his wife have gone up to Seattle, where he heads music for the dance at the Cornish School, and he is organizing a New MusicSociety and is particularly interested in percussion music. He has a group ofpercussionists, four good players, and three others who can take easy parts. Hehas three each (different sizes) of tom-toms, gongs, woodblocks, dragon’smouths, brake drums, small high gongs, besides the usual drums. I was won-dering whether you would be interested to send him your percussion work. Iam sure he would be interested, and you could tell him, if you wish, that I sug-gested it. . . . Their concerts are given well, and get good attention there. . . .121

On 27 July 1939 Cage and colleagues presented a program of “modernAmerican percussion music” at Mills College in Oakland. Cage told Cowellthat the performance had come about through Cowell’s suggestion. (Onceagain, however, there was more than one influence: Lou Harrison claimedthat he was the one to have recommended Cage’s program to the College.)122

Whatever the stimulus, the performance was successful enough that Cage wasinvited back the following year. The 1939 concert contained no works by

York: Something Else Press, 1969). The “Hilarious Curtain Opener” and the Ritournelle in elastic form were published in New Music 19, no. 1 (October 1945). The three Ritournelles arerecorded by Josephine Gandolfi on the CD Dancing with Henry.

120. Letter, Cowell to Bonnie Bird, 2 April 1939 (private collection). Bird and her husbandRalph Gundlach visited Cowell in San Quentin in August 1939 and told him of plans to continuewith percussion events in Seattle (letter, Cowell to his parents, 29 August 1939 [NYPL CowellCollection, box 97]).

121. Letter, Cowell to Becker, 14 March 1939 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 97). In a letter of 26 March 1939, Cowell told Slonimsky about Cage’s work (NYPL Cowell Collection,box 97).

122. In a letter to his stepmother Cowell wrote: “Cage is giving a percussion concert at Mills,he writes that it came about thru my suggestion, but that he has been unable to get togetherenough players to give my ‘Pulse’ which he presented in Seattle” (Henry Cowell to Olive Cowell,27 July 1939 [NYPL Cowell Collection, box 97]). Apparently Cowell’s parents attended the performance, as evidenced from later correspondence. Lou Harrison’s claim of influence (per-sonal communication to the author, 1994) does not necessarily contradict Cage’s words toCowell: Cowell and Harrison might both have encouraged Mills to support the performance.

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Cowell, but Pulse was performed on 18 July 1940, at which time Cage re-peated Cowell’s “future of music” statement on the printed program (as discussed above; see Fig. 1).123

The “Future of Music”; Contacts after 1940

Cowell’s statement may well have inspired the title of Cage’s own “Future ofMusic” proclamation, which dates from the same year as the second Millsconcert (not 1937, as printed in Silence).124 This influential and oft-quoted es-say originated as a lecture delivered at a meeting of the Seattle Artists’ Leagueon 18 February 1940, near the end of Cage’s Seattle residency. (The erro-neous 1937 date stemmed from a casual conversation between Cage andGeorge Avakian, as I have shown previously.)125 Influences on Cage’s procla-mation are numerous; in addition to Cowell’s prediction, the most prominentstimuli are Luigi Russolo’s L’arte dei rumori (The Art of Noises [1913]),Carlos Chávez’s Toward a New Music (1937), and the writings of EdgardVarèse.126

123. This concert, staged in conjunction with visiting faculty from the Chicago School ofDesign, was reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle, Time, Modern Music, and the DanceObserver.

124. Cage, “The Future of Music: Credo,” in Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown,CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 3–6.

125. The lecture could not have taken place in 1937. Cage did not move to Seattle until theautumn of 1938 and the Seattle Artists’ League met for the first time on 11 December of thatsame year. Cage spoke at the league twice, on 11 December 1938 and 18 February 1940. A man-uscript of the lecture’s basic text at Northwestern University bears the notation “1940,” thus situating it at the second meeting. For details, see Miller, “Cultural Intersections,” 54–56. The er-roneous date first appeared (along with Cage’s essay) in the program booklet for a 25-year retro-spective concert of Cage’s music at Town Hall, New York, on 15 May 1958. The programbooklet is contained in the LP recording The 25-year Retrospective Concert of the Music of JohnCage (New York: Distributed by George Avakian, 1959, matrix no. K08Y 1499–1504). In a letterto me dated 23 July 1997, George Avakian confirmed that the 1937 date arose “in conversation.”

126. David Nicholls presents a direct comparison between Cage’s essay and the writings ofRussolo and Chávez in American Experimental Music, 189–91, and in “Cage and the Ultra-Modernists.” The published version of Cage’s proclamation (“The Future of Music”) contains abasic text in capital letters interspersed with commentary in normal type. It is likely that at leastparts of the commentary may have undergone revision after Cage left Seattle. (The manuscriptcopy of the text at Northwestern University, which dates Cage’s lecture to 1940, contains onlythe portions of the published text in capitals.) Several authors have pointed to Cage’s use of theterms “organization of sound” and “organizer of sound” in the commentary, which seem to stemfrom Varèse’s influential article “Organized Sound for the Sound Film” (published in TheCommonweal on 13 December 1940). Varèse’s article strongly impressed Cage. He even typed itout word for word (the document is included in the Cage Collection at the NorthwesternUniversity Music Library). However, it was not published until ten months after Cage’s lecture tothe Seattle Artists’ League and several months after Cage had left Seattle and returned to SanFrancisco. Nicholls suggests that Varèse’s term might have been transmitted to Cage by Cowellprior to its publication (American Experimental Music, 191). Varèse was in San Francisco in

Henry Cowell and John Cage 93

Some less obvious stimulants are revealed by program notes Cage wrote fora percussion concert at Reed College in Portland, which took place four daysbefore his lecture to the Seattle Artists’ League.127 This little-known docu-ment is transcribed in full in Appendix C. Although the language of the notesdiffers from that in “The Future of Music,” many of the concepts are (not surprisingly) similar. For example, Cage’s advocacy of efforts to “master” and“subjugate” noise, leading our ears to become “sensitive to its beauties” isvery similar to his statement in “The Future of Music” that “what we hear ismostly noise. . . . When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. . . . We want tocapture and control these sounds, to use them not as sound effects but as musical instruments.” Similarly, his statement in the Reed College programthat “the sounds which have been accepted as musical are surprisingly few” issimilar to his reflection in the “The Future of Music” that “the composer ofpercussion music . . . explores the academically forbidden ‘non-musical’ fieldof sound. . . .” Particularly interesting in the present context are correspon-dences concerning electronic instruments and rhythm. “The Future ofMusic” contains two independent statements, one linking “electrical instru-ments” with overtones, the other dealing with “the field of time”:

The special function of electrical instruments will be to provide complete con-trol of the overtone structure of tones (as opposed to noises) and to make thesetones available in any frequency, amplitude, and duration. (Silence, p. 4)

The composer (organizer of sound) will be faced not only with the entire fieldof sound but also with the entire field of time. . . . No rhythm will be beyondthe composer’s reach. (Silence, p. 5)

In the Reed College notes, Cage linked these topics:

Perhaps, in the near future, we will have electrical instruments which, when di-als are turned, buttons pushed, etc., will give us everything we want: free accessto sound. Machines will be invented which will play rhythms which human be-ings could not. Experiments in this direction have resulted in Henry Cowell’s“Rhythmicon” and Baetz’s “Rhythm Rotor,” instruments capable of playingcomplicated cross rhythms.128

1937–38 and Los Angeles in 1938 and visited Cowell in San Quentin (letter, Cowell to JohnBecker, 31 January 1938 [NYPL Cowell Collection, box 97]). In January 1940 Cage used a sim-ilar term, “organized noise,” to refer to percussion music during his ensemble’s concert at theUniversity of Montana (“Tuesday’s Concert Arouses Amusement, Slight Hysteria,” unidentifiednewspaper from Missoula, MT, 11 January 1940; clipping in Cage’s mother’s scrapbook [Cagecollection, Northwestern University Music Library]).

127. A copy of the Reed College program is found in the Cage Collection at theNorthwestern University Music Library.

128. The Baetz rhythm rotor was a mechanical rhythmic device used by William Russell inhis percussion work Made in America (1937). For a discussion of Russell’s work and programnotes for various pieces, see http://www.essentialmusic.com/russell/russell.html (accessed 11 August 2005).

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Cowell’s rhythmicon, developed in the early 1930s, not only played com-plex cross-rhythms, but also linked these rhythms directly to pitches in theovertone series (as implied in the first excerpt quoted above from Cage’s“Future of Music”). The instrument—built by Theremin, funded by Ives, andpraised by Slonimsky, who owned one of the two prototypes—sounded theovertones of a particular note in rhythmic proportion to the fundamental.Slonimsky wrote:

The rhythmicon can play triplets against quintuplets, or any other combina-tions up to sixteen notes in a group. The metrical index is associated . . . withthe corresponding frequence [sic] of vibrations. . . . Quintuplets are . . .sounded on the fifth harmonic, nonuplets on the ninth harmonic, and so forth.A complete chord of sixteen notes presents sixteen rhythmical figures in sixteenharmonics within the range of four octaves. All sixteen notes coincide, with thebeginning of each period, thus producing a synthetic harmonic series oftones.129

Cowell described the instrument’s purpose and capabilities, as well as hisown role in its conception and development, in a letter to his stepmother on 1June 1932:

My part in its invention was to invent the idea that such a rhythmic instrumentwas a necessity to further rhythmic development, which had reached a limit,more or less, on performance by hand, and needed the application of mechani-cal aid. [Cowell had explored extraordinarily difficult cross-rhythms in his ownworks, notably Fabric for piano (1920) and the Quartet Romantic (1917).]That which the instrument was to accomplish, what rhythms it should do, andthe pitch it should have, and the relation between the pitch and rhythm, are myideas. I also conceived that the principle of broken up light playing on a photo-electric cell would be the best means of making it practical. With this idea, Iwent to Theremin, who did the rest—he invented the method by which thelight could be cut, did the electrical calculations, and built the instrument.

The purpose of the instrument is two fold: to enable the productions ofrhythm and related tone beyond a point where they have been able to have been produced by any known means before now, to be used (1) for makingrhythmical melody and harmony for use in musical composition, and (2) for the carrying on of numerous rhythmical physical and psychological scientific experiments.130

129. Nicolas Slonimsky, “Henry Cowell,” in American Composers on American Music: ASymposium, ed. Henry Cowell (New York: Ungar, 1962; original edition published by thetrustees of Stanford University, 1933), 60. Seeger claimed credit for introducing Cowell to theprinciple of the rhythmicon by scratching clicks in various proportions into a phonograph disc.(See Nicholls, American Experimental Music, 141.) Lou Harrison said he learned how to playCowell’s Fabric using a similar technique. Though Harrison never mentioned the source of hisidea, Cowell may well have suggested it based on his studies with Seeger.

130. Letter, Henry Cowell to Olive Cowell, 1 June 1932 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 18,folder 527).

Henry Cowell and John Cage 95

Cowell, who wrote Rhythmicana (for rhythmicon and orchestra) in 1931,had told Cage about the device three years before the “Future of Music” lec-ture, and urged him to explore the instrument’s possibilities: “My rhythmicon(uses direct current and is rather in pieces but can be put together) is atStanford Psychology dept.,” Cowell wrote in 1937, and “could be borrowed.. . . It is very clumsy, about a yard square (one of the three pieces) and weighsabout 150 pounds.”131 Cage did not follow up on Cowell’s offer; but appar-ently he already knew about the instrument’s capabilities, since Cowell did notdescribe them in this letter.

Cage ended his “Future of Music” essay by advocating the establishment of“centers of experimental music,” where “oscillators, turntables, generators,means for amplifying small sounds, film phonographs,” would be available tocomposers. He wrote to Cowell in August and September 1940 that if hewere successful in establishing such a center, he would track down the rhyth-micon and use it there.132 In the following years Cage wrote dozens of letters in an effort to bring this visionary project to realization. Cowell did his best to connect Cage with interested sponsors, but ultimately Cage wasunable to secure the necessary financial support.133

131. Letter, Cowell to Cage, 23 March 1937. Cowell completed Rhythmicana in November1931. Although the rhythmicon was demonstrated at the New School in 1932, the concerto wasnever performed during Cowell’s lifetime. A reconstructed performance via computer took placeat Stanford University in 1971. See Lichtenwanger, Music of Henry Cowell, 132–33.

132. Letter, Cage to Cowell, 8 August 1940: “If support for the project is obtained, would itbe possible for me to use the Rhythmicon which you mentioned is at Stanford?”; and Cage toCowell, 27 September 1940: “Just got your card about the Rhythmicon. I haven’t found supportfor the center yet; when I do I shall take advantage of your offer and use the Rhythmicon.” Bothletters are in the NYPL Cowell Collection, box 2, folder 44.

133. For example, the following letters from Cage to Cowell in the Cowell Collection, NewYork Public Library (dating from August to December 1940) document Cage’s efforts:

(1) 16 August 1940: Cage thanks Cowell for his suggestions and notes that he has contacted(or will contact) the Conn instrument company, Mills College, Lucille Rosen, Varèse, the Carne-gie Corporation, General Electric, and the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Whitney Foundations;

(2) 23 August 1940: Cage mentions plans to contact Stokowski and Bender; (3) 12 September 1940: Cage expects to talk to Disney, has had positive response from Conn

(Dr. Robert Young); (4) 27 September 1940: Diego Rivera may be able to muster support; (5) 3 October 1940: Rivera referred Cage to Chaplin, Edsel Ford, and Stokowski; Cage has

spoken to or will contact Bender, Mrs. Henry Swift, an executive engineer at GE, AlfredFrankenstein, Ashley Pettis, Mrs. Charles Felton, and Carl Seashore at the University of Iowa;

(6) 28 October 1940: Stokowski and Ernest Toch are enthusiastic; Cage is optimistic aboutpossibilities at the University of Iowa: will Cowell send a supportive letter?

In addition to the correspondence at the New York Public Library, documents related toCage’s attempt to set up his “Center for Experimental Music” can be found among the materialsin the Cage Collection at the Northwestern University Music Library. Among these materials are:(1) a proposal for an experimental music center at Mills; (2) excerpts from a Guggenheim applica-tion; (3) a letter to the Whitney Foundation; (4) additional correspondence.

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In November 1940 Cowell praised Cage’s work with percussion in the arti-cle “Drums along the Pacific,” published in Modern Music. The extraordinarydevelopment of percussion orchestras during the 1930s stemmed chiefly fromthe work of Cage and Harrison, wrote Cowell; the two West Coast composersformed and directed such ensembles, “concocted innumerable creations for these instruments, and . . . induced others like Ray Green. . . , GeraldStrang. . . , and J. M. Beyer . . . to write for them.”134 Cowell also traced thebackground of the percussion ensemble to the Italian Futurists, Varèse, PercyGrainger, and Afro-Cuban influences. He added, “Our newest Pacific coastgroup—Cage, Green, Harrison and Strang—have also developed their inter-est naturally as composers for the modern concert dance.”

Although the article provided Cage with favorable public exposure on a na-tional level, he reacted to it negatively. He wrote to Cowell in January 1941:“I didn’t write to you about the article in Modern Music, Drums along thePacific, because my point of view is different than the one you expressed.”135

As the “Future of Music” and (even more directly) the Reed College programnotes demonstrate, Cage objected to Cowell’s separation of percussion musicfrom other explorations of new sounds. He was also bothered by the heavyemphasis on dance. “Percussion music is like an arrow pointing to the wholeunexplored field of sound,” Cage had written in the program notes. He nowexpressed a similar view directly to Cowell:

I think of percussion as a beginning of exploration of the whole field of sound,with the goal being the use of electricity and film, which will make the wholefield available for use. . . . Most of the work Lou and I have done has beendone in spite of dancers. . . . I would like to see an article which shows the con-nection between percussion and other experiments with new materials and theorganized sound mentioned in Varese’s article [“Organized Sound for theSound Film”]. . . . I didn’t ever really want to write about what I felt aboutyour article, because I was disappointed in it.136

Cowell’s reaction to this frank criticism was typically thick-skinned, and re-lations between the two seem not to have suffered. After Cage and his wifeXenia moved to New York in 1942, interaction with Cowell became frequent.When Sidney Robertson traveled to California to secure a pardon for Cowellfrom the governor that December, for example, Cowell used Cage as a phonecontact.137 Two months later, Cage premiered Ostinato Pianissimo at theMuseum of Modern Art.

134. Henry Cowell, “Drums along the Pacific,” Modern Music 18, no. 1 (Nov./Dec. 1940):47.

135. Letter, Cage to Cowell, 8 January 1941.136. Ibid.137. Letter, Henry Cowell to Sidney Robertson Cowell, 7 December [1942] (NYPL Cowell

Collection, box 21, folder 640): “I still haven’t made up my mind where to go, but I’ll keep intouch by phoning at least daily to Ted, and also, in case of a night call, I’ll be in touch with JohnCage, 550 Hudson St, phone Watkins 9-6235.”

Henry Cowell and John Cage 97

Thus the tables began to turn. Cage, increasingly independent, helped pro-mote the work of his former teacher. Years later he acknowledged Cowell’s in-fluence. In his essay “History of Experimental Music in the United States,”Cage wrote that “Henry Cowell was for many years the open sesame for newmusic in America. . . . From him, as from an efficient information booth, youcould always get not only the address and telephone number of anyone work-ing in a lively way in music, but you could also get an unbiased introductionfrom him as to what that anyone was doing.”138 In addition to introducingCage to people, however, we have seen that Cowell introduced him to skillsand concepts that had a profound effect on Cage’s development. From teach-ing Cage to “run the recorder” and instructing him in ethnic musics in whichrhythm and melody assumed greater importance than harmony139 to advocat-ing and classifying sliding tones, promoting percussion music, developingforms in which small units mirrored the macrostructure, and providing amodel for indeterminate performance, Cowell not only helped direct Cage’swork in the 1930s, but also laid the foundation for many ideas that would be-come crucial to Cage in future years.

Conclusion

Let us return now to the complex questions of influence raised at the begin-ning of this article, for, as we have seen, the antecedents of Cage’s develop-ment have been traced—by himself or by commentators and critics—tonumerous composers (as well as painters, writers, and philosophers): Varèse,Russolo, Chávez, Russell, Seeger, Satie, Toch, Boulez, Feldman, Schoenberg,and many others in addition to Cowell. Cage cited some of these influencesrepeatedly; others he mentioned only rarely. Determining direct lineage forCage’s work (or that of any other composer, for that matter) is not only com-plicated, but probably impossible; and it is particularly complex given therapid, multidirectional dissemination of ideas among the ultramodernists inthe mid-twentieth century. Cage’s own comments, of course, are crucial; butthey are by no means the only source we should consider. Memory is selectiveat best, unreliable at worst. (As Nicholls, Patterson, and others have shown,Cage’s memory—like that of many others—has proven inaccurate in manydetails.)

138. Cage, “History of Experimental Music in the United States,” 71. 139. For example, in “The Nature of Melody,” Cowell writes: “Harmony is a less fundamen-

tal element than rhythm and melody are. Rhythm and melody were employed for no one knowshow many years. . . before anything that could be called harmony became a part of musical art;and even today, all the music of the world employs melody and rhythm, whereas harmony as anart is used only in the music of the European system” (quoted in Gann, “Subversive Prophet,”203). Harrison often noted that Cowell emphasized this point in his courses.

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Furthermore, the repeated retelling of personal history often generatesmythologies. Cage, who was extremely articulate, told and retold the samestories in his many interviews—a valuable medium to be sure, but one thattends to elicit concrete, uncomplicated answers, and favor the colorful overthe prosaic. (The story of Fischinger and the spirit of objects being released bytheir sounds is a good example; it forms a much more compelling tale than re-calling a performance of Ionisation or citing Cowell’s publications of percus-sion music.) Mythologies about Cage have proliferated and been embellishedover the years until they now form a body of accepted and oft-repeated lore.That is not to say that we should dismiss Cage’s citations of influence, ofcourse—only that we must look beyond them.140

Such selective attributions by Cage (like Cowell’s failure to acknowledgeSeeger in some cases) do not reflect an attempt to disguise conceptual models;rather, they suggest a line of transmission so complex and intertwined that theidea’s origin has become unclear. In addition, we should not find it surprisingthat Cage focused attention on composers whose aesthetic aims correlatedclosely with his own. As a case in point, he noted in a 1940 letter to PeterYates that the work of Russolo and Varèse was more consistent with his ownaims in the area of percussion music than the goals of composers “interested infolk and primitive and oriental music,” such as “Bartok, Chavez, and perhapsothers. Eicheim. Maybe Cowell.” (He characterized the philosophy of this lat-ter group as “getting back to the earth business.”) The only commonalityamong the percussion composers, Cage concluded, was a “desire to organizeresults of an exploration of sound and rhythm made through the use of per-cussion, mechanical, electrical and film means. . . . [Otherwise] their aestheticpoints of view differ.”141

Indeed, the “aesthetic points of view” of Cage and Cowell were often atodds. Cowell valued recording equipment for its ability to preserve deteriorat-ing field recordings and document new works. Cage turned the recorder intoa musical instrument. Cowell taught about sliding tones in Asian musics, usedthem in compositions for instruments and voices, and developed ways to de-fine and classify them.142 Cage combined the ideal of sliding tones with elec-

140. My own biography of Lou Harrison (with Fredric Lieberman) provides a similar exam-ple. Originating as an oral history, my coauthor and I heard—as with Cage—the same stories ofhistorical development again and again. It was only through talking with nearly fifty other associ-ates that a full picture of Harrison’s work emerged.

141. Citations in this paragraph from the letter of Cage to Yates, 24 December 1940.142. For Asian influences on Cage, see various writings by David Patterson, for example:

“Appraising the Catchwords, c. 1942–1959: John Cage’s Asian-Derived Rhetoric and the His-torical Reference of Black Mountain College” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1996); and hisessays “Cage and Asia: History and Sources,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Cage, ed.David Nicholls, 41–59 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and “The Picture ThatIs Not in the Colors,” in John Cage: Music, Philosophy, and Intention, ed. Patterson, 177–215(New York and London: Routledge, 2002). See also Pritchett, The Music of John Cage, esp. 36–38 and 74–78.

Henry Cowell and John Cage 99

tronically generated sounds, using them to define rhythm- and motive-basedforms. Cowell developed the concept of having smaller structural units reflectthe pattern of larger ones to create coherence in compositions with options for expansion or contraction. Cage built this multi-level organizational princi-ple into a micro-macrocosmic precompositional system, which he worked outin increasingly exquisite detail in larger and larger works over the followingdecade. Perhaps most importantly, Cowell developed elastic forms for thepractical purpose of writing music suitable for the dance; Cage, building onthis model, recognized the potential of creating works whose inherent princi-ple was their unpredictability, works that changed from one performance tothe next.

For Cowell, elastic forms and micro-macrocosmic structures were inti-mately linked, the latter providing the logic that made the former coherent.For Cage these two concepts became separated. Micro-macrostructure wassimply one type of formal organization, depending on rhythm as a primarydefining principle. Using such structures, Cage could at once maintain a “con-nection with the past” (cited in the last paragraph of his “Future of Music” essay) and yet move away from pitch- or harmony-based systems. Elasticity inform, on the other hand, did not manifest itself in Cage’s work until later,when he began to adopt an open-arms model, inviting others to share in thecompositional process, as Cowell had in the 1930s. In Cowell’s case, the col-laborator was a choreographer, performer, or composer authorized to alter awork’s length or build a piece out of cells he provided. Despite the collabora-tion, the resulting compositions reflected Cowell’s voice, though their lengthand form might be determined by others and governed by extramusical fac-tors such as the needs of the dance. Cage, on the other hand, took the notionof collaborative composition in a direction Cowell had not envisioned, using itto serve a radical goal: the subjugation of his own intentionality. By welcom-ing the input of a greater and greater number of cocomposers—and permit-ting the sounds themselves to be determined by factors out of his control—Cage attempted to undermine his own preferences. To cite but one ofmany examples: in Variations V (1965) three assisting composers played tapesand radios while Cage and David Tudor worked the dials on a fifty-channelmixer; but ultimately none of these five composer-performers had any controlover the audible sound, which reached the loudspeakers through the interac-tion of Cunningham’s dancers with a set of capacitance antennas and photo-cells on the stage.143

On a conceptual plane, Cowell, along with Varèse, opened Cage’s mind to“the idea of a limitless tonal universe,” Cage acknowledged in the 1970s.144

143. For more on this topic, see Leta E. Miller, “Cage, Cunningham, and Collaborators:The Odyssey of Variations V,” Musical Quarterly 85 (2001): 545–67; and idem, “Cage’s Col-laborations,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Cage, ed. David Nicholls, 151–68 (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

144. Cage, For the Birds, 74.

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Cage’s objective, as he told Daniel Charles, was “sounds, quite simply.Sounds, pure and simple.” Whether it was tone clusters and other extendedpiano techniques, which “pointed towards noise and a continuum oftimbre,”145 or the musics of peoples outside the Western art-music tradition,Cowell’s passionate advocacy of “unacceptable” sounds legitimized the explorations of many younger composers, among them Cage. In 1931 hewrote: “The most important single musical activity is creation. All there is tosay has not been said in musical composition. . . . There is a great deal of newbeauty to be found in the expression of every phase of contemporary life andactivity, exquisite exhilaration in the discovery of new musical materials andfinding their uses in musical expression through the building of new musicstructures.”146

Cowell’s second major conceptual contribution to Cage’s developmentwas his advocacy of hybridity—the creation of novel works based on combin-ing the sounds of various sources or cultures.147 But creating successful hy-brids also required training and skill. He wrote to Aaron Copland in 1937: “Ithink we are in entire agreement as to trends toward simplicity, but a simplicityin which all of our best training and ability is preserved. That’s the real rub.It’s a matter requiring the greatest technique and ability to do this. I find bestfor me the idea of attaining simplicity by unifying seemingly complex ele-ments, and using them so that they seem simple. . . .”148

Cage brought his prodigious skills and imagination to bear on combiningthe various influences he encountered: be it percussion, sliding tones, elec-tronic sounds, rhythmic structures, Asian musics, extended instrumental tech-niques, or ideas of elasticity. While his aesthetic goals may have differed infundamental ways from those of Cowell, Cage inherited from his teacher anopen-mindedness, an adventurousness, a thirst for new sounds, and the “authorization” to combine them in novel ways that led him to question andultimately redefine our conception of the very idea of music.

145. Cage, “History of Experimental Music in the United States,” 71.146. Cowell, “Creation and Imitation: A Dissertation on New Music,” Fortnightly 1, no. 6

(20 Nov. 1931): 5.147. See, for example, “Oriental Influence on Western Music” (published in Music—East

and West, Executive Committee for the 1961 Tokyo East-West Music Encounter, 1961), a paperCowell read in Tokyo in 1961. “I want to make a plea also for preserving that sort of hybrid musiccoming into being,” he told the conference delegates.

148. Letter, Cowell to Copland, 17 September 1937 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 97).

Henry Cowell and John Cage 101

Appendix A Main Events Cited in This Article

193018 June Neue Musik Berlin festival concert with music for records;

Cage is in the audience.1931

Oct.–Dec. Cowell in Berlin; buys copy of the Berlin archive’s 120-cylinder demonstration collection for the New School inNew York.

1932Sept.–Dec. Cowell in Berlin; buys records of world musics for the

New School, Chávez, and himself.1933

Jan. Cowell rents a machine to copy cylinder recordings ontodiscs.

10 Jan. Letter, Cowell to Ives: Cowell proposes making records ofnew music.

Mar. Cowell publishes Russell’s percussion octet in New Music. 6 Mar. Premiere of Varèse’s Ionisation, New York (Cowell plays

piano, Slonimsky conducts).between mid- New Music Society Workshop, San Francisco; CageApril and mid- demonstrates his Sonata for Clarinet.July14 July Cage’s name and phone number are written in Cowell’s

calendar.16 July Slonimsky conducts Ionisation at the Hollywood Bowl;

Cage is in the audience.26 Oct. Letter, Cage to Cowell: Cage requests career advice.22 Nov. Postcard, Cowell to Slonimsky: First record for New

Music Recording series made yesterday.1934

Jan. Cowell teaches percussion course at the Mundstock dancestudio, San Francisco.

Mar. Letter, Cage to Weiss: request for composition lessons.Mar. Cowell finishes writing Ostinato Pianissimo.28 May Cowell directs Ionisation in San Francisco.Fall Cage moves to New York to study with Weiss.1 Oct. Cowell’s “Primitive and Folk Origins of Music” course

begins; Cowell teaches Cage “to run the recorder.”15 Dec. and ff. Cage rides with Cowell from New York to California.30 Dec. Letter, Cowell to Olive Cowell: I’m setting up New Music

Society in Los Angeles with Cage.

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1935Mar. Letter, Cage to Cowell: expresses warmth and thanks.13 Apr. House concert, Los Angeles, arranged by Cage:

shakuhachi music by Kitaro Tamada.Oct. Cowell begins teaching percussion for dancer Hanya

Holm at Wigman School, New York1936

— Cowell publishes percussion ensemble works inNew Music.May Cornish School begins its radio school program.21 May Arrest warrant brought to Cowell’s home in Menlo Park.18 June Letter, Cage to Cowell: distress over Cowell’s arrest.

1937Jan. Cowell’s article on elastic form published in the Dance

Observer23 Mar. Letter, Cowell to Cage: advice on percussion, future of

music.1938

26 June–10 July Cage meets dancer/choreographer Bonnie Bird throughLou Harrison.

19 Sept. Letter, Sidney Robertson to Cowell: Cage describes elasticform to her.

Fall Cage moves to Seattle.(before 7 Oct.)9 Dec. Cage’s first percussion concert at the Cornish School,

Seattle; he programs works from Cowell’s 1936 collectionas well as his own Quartet and Trio.

1939Jan. Cowell completes music for Bird’s Marriage at the Eiffel

Tower.Mar. Letters, Cowell to Becker and Cowell to Slonimsky prais-

ing Cage’s work.19–26 Mar. Cowell completes composition of Pulse.24 and 25 Mar. Marriage at the Eiffel Tower and Imaginary Landscape

No. 1 performed in Seattle.19 May Cage’s second percussion concert, Cornish School (in-

cludes Cowell’s Pulse).27 July Cage’s concert of modern American percussion music,

Mills College, Oakland.9 Dec. Cage’s third percussion concert, Cornish School (includes

Cowell’s Pulse and Return); Cage quotes Cowell on thefuture of music.

194014 Feb. Concert of percussion ensemble music, Reed College,

Portland.

Henry Cowell and John Cage 103

18 Feb. Cage delivers “Future of Music” lecture at the SeattleArtists’ League.

26 June Cowell paroled and released from prison; moves to NewYork.

18 July Cage’s second percussion concert at Mills College; futureof music quotation repeated.

Nov.–Dec. Cowell’s “Drums along the Pacific” published in ModernMusic.

19419 Jan. Letter, Cage to Cowell: expresses disappointment with

“Drums along the Pacific”1943

7 Feb. Cage conducts premiere of Ostinato Pianissimo in NewYork.

Appendix B Letter from Henry Cowell to John Cage, 23 March1937 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 97 [copy] and box 115[original])

Dear John,

I am very glad indeed to hear from you, and wish that you would write moreoften; I would like to keep close track of what you are writing, and the direc-tion it takes, and could do this to a certain extent if you tell me about it. Donot try to send me any of your manuscripts, however, as I cannot receive suchthings. Too bad. I will have to wait until sometime when I am out to seethem. We can’t know how long that will be until August. Yes, I was pleased tohear that you are interested in percussion developments. I was just on thepoint of trying to form a sort of symphonic percussion ensemble in SF and an-other in NY before my arrest, and so of course heartily approve of your movein the direction in LA. I am so glad you have some rehearsers. That is the mainthing. I am sure that the value of study with Schoenberg is now past for you.It has a great value—I know the whole business well, having been in his Berlinclass. He would never, never, permit you to create, ever. Now is high time foryou to do so. But of course, in your own chosen field of creation, principles offine-wrought construction must also apply, and while not necessarily adoptingthose of S., the way of building up such things is shown through contact withhim. I know how natural it is to react against the retrogrades, etc. of poly-phonic form-devices; but the best is to remain balanced, not prejudicedagainst them because they were too vigorously crammed down your throat!

I think very well of your new percussion center plan, and wish you wouldpush ahead with it. If I can help, I will. Of course, Strang knows everyone thatI would, down there, who might be interested. I have lost contact with the

104 Journal of the American Musicological Society

South, except for a few people. I suppose you know Still, Antheil? If not, in-troduce yourself, saying I said so. I don’t know any to rehearse. I would beglad to lend you instruments, if someone wanted to bring them down, andsomeone (you perhaps) would be responsible for getting them back to meeventually. They are at my father’s. I don’t know just what is there. Flade hassome of them at Mills that could be used. It is not a very dazzling array. I hon-estly believe, and formally predict, that the immediate future of music lies inthe bringing of percussion on [the] one hand, and sliding tones on the other,to as great a state of perfection in construction of composition and flexibilityof handling on instruments as older elements are now. This means that onething to do first is to contact a shop where instruments can be made. Work onthe constructing of new percussion instruments, and arrange so that many canbe controlled by one player. I am sure that with limited finances, grand and astonishing percussion instruments can be developed. I think a craft shop fordrum-making would be a commercial success, also. All dance studios wantthem. It is impossible to write at enough length to give an idea of Hindurhythm; Fox-Strangways book on “Music of Hindustan” has it in rather in-volved terms. Visit me someday and I will explain it to you. I think it is neededto put the theory in clear form. I will try to do it when my melody book isdone. That is for beginners, but has some good ideas. It is an introduction tothe new and experimental work that might be done. My rhythmicon (uses di-rect current and is rather in pieces but can be put together) is at StanfordPsychology dept. could be borrowed, for any grand spread of this idea. It isvery clumsy, about a yard square (one of the three pieces) and weighs about150 pounds. I have two Indian (East) drums in NY at Lahiri’s. Try making awater drum—shaped like tympani, a little water in lower kettle part, eithertone is struck, circle water gently for glissandi. It is one of their more effectiveinstruments. Varese’s address is 188 Sullivan St. NYC. You could get a score ofIonization from Dene Denny in Carmel by writing.

James and Ann Mundstock of 535 Sacramento St. SF want a percussionmusician for this summer. They asked Strang, but couldn’t afford to meet hisguarantee. I told them of you. Perhaps you could confer with them and himand might like to come up.

Give my warmest regards to Pauline, Buhlig, Galka and any other friendsyou may see.

Warm greetings to you

As ever

Henry

Henry Cowell and John Cage 105

Appendix C Program Notes by Cage for a Percussion EnsembleConcert at Reed College, Portland, Oregon, 14 February 1940

The principal purpose of percussion music is to explore the materials of music:sound and rhythm. The search is directed principally towards those fields ofsound which have, in our classical music, been considered not musical.

The sounds which have been accepted as musical are surprisingly few. Manyvariations of sound quality, amplitude, pitch and duration are yet to be foundand used. In the realm of pitch, for example, we have yet to explore the possi-bilities of sliding tones. Some composers of percussion music have made use ofsirens, slide whistles, gongs struck while being lowered into the water, and theglissandi available on pedal timpani. Perhaps, in the near future, we will haveelectrical instruments which, when dials are turned, buttons pushed, etc., willgive us everything we want: free access to sound. Machines will be inventedwhich will play rhythms which human beings could not. Experiments in thisdirection have resulted in Henry Cowell’s “Rhythmicon” and Baetz’s “RhythmRotor,” instruments capable of playing complicated cross rhythms.

Percussion music is like an arrow pointing to the whole unexplored field ofsound. It will be thought of in the future as a transition from the limited musicof the Nineteenth century to the unlimited freedom of “electronic” music.

The present percussion orchestra includes a vast assortment of instrumentsranging from the conventional Chinese gongs and tom-toms, through folk in-struments of Cuba and our own Indians, to unconventional instruments suchas the washboard, automobile parts and RCA test records of constant andvariable frequency. [Note: turntables and test records were not used in anyworks on the Reed College program. The only compositions by Cage on theprogram were the Second Construction and the early Quartet.]

Many modern American composers are writing in this new medium:Edgard Varese, Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison, Franziska Boas, Ray Green, J. M. Beyer, William Russell, as well as others.

Listening to the music of these composers is quite different from listeningto the music, say, of Beethoven. In the latter case, we are temporarily pro-tected or transported from the noises of every-day [sic] life. In the case of per-cussion music, however, we find that we have mastered and subjugated noise.We become triumphant over it and our ears become sensitive to its beauties.

Works Cited

Interviews, Correspondence, and Other Manuscript MaterialsAnnouncement for concert at the International House, Berkeley, on 26 February

[1935]. NYPL Cowell Collection, box 143. Announcement for New Music Society members-only concert on 1 April 1935. New

York Public Library [NYPL] Cowell Collection, box 143.

106 Journal of the American Musicological Society

Avakian, George. Letter to the author, 23 July 1997.Brown, Earle. Letter to Peter Yates, 20 Jan. 1967. Yates Papers, Mandeville Special

Collections Library, University of California, San Diego.Cage, John. “The Future of Music.” Manuscript of preliminary version in the John

Cage Collection, Northwestern University Music Library, Evanston, IL.———. Letters to Cowell, 26 October 1933; undated (end of March 1935); undated

(April 1935); 18 June 1936, 8 August 1940, 16 August 1940, 23 August 1940, 12 September 1940, 27 September 1940, 3 October 1940, 28 October 1940, and8 January 1941. NYPL Cowell Collection, box 2, folders 44 and 45; and box 95.

———. Letter to Adolph Weiss, undated, but probably March 1934. Transcribed inWilliam George, “Adolph Weiss,” PhD diss., University of Iowa, 1971.

———. Letter to Peter Yates, 24 December 1940. Yates Papers, Mandeville SpecialCollections Library, University of California, San Diego.

Cowell, Henry. Enrollment sheet for his course “Primitive and Folk Origins of Music”(New School, New York). NYPL Cowell Collection, box 146, folder 91.

———. Interview by Beate Gordon, 1962. Transcript in NYPL Cowell Collection,box 72.

———. Interview by Louis Vaczek, 18 June 1962. Transcript in NYPL Cowell Col-lection, box 72.

———. Letter(s) and postcard(s) to: Béla Bartók, undated. NYPL Cowell Collection, box 16, folder 497.John Becker, 31 January 1938 and 14 March 1939. NYPL Cowell Collection,

box 97.Bonnie Bird, 2 April 1939. Private collection.John Cage, 23 March 1937. NYPL Cowell Collection, box 97 (copy) and box

115 (original).Carlos Chávez, 11 September 1932. NYPL Cowell Collection, box 18, folder

528.Aaron Copland, 17 September 1937. NYPL Cowell Collection, box 97.Harry Cowell, 1 February 1939. NYPL Cowell Collection, box 97.Harry and Olive Cowell, 11 December 1931, 8 January 1933, 4 October 1933,

26 December 1938, and 29 August 1939. NYPL Cowell Collection, box18, folders 521, 531, and 536; and box 97.

Olive Cowell, 27 October, 7 November, and 21 November 1931; also 1 June1932, 1 December 1934, 15 December [1934], 30 December 1934, 26 September 1937, 4 March 1939, and 27 July 1939. NYPL CowellCollection, box 17, folder 519; box 18, folders 520, 527, 540, and 640; andbox 97.

Sidney Robertson (Cowell), 8 August 1938 and 7 December [1942]. NYPLCowell Collection, box 97 and box 21, folder 640.

Percy Grainger, 3 December 1937. NYPL Cowell Collection, box 97.Charles Ives, 14 November 1931, 10 January 1933, 14 March 1934, and

2 October 1934. NYPL Cowell Collection, box 18, folders 520, 531, 538,and 539. Also: undated letter to Ives in box 21, folder 647.

Nicolas Slonimsky, 14 February 1933, 22 November 1933 (postcard), 23 January 1934, 26 March 1939, and 29 May 1939. NYPL CowellCollection, box 18, folders 532, 537, 538; and box 97.

Blanche Walton, 19 March 1939. NYPL Cowell Collection, box 97.

Henry Cowell and John Cage 107

Adolph Weiss, 7 March 1934. NYPL Cowell Collection, box 18, folder 538. ———. Miscellaneous calendars. NYPL Cowell Collection, box 72.———. “The Nature of Melody.” Unpublished treatise, ca. 1936–37. Manuscript

materials are in the NYPL Cowell Collection, box 126.———. “Rhythm Book.” Unpublished treatise, ca. 1937–38. Manuscript materials are

in the NYPL Cowell Collection, box 115.———. Sound Form No. 1. Manuscript score and six pages of performance instruc-

tions. Cowell Collection. Music Division, Library of Congress.———. Synchrony. Manuscript short score of the original version. Cowell Collection.

Music Division, Library of Congress.———. United Quartet, composer’s analysis. NYPL Cowell Collection, JPB 01–63.Cowell, Sidney Robertson. Annotation (14 December 1988) on a letter of 11 Septem-

ber 1932 from Henry Cowell to Carlos Chávez. NYPL Cowell Collection, box 18,folder 528.

———.Letter to Henry Cowell, 19September 1938. NYPL Cowell Collection, box 95.Graham, Martha. Letter to Olive Cowell, 20 March 1937. NYPL Cowell Collection,

box 95.Harrison, Lou. Interviews by Leta E. Miller and Fredric Lieberman, 29 December

1993 and 31 March 1994. Slonimsky, Nicolas. Letters to Cowell, 7 March 1934 and 14 October 1934. NYPL

Cowell Collection, box 13, folder 387.Strang, Gerald. Letter to Olive Cowell, 26 May 1936. NYPL Cowell Collection, box

96.Tamada, Kitaro Nyohyo. Letter to Henry Cowell, 14 March 1934. NYPL Cowell

Collection, box 14, folder 411.Weiss, Adolph. Letter to Cowell, 18 March 1934. NYPL Cowell Collection, box 16,

folder 460.

Published Works, Dissertations, and ThesesBernstein, David. “Music I: To the Late 1940s.” In The Cambridge Companion to John

Cage, edited by David Nicholls, 63–84. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2002.

Boren, Virginia. “Cornish Dance Group Gives Refreshing Concert,” Seattle Times, 8 May 1940.

Brown, Katherine M. “The Work of Mary Wigman.” MS thesis, University of Utah,1955.

Bulletin of the New York Musicological Society. 1931–34.Cage, John. “A Composer’s Confessions.” Address at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie,

New York, 28 February 1948. Published in Musicworks 52 (Spring 1992): 6–15;reprinted in John Cage, Writer: Previously Uncollected Pieces, edited by RichardKostelanetz. New York: Limelight Editions, 1993, 27–44.

———. “Composition as Process.” In Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middletown, CT:Wesleyan University Press, 1961, 18–34.

———. For the Birds: John Cage in Conversation with Daniel Charles. Boston andLondon: Marion Boyars, 1981.

———. “The Future of Music: Credo.” In Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middletown,CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961, 3–6. Manuscript versions of original 1940lecture in the John Cage Collection, Music Library, Northwestern University.

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———. “History of Experimental Music in the United States.” In Silence: Lectures andWritings. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961, 67–75.

———. “How the Piano Came to Be Prepared.” In Empty Words: Writings ’73–’78.Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1979, 7–9.

———. John Cage, Writer: Previously Uncollected Pieces. Selected and introduced byRichard Kostelanetz. New York: Limelight Editions, 1993.

———. Notations. New York: Something Else Press, 1969.———. Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press,

1961.Canon, Cornelius. “The Federal Music Project of the Works Progress Administration:

Music in a Democracy.” PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 1963.Cornish, Nellie C. Miss Aunt Nellie: The Autobiography of Nellie C. Cornish. Seattle:

University of Washington Press, 1964.Cowell, Henry. “Creation and Imitation: A Dissertation on New Music,” Fortnightly

1, no. 6 (20 Nov. 1931): 5–6.———. “Current Chronicle: NewYork,”Musical Quarterly 38 (January 1952):123–36.———. “Drums along the Pacific,” Modern Music 18, no. 1 (November/December

1940): 46–49.———. Liner notes to the recording Music of the World’s Peoples. Ethnic Folkways

Library Albums FE 4504–4508. LP recording, 1951–55.———. New Musical Resources, edited by David Nicholls. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1996. Original edition, New York and London: Alfred A. Knopf,1930.

———. “Oriental Influence on Western Music.” In Music—East and West, ExecutiveCommittee for the 1961 Tokyo East-West Music Encounter, 1961, 71–76.

———. “Relating Music and Concert Dance.” Dance Observer 4, no. 1 (January1937): 1, 7–9.

Crawford, Richard. The American Musicological Society, 1934–1984: An AnniversaryEssay. Philadelphia: American Musicological Society, 1984.

Fetterman, William. John Cage’s Theatre Pieces: Notations and Performances. Con-temporary Music Studies 11. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Harwood AcademicPublishers, 1996.

Fisher, Marjory. “New Projects Promise Aid to Composers.” San Francisco News, 18 Feb. 1933.

Gann, Kyle. “Subversive Prophet: Henry Cowell as Theorist and Critic.” In The WholeWorld of Music: A Henry Cowell Symposium, edited by David Nicholls, 171–222.Contemporary Music Studies 16. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Harwood AcademicPublishers, 1997.

George, William. “Adolph Weiss.” PhD diss., University of Iowa, 1971.Harrison, Lou. Music Primer. New York: C. F. Peters, 1971.Hicks, Michael. Henry Cowell, Bohemian. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois

Press, 2002.———. “The Imprisonment of Henry Cowell.” This Journal 44 (1991): 92–119.———. “John Cage’s Studies with Schoenberg.” American Music 8 (1990): 125–40.Hines, Thomas S. “ ‘Then Not Yet “Cage” ’: The Los Angeles Years.” In John Cage:

Composed in America, edited by Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junkerman, 65–99.Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

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Hitchcock, H. Wiley. “Henry Cowell’s Ostinato Pianissimo.” Musical Quarterly 70(1984): 23–44.

——— Music in the United States: A Historical Introduction. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:Prentice-Hall, 1969.

John Cage [Catalog compiled by Robert Dunn]. New York: Henmar Press, 1962.John Cage [Catalog of works]. New York: C. F. Peters, [1993].Jones, Isabel Morse. “Father Finn Accomplishes Hardest Tasks with Smile: Dinner

Party, Choir Rehearsals Both Reveal Pleasant Adroitness; Bowl Programs for ThisWeek Discussed.” Los Angeles Times, 16 July 1933.

———. “Words and Music.” Los Angeles Times, 7 April 1935, A10.Katz, Mark. Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music. Berkeley, Los

Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2004.Key, Susan. “John Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No. 1: Through the Looking Glass.”

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Kostelanetz, Richard. Conversing with Cage. New York and London: Routledge,2003.

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the Recordings. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1978.Miller, Leta E.. “The Art of Noise: John Cage, Lou Harrison, and the West Coast

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———. “Cage, Cunningham, and Collaborators: The Odyssey of Variations V.”Musical Quarterly 85 (2001): 545–67.

———. “Cage’s Collaborations.” In The Cambridge Campanion to John Cage, ed.David Nicholls, 151–68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

———. “Cultural Intersections: John Cage in Seattle (1938–40).” In John Cage:Music, Philosophy, and Intention, 1933–1950, edited by David Patterson, 47–82.New York and London: Routledge, 2002.

———. “Henry Cowell and Modern Dance: The Genesis of Elastic Form.” AmericanMusic 20 (2002): 1–24.

Miller, Leta E., and Fredric Lieberman. Lou Harrison. Urbana: University of IllinoisPress, 2006, forthcoming.

Montague, Stephen. “John Cage at Seventy: An Interview.” American Music 3(1985): 205–16.

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Slonimsky, Nicolas. “Henry Cowell.” In American Composers on American Music: ASymposium, edited by Henry Cowell, 57–63. New York: Ungar, 1962; original edi-tion published by the trustees of Stanford University, 1933.

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Thompson, Howard. “New Music Given by Pan-Americans.” New York Times, 16 April 1934.

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Timmons, Stuart. The Trouble with Harry Hay: Founder of the Modern Gay Movement.Boston: Alyson, 1990.

Tomkins, Calvin. The Bride and the Bachelors: The Heretical Courtship in Modern Art.New York: Viking Press, 1965.

“Tuesday’s Concert Arouses Amusement, Slight Hysteria.” Unidentified newspaper(Missoula, MT), 11 Jan. 1940.

Varèse, Edgard. “Organized Sound for the Sound Film.”The Commonweal (13 Decem-ber 1940): 204–5.

Weschler, Lawrence. “My Grandfather’s Tale.” Atlantic Monthly 278, no. 6(December 1996): 86–106.

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RecordingsThe 25-Year Retrospective Concert of the Music of John Cage. New York: Distributed by

George Avakian. Matrix no. K08Y 1499–1504. 3 LP discs, 1959. Remastered on 3compact discs, 1994, Wergo WER 6247-2.

Cowell, Henry. Synchrony. CRI 217. LP recording, 1967. Remastered on compactdisc, 1997, Citadel CTD 88122.

Dancing with Henry: New Discoveries in the Music of Henry Cowell. Mode Records101, Compact disc, 2001.

Demonstration Collection of E. M. Hornbostel and the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv.Ethnic Folkways Library FE 4175. LP recording, 1963.

Abstract

This article explores, through examination of correspondence and other pri-mary sources, the close interaction between Henry Cowell and John Cagefrom 1933 to 1941 in the areas of percussion music, dance, world musics, theprepared piano, electronic sounds, micro-macrocosmic forms, sliding tones,and elastic composition. Several works are examined in detail, among themCowell’s Pulse (which anticipated Cage’s micro-macrocosmic forms in theConstructions) and Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (whose electronicslides addressed Cowell’s prediction that the “future of music” lay in the per-fection of percussion and sliding tones). A previously unavailable recording of Imaginary Landscape No. 1 by Cage’s ensemble reveals an unexpected in-terpretation of the score. Appendices present a chronology of events, a 1937letter from Cowell to Cage, and a little-known set of Cage’s program notesfrom 1940.