The Music of Henry Cowell

The Music of Henry CowellAuthor(s): Hugo WeisgallReviewed work(s):Source: The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 45, No. 4 (Oct., 1959), pp. 484-507Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/740598 .Accessed: 20/07/2012 16:00

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THE MUSIC OF HENRY COWELL

By HUGO WEISGALL

INCE his formal New York ddbut in 1924, Henry Cowell has been a major creative force in American music. His musical gifts and

the range of his energy, the scope of his music, the breadth of his in- fluence and the recognition he has achieved, combine to make of him a figure a little larger than life, a kind of Paul Bunyan in music. Aside from his life as a composer, Cowell has lived several other full lives as champion of new music, impresario, performer, lecturer, critic, editor, teacher, and sponsor of the young.

These activities contribute much to a portrait of Cowell, but the music itself demands more critical attention than it has had. One cannot

point to another composer on the American scene who has submitted himself with such confidence to the entire gamut of musical experience and who has created such an impressive amount of work embodying so many different kinds of musical ideas, techniques, and sounds.

The last word on so rich a personality will not be written for some time to come, but with the help of Cowell's most recent works one can venture to trace certain trends from their origins, and gain thereby a much-needed consistency of view.1

At certain periods it has been taken for granted that composers should write in a great range of styles and idioms. Since the 19th century, however, the idea of stylistic diversity has been frowned upon, and in our day composers who are not satisfied only to "express themselves" have been critically suspect.

As to Cowell, despite what may seem at first a great diversity of musical impulses, it becomes clear that his music is of a piece, the product of a single personality. There is a perceptible consistency in the

1 The author wishes to acknowledge the assistance of Alan Stout in the pre- liminary research for this article.

484

The Music of Henry Cowell 485

choice of musical materials, and within a recognizable range there is an equal consistency in the handling of these materials. Just as one can always apprehend Stravinsky by the instrumental sound, no matter how different the music, or Bart6k by the rhapsodic freedom of the form he gives to tightly concentrated musical ideas, one can always find Cowell's signature in the integration of ideas and techniques that from a conventional point of view seem disparate. What at one time gave the impression of extreme eclecticism is the variety of stimuli that Cowell has known how to accept as taking-off points, and the mass of his music that uses similar ideas in different ways. Each work, often each movement, can be regarded as an enthusiastic synthesis of some musical experience Cowell has just undergone, written with a great sense of immediacy. That this consistency in variety has not been crippling is apparent when one considers some of his latest works, where he brilliantly combines elements never related before.

Henry Cowell was born in Menlo Park, near San Francisco, on March 11, 1897. He was eight years old when his health required that he abandon a first strenuous career as violin prodigy; he then decided to become a composer. His attention was directed to the sounds to be heard around him: the noise of the wind and the sea, of trains; dissonant speech intonations, neighborhood singers and pianists; singing games of Oriental children, his mother's Iowa folk tunes, his father's Irish songs and dances-and the Chinese opera (because it was free). Nothing led him to suppose that these sounds were not all equally valid as material for his own music, and quantities of his early compositions derive from a very wide assortment of such aural experience.

The boy began to write music in 1908. The second theme of the piano piece Antinomy is the only surviving fragment from this time; it was originally part of a long melodic setting of Longfellow's Golden Legend, never finished. "Commissioned" at the age of fourteen to write music for a pageant based on legends from Irish mythology, Cowell hit upon a device he called "tone clusters" in the attempt to produce music on the piano suitable for the sea-god Manaunaun. This music was first performed at a public concert in San Francisco on March 10, 1912, when Cowell was fifteen, and The Tides of Manau- naun is still the most often performed of Cowell's short piano works.

Tone clusters are groups of adjacent tones (three or more, up to twelve), played simultaneously. Cowell soon came to think of them as creating a system of harmony based on the interval of a second instead

486 The Musical Quarterly

of a third; the term came from their appearance on the keyboard and in the notation he devised for them. Most of the tone-cluster piano pieces that first attracted international attention to Cowell's name and caused scandals at their early performances (because of their unconventional material and even more unconventional performance technique) come from the decade 1911-1921.2 In this early piano music these secundal chords are sounded along any chosen scale line - diatonic (The Trumpet of Angus Og, Tides of Manaunaun), penta- tonic (Amiable Conversation, Exultation), or chromatic (Advertisement, Antinomy), and they were used either homophonically (Harp of Life, Reel) or polyphonically (Dynamic Motion) almost from the first.

Although this fruitful device was originally derived from the piano, it appears in Cowell's orchestra music after about 1917 (Some More Music). Perhaps its fullest orchestral use comes in the second movement of the Piano Concerto (1929). Cowell continues to find secundal harmony and counterpoint expressive for his symphonic purposes today, more frequently however in the modal pieces than in the chromatic dissonant ones.

Cowell has been called a self-taught composer, but this is true only in the sense that he had already written more than a hundred pieces before he began his first formal training in composition at the age of sixteen, under the wing of Charles Seeger, who was then head of the Department of Music at the University of California in Berkeley. Cowell could not matriculate at the University because he had had no formal schooling at either the elementary or high-school level. After an intro- ductory interview in the spring of 1913, Seeger undertook to arrange that the boy be given special status at the University so that he might initiate his theoretical studies under E. G. Strickland. Seeger also arranged for him to study counterpoint with Wallace Sabin, a San

2 Cowell's penchant for recounting the more surprising incidents of his career has obscured the success he had from the first in Europe with a few dignified critics and musicians of the first rank, men independent enough to respect an American who felt his music must be shaped by his experience of sound as he found it in his own country. Early supporters of his music were Artur Schnabel and Bart6k, who arranged the concerts that introduced him to Berlin and Dessau, and Paris, respec- tively. Friendly reviews came from Adolf Weissmann in Berlin, Erwin Felber in Vienna, Georges Migot in Paris, Edward Dent in London, and soon thereafter, in New York, from Pitts Sanborn and Lawrence Gilman. Seventeen of the tone- cluster piano pieces were published by Breitkopf & H~irtel in 1922. Cowell's five European concert tours (in which he played only his own music) took place in 1923, 1926, 1928, 1931-32, and 1933; all but the first one paid for themselves.


Francisco organist. It was further agreed that Cowell should suspend free composition for a year; meanwhile weekly meetings with Seeger were to be devoted to a discussion of new ideas in music.

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

It was soon clear to Seeger that a meaningful discipline, for so determined an autodidact as the boy had already become, could only be derived from his own music. So Seeger made two suggestions: First he urged that Cowell work out a systematic technique for any unusual musical material he wanted to employ; and second, he pointed out that it is for the innovator himself to create the initial repertory embodying his innovations. Both suggestions suited Cowell perfectly, and ever since he seems to have visualized his life's work in these terms.

Following his early intense concern with the problems and possibilities of secundal harmony and counterpoint, Cowell turned to consider parallel developments in rhythm. His book New Musical Resources, written in 1919 and revised somewhat for publication in 1929, is the theoretical exposition of the possibilities for orderly development of rhythmic structures in relation to melodic and harmonic ones. The basis of this relationship lies in the vibration ratios expressed in the overtone series, ratios that Cowell found might be used to define rhythmic intervals as well as tonal ones.3 In the early twenties Cowell also turned his attention to what he considered to be the neglected possibilities inherent in the piano strings. Directly on them he proceeded to produce

3Cowell's most complete use of the idea was in his Quartet Romantic (1914 or 1915). The carrying over of serial relationships from the pitch element to other elements of music can be found in more than one contemporary style. In 1959 Karlheinz Stockhausen told Cowell that after he and his colleagues had been work- ing with this idea for some time, he was astonished to have Cowell's book called to his attention by a young composer from Argentina.


harmonics, muted tones, and pizzicati of various sorts, and he also applied to them various mechanical mutes and hammers, table knives, gong beaters, rubber bands, coins, and so on, to vary the tone quality of what he sometimes called the "string piano."

Cowell's formal theoretical training in the Western musical tradition covered about eight years of the usual studies. He has spent approximately the same length of time studying other musical cultures with famous Oriental teachers in Berlin, New York, and California; in 1931- 32 he had a Guggenheim Fellowship for study under von Hornbostel at the University of Berlin.4 To this must be added a recent year (1956-57) spent in Asia with the primary purpose of hearing first-hand the music of the chief Asian cultures.

All of Cowell's inquiries into new theoretical resources in music, whether physical (acoustical, instrumental) or cultural (various kinds of folk and formal musics of the Orient), have been undertaken for the same reason: to find intellectual justification for procedures he had already begun to use instinctively, and which he was repeatedly told were "not music." He wished to satisfy himself about all the various things that had been considered music in other times and places, for one thing. And as to what music might become, through an abstract theoretical approach, he wrote in the preface to New Musical Resources (1929):

My interest in the theory underlying new materials came about at first through wishing to explain to myself, as well as to others, why certain materials I felt impelled to use in composition, and which I instinctively felt to be legitimate, have genuine scientific and logical foundation . . . Some of the results of the investigation convinced me that although my music itself preceded the knowledge of the theoretical explanation, there had been enough unconscious perception so that the means used were . . . in accordance with acoustical law.

The relationships he noticed among expanding resources for music in the West as he conceived them, the music of other parts of the world, and his own music, led him to the concept of music as a single world- wide art, which uses the same basic elements everywhere but which has simply developed these elements to differing degrees or has combined them differently, in different places. This suggested a new kind of musical internationalism, of which Cowell wrote in 1948:

* It was during this Berlin period that Schoenberg invited Cowell to play for his master classes and to visit his lectures, which were devoted over a period of months to the analysis of a single string quartet of Mozart. Cowell never studied composition with Schoenberg.


Dodecaphonic internationalism eliminates everything that has been developed as a national style in the handling of musical materials. Thus it has had to build its own associations and traditions according to its own inner logic; this logic is the tighter because it is not conditioned by the vagaries of custom. Another kind of "internationalism" seems possible to me, however, in which musical materials developed in a single culture are carried beyond the customs of that culture according to a logic inherent in the basic materials themselves. In this way a given kind of musical treatment is extended, instead of being eliminated because its purely nationalistic aspects are limited. Such a concept of extension may, for example, be applied to rhythm; this will practically always result in rhythms which can be found in Africa or Indonesia (where rhythm is far more elaborately developed and systematized than it is with us). My admiration and enjoyment of foreign musical cultures have led me to welcome types of musical treatment which show the close relationships between our musical concepts and those developed by other people. The composer's problem here, as always, is to bring musical materials together in accordance with their own nature and its implications.

* *

The difficulty a critic faces, quite aside from the bulk of the music he must attempt to digest, is above all the question of style. One can only point out that Cowell is in command of a vast vocabulary in many musical languages; and to deal understandingly with them a critic must be prepared to place himself at the point where Cowell chooses to be.

The vast amount of music Cowell has produced during the past forty years has been couched in many forms and for most conceivable combinations, and at various times there have actually been used in it materials drawn from more than a dozen regional traditions, handled by means of nearly as many different techniques. Quite apart from a remarkable fecundity and exuberance, Cowell seems always to have been temperamentally incapable of excluding from the corpus of his work anything offered by his creative mind. His is a nature that accepts wholeheartedly; he does not easily reject anything, whether in himself or others.5

The quantity of Cowell's music is also partly accounted for by the fact that any dissatisfaction he may feel with a piece of music produces

SThe mass of the music becomes more manageable, perhaps, if it is examined like a genealogical table. The family line is entirely free of prejudice; the principle of segregation is never invoked. Marriages are based on mutual attraction, and take place both within and without the clan. Progeny reveal a variety of inherited traits, some of which remain dominant (in combination with an assortment of others) through several generations; some are sports, which may appear only once, or may be developed in turn into a new strain. This is a very living music.


not a revision but a new work. Moreover, he is constantly writing small pieces employing a particular type of material or embodying a specific idea that later undergo metamorphosis and are used in larger works. He is also forever writing music for special occasions or special people, and these too are more often than not essais for subsequent enlargement and more elaborate use.

Unfortunately no catalogue raisonne exists, but mention should be made of thirteen symphonies, twenty-nine other works in several movements for orchestra, a dozen or so single-movement works for orchestra, ten quartets, of which six are for strings, three quintets, a septet, eight two-to-five-movement works for various solo instruments with piano or harpsichord, six two-to-seven-movement works for three instruments or voice and two instruments, nine stage works, three works for chorus and orchestra or band, five concertos for piano and orchestra, and the recent Concerto for Percussion and Orchestra.6

One may trace two principal currents in Cowell's music. One of these is a consistent use of chromatic dissonant material, usually expressed polyphonically; the other is a broad extension of modal prin- ciples, frequently utilizing "exotic" scales, rhythmic forms, and instruments. Neither of these tendencies is more "experimental" than the other, and both of them, separately or together, appear from time to time since Cowell's earliest compositions.

One cannot divide Cowell's work into limited chronological "periods" because there has never been a time when he has devoted himself consistently to a single thing. Yet one can trace, with respect to any one musical notion, various experiments, permutations and combinations that move in a general way from the simple to the complex.

So it is possible to say that from 1919 to about 1931 Cowell devoted himself with increasing intensity to the concepts of rhythm and dissonant chromaticism that he developed in his book New Musical Re- sources (1919; 1929). From the mid-thirties to the late forties there appears a marked concentration on the reworking of modal (Eastern as well as Western) musical materials, and since about 1950 the two tendencies are more often combined than not-never, however, the same way twice.

SThe twelve hymn and fuguing tune pieces go through several of the categories; furthermore this form can be found providing parts of the Violin Sonata, of Sym- phonies 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, and 12, of the Set of Five, of String Quartet No. 5, and of A Thanksgiving Psalm, for men's chorus and orchestra.


Among Cowell's chief works for orchestra there are peaks that offer the best clues, perhaps, to the general topography. I cite the Sinfonietta (1924; 1928), the Sixth Symphony (1950), and the Eleventh and Twelfth Symphonies (1955 and 1956) in particular, since I consider them landmarks in that aspect of Cowell's style which can be most consistently traced in its development throughout his creative life. Other works, but far from all of them, will be mentioned in connection with Cowell's musical interests and the procedures I attempt to describe.

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

The Sinfonietta, in three movements, is certainly one of Cowell's strongest, most concise, and best-constructed works. So discerning a musician as Anton Webern included it on his programs in Vienna in 1932.

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

While the Sinfonietta's harmonic sound at any given moment is not unlike that of Hindemith's music of the same period, the total effect is at once warmer, more expressive and more human. Despite


the abundance of Wagnerian leaps and sharp dissonances, the music is chaste and the listener is not expected to become passionately involved. The whole work is of perfect consistency of style.

Synchrony (1929) is a single movement for large orchestra. The entire piece derives formally from a trumpet solo announced at the opening; it is a fantasia on a single motif. It was commissioned by Martha Graham for a Metropolitan Opera performance that never took place. Stokowski's playing of it with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1932 was Cowell's first major orchestral performance in America. (Synchrony had however been performed earlier abroad, as had the Sinfonietta.) The third large work of the period 1921-31 is the Con- certo for Piano and Orchestra, a fiendishly difficult piece with secundal chords for the orchestra and a finale of great rhythmic complexity. (There were a number of shorter dissonant pieces for orchestra during this general period, now either lost or regarded by their author with some misgiving.)

It is in these three major works that Cowell first came to grips effectively (and surprisingly early) with the problems of creating large forms out of dissonant germinal motifs. Everything is tightly knit and closely reasoned, and the music achieves neatly and effortlessly what it sets out to do. These works form one of the landmarks of the twenties; they stand up with our most impressive music today.

From about 1936 to 1950, when the Sixth Symphony was begun, Cowell was almost entirely preoccupied with various kinds of traditional music; folk music of the five continents and seven seas, and the elaborate classic traditions of Asia. It is at this time that Cowell first becomes articulate on the subject of what may be called the search for an ecumenical music-for a style or styles that will have meaning to many different peoples, for a more widely communicative music - and also, possibly, for an intellectually satisfying channel for indulging his natural melodic gift.

An intensely personal statement written in 1936 to accompany the publication of his United Quartet gives expression to ideas related to much of the music he was to write in the next fifteen years:

The Quartet should be easy to understand, without following any known path- way, but it should be understood equally well by Americans, Europeans, Orientals, or higher primitives; or by anybody from a coal miner to a bank president. The main purpose of it, of course, is not in its technique, but in the message which,


of course, is not suitable for expression in words. It may be said that it concerns human and social relationships. The technique is for the purpose of conveying the message to the widely differentiated groups who need to be united in these relationships.

The work is original in spite of its simplicity, because the simplicity is drawn from the whole world, instead of from the European tradition or any other single tradition. It is not an attempt to return to the primitive, to return to the Oriental, to be neo-classical, nor to be ultra-modern. There are in it elements suggested from every place and period. For example, the classical feeling is represented, not by the employment of a classic form, but in building up a new form, carefully planned. A carefully planned form is a classic concept. Primitive music is represented, not by imitating it, nor by taking a specific melody or rhythm from some tribe, but by using at times a three-tone scale and exhausting all the different ways the three tones can appear (a procedure of some primitive music), and by its underlying rhythmic beat-like primitive music, but taken from no specific instance. The Oriental is represented by modes which are constructed as Oriental modes are constructed, without being actual modes used in particular cultures. From Western culture, the archaic is represented by foundational harmonic intervals of fifths, fourths and octaves. The romantic is represented by the emotional outpouring of the melodies. The modern is represented by the use of unresolved discords, by free intervals in two-part counterpoint and by the fact that the whole result is something new - and all that is new is modern.

This manifesto pinpoints a vast amount of music written between 1930 - approximately after Synchrony and the Piano Concerto - and 1950, before the Sixth Symphony. Not all of this music is equally successful from every point of view, of course. There is much fine music, many beautiful individual movements, a host of boldly imaginative sallies in one direction or another, and great masses of direct, simple music, unproblematic to the listener but not unexperimental technically. For pure musical charm and spontaneity it would be hard to improve upon the Comallye ballad tunes, the Irish-American dance tunes, and various pieces or movements that appear during this time. (The jig has since become firmly entrenched as the Cowell scherzo; it is to Cowell what the waltz was to Tchaikovsky.) One should cite the Old American Country Set (1937), lively pieces marked by several of the then little-recognized traits of rural American music: the square form, the long initial notes of phrases, the frequent tonic where a European would use the dominant. Toccanta (1938) for three instruments and voice without words, and its orchestral version (Symphonic Set Opus 17) written a year later, is somewhat more sophisticated music that suggests Middle Eastern melodic styles. Two of the best works of this period are for band: Animal Magic, whose three-note motif is by exception


in Cowell's music an actual tune, from the Greenland Eskimo; and Schoonthree, a poetic piece whose form is dictated by its Celtic title, which means The Music of Sleep - the music intensifies as sleep deepens and fades away as the sleeper wakes. Of Cowell's innumerable fine melodies, one of the most memorable dates from 1942: How Old Is Song, a setting of a brief poem by his father, Harry Cowell, which circulates also in a version for violin and piano. The melody is super- posed upon a little piece written in 1923 for the strings of the piano. Other songs and choral pieces written during the forties are for the most part skillful, direct, and attractive in their simplicity; they can be regarded as foreshadowing the Septet as well as such works for chorus and orchestra as the Thanksgiving Psalm from the Dead Sea Scrolls and ". .. if He please," all written in the fifties. The significance of much of this music, aside from its nearly unfailing immediate charm, lies partly in the contributions Cowell was to levy on it later for integration into works of broader scope and greater intensity of conception.

Many of the longer works of this intermediate period seem aggressively redundant in one spot or another, a surprising thing to find in Cowell's writing. Several of the symphonies suffer from the familiar 20th-century last-movement trouble - a difficulty Cowell was no better able to solve during this period than most of his contemporaries. In Cowell's case, the trouble may possibly stem from the fact that in many diatonic works he has set himself the apparently insoluble problem of making a full-blown theme generate a multi-movement structure. This is usually not fatal in the early movements, but seems to make it impossible to build up the expected tension at the close of the work. Cowell does not agree that it is necessary to leave the hearer with a sense of completely satisfied expectation at the close of a large work, and he has more than once, as in the Violin Sonata, deliberately provided a brief period of chaos, in which the energies of the music completely fail just before the last movement ends. Other long works tend to end with a return to the beginning, which establishes a perfectly reasonable cyclic form but one that, to this writer at least, is not at all satisfying in dramatic structural terms.

However this may be, Cowell was at the same time (after 1941) consistently exploring the possibilities of the hymn-and-fuguing-tune combination; this he eventually established as a highly successful neo- Baroque form. Cowell regards the two-movement form, "something slow followed by something fast," as valuable partly because it is so


widespread a type of musical structure, but the specific musical materials developed in this series come from the British Isles via rural American hymnody. Cowell combines the modal style of the ballad tunes that were appropriated for hymns in the southern United States with the fuguing tune idea that is associated with Billings's name and was employed by many colonial American composers. The whole concept is particularly well suited to Cowell's expansive melodic gifts, and it coincides remarkably with his diatonic modal taste. As with the tone clusters and dissonant counterpoint and harmony earlier, he has created a body of works of different lengths and complexity of technical treatment that establish their own consistent theoretical basis. For example, he may expand the basic melodic material by orderly kinds of modal modulation: using the same mode on different tonics; or different modes on the same tonic; or different modes on different tonics. New modes are derived from tetrachord changes, either conjunct or disjunct. In the polyphonic sections, in-mode notes are treated as consonant, with fifths, octaves, or triads sitting at the cadence. These are procedures that Cowell had already occasionally used with Oriental modal materials, and which after 1956 he was to apply more elaborately to Iranian, Indian, and Japanese musical styles again.

In the late forties Cowell's four- and five-movement works began to use hymns and fuguing tunes for first and/or last movements, with ballads and jigs between them for the slow movements and scherzos. The first such piece was the Violin Sonata (1945), followed almost immediately by the Fourth Symphony (1946). The Fifth Symphony (1948) is an essay in using several exotic-seeming techniques to bring into symphonic form a theme of a type common to many different cultures - a work full of lovely music but whose "symphonic character" has been sometimes disputed.

Symphony No. 6 (1950) is of much larger and tighter conception. In its opening movement one finds the single example of deliberate use of a twelve-tone row in Cowell's music. The row undergoes development, but not the whole row as in the Schoenbergian tradition: instead Cowell takes motifs from it for development in symphonic fashion. No. 7 applies some dissonance to the hymn-and-fuguing-tune idea, in a dignified work full of beautiful writing, called by a Viennese critic (Erich Jantsch) in 1955 "symphonic music in our own terms, full of... pleasure in making music." No. 8 is a series of colorful simple movements for an international festival, written to be done by combined


Ohio college orchestras and chorus at Wilmington, Ohio. No. 9, commissioned by an amateur orchestra in Green Bay, Wisconsin, is full of fine melodies; it has an unforgettable opening. No. 10 is a broader development of the hymn-and-fuguing-tune style. These five symphonies, of which Nos. 6, 7, and 10 are major creative developments, were all written in a great burst of energy between the fall of 1949 and January 1953; there followed immediately a year that was devoted entirely to Symphony No. 11.

Since 1941, a dozen or so two-movement works have appeared under the title of Hymn and Fuguing Tune: No. 1 for band; Nos. 2 and 5 for string orchestra (the last also for voices); No. 10 for string orchestra and oboe; No. 3 for large orchestra, a handsome work that gives the brass a touch of swooping, syncopated Salvation Army street band music; and the others for solo instruments and piano or small vocal or instrumental combinations. Some fifty smaller but related pieces are woven through this very productive period, written regularly for family anniversaries and for Christmas, in which the return of dissonance can be plainly traced, even more consistently than in the series of hymn-and-fuguing-tune symphonies, Nos. 4, 6, 7, 9, and 10. Dis- sonance reappears gradually in diatonic music; tone clusters are used more often in the orchestra. Tunes contract and motifs begin to act again as germinating factors in symphonic movements, beginning with the Sixth Symphony.

By the time the Eleventh Symphony is reached, in 1953, chromatic dissonance is fully re-established as a compositional procedure, and here begins the period of synthesis of the elements most significant of Cowell's maturity, drawn with consistent taste and mastery from his most personal creative activity during the preceding forty years.

The Eleventh Symphony is subtitled "Seven Rituals of Music," and it takes its form from the interweaving of seven themes, each of which stands for one or another of the great human occasions - birth, play, struggle, death, and initiations into work, love, and spiritual experience - whose rituals have everywhere and always been associated with music. Although there is not one traditional "sonata" movement in the piece, it is considerably more symphonic as an entity than may at first appear. The printed list of movements suggests a suite or a serenade, but the music does not; the themes are elaborately interwoven and developed, and no single theme is limited to a single movement: it always appears elsewhere more than once, in either a reminiscent or a premonitory role.


All the themes are brought together in the brief requiem that beautifully closes the work.

This is a masterful integration of superficially disparate elements of style and technique, for a unified musical (as well as programmatic) purpose. The Impressionism of the first movement is in no way contra- dicted by the strenuous Expressionism of the third; nor does the almost pictorial use of percussion (in the second, fourth, and sixth movements) oppose the glissandi of the fifth or the fugal structure of the last movement. The non-Western materials in the music are not so obvious as in the Fifth Symphony; the Eleventh is in every way a subtler work.

The Twelfth Symphony (1956), as yet unperformed, is in many ways the climax of Cowell's career as a symphonist. It solves faultlessly the problem of applying chromatic dissonance techniques to the hymn- and-fuguing-tune genre. Like all the best of Cowell's "long" works this one is short. In pattern it runs slow, fast, fast, slow-fast. The first movement is a hymn, and in feeling it harks back to the Movement for String Quartet (1934), yet the rhythmic flow here is far more supple and not at all four-square. The acerbic harmonies of the earlier work are somewhat tempered. The second movement rather elaborately recalls the second movement of Cowell's Ninth Symphony, and for once the Cowell scherzo is in 2/4, with a delightful Mendelssohnian flavor. The 6/8 jig is not, however, forgotten; it appears as the trio. The final movement is an especially beautiful hymn-and-fuguing-tune, remarkable for the chromatic character of its fuguing theme; it perfectly pro- vides the sense of climax and completion required by a large work.

Cowell returned in September 1957 from a year spent listening to the varied music of Asia, and several subsequent works were gene- rated by what he describes as "submitting himself to the contagion" of old music in Persia, South India, and Japan. Much of this music ties as neatly into his taste for modal variation as the American religious styles have done, with the added interest of a great rhythmic complexity, and Cowell has been enjoying the challenge of making the nearly monodic styles of the Orient interesting for the symphony orchestra without denaturing them. His Thirteenth Symphony, for instance, adopts the Indian method of melodic variation which treats a single tone as if it were a motif. In Tokyo Cowell was taken to hear a rehearsal of the Emperor's musicians by a young Japanese composer who smilingly pointed out "Cowell's tone clusters" on the sho in the old gagaku, the seventh-century court music of Japan. Cowell was surprised that a


Japanese noticed the similarity of techniques, but it was familiar to him and already incorporated into the piece he was then writing as his second Louisville Commission, later entitled Ongaku ("Music") and since performed in both the United States and Japan. The Persian Set was written for the twelve instruments of the mixed East-West orchestra of the new Radio Tehran. The composer aimed it at a Middle Eastern radio audience that likes its familiar folk-tune styles "straight," and at performers some of whom had comparatively little experience in per- forming from Western notation. Cowell of course conformed to the request of the Iranian Minister of Fine Arts that he use no actual Iranian tunes, since he sympathizes with the feeling that if Iranian music is to be introduced abroad, Iranian composers who are being trained in Tehran today naturally wish to write it themselves.7

At sixty-two Cowell has no intention of abandoning active explora- tion of whatever music he may decide to make his concern. His technical resources are richer than ever, and happily he has had, since 1954, much more time to compose. Trying in 1955 to explain to an inter- viewer why he has never been dedicated to any single musical style or technique, Cowell exclaimed with some heat: "I want to live in the whole world of music! . .. I have never deliberately concerned myself with developing a distinctive 'personal' style, but only with the excitement and pleasure of writing music as beautifully, as warmly, and as interestingly as I can. If I am to develop the 'personal' style that seems to be the aim of so many composers today, I've always felt the music itself must do this for me, and that my job is simply to go on making music.

"If a man has a distinctive personality of his own, I don't see how he can keep it out of his music. And if he hasn't, how can he put it in?"

7 Resentment of Rimsky-Korsakov's use of Persian tunes in the Scheherazade suite was often expressed to Cowell by Iranian musicians. It seems that the Russian composer took down actual folk melodies on a visit to Esfahan (where they may still be heard). That these tunes circulate as Russian music seems to Iranians a profound injustice.

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A page from Henry Cowell's Sixth Symphony in the composer's handwriting

COMPOSITIONS CITED AND RELATED WORKS

Date Title and First Performance Publisher 1908 Golden Legend MS lost

An "opera" - melodic setting for Longfellow's poem, never completed. 1911 Adventures in Harmony MS lost

Pieces for piano; first use of tone clusters. March 10, 1912, San Francisco Musical Club, composer at piano.

1912 Tides of Manaunaun Breitkopf & Hiirtel - AMP For piano; introduction to a pageant of Irish legends by John Varian. March 10, 1912, San Francisco Musical Club.

1912-25 Piano Works, Vol. I (1959), Vol. II (to appear). AMP 1913 Dynamic Motion Breitkopf & H~irtel - AMP

What's This? For piano; chromatic dissonant counterpoint.

1914-15 Quartet Romantic MS For 2 flutes, violin, and viola. Tonal durations and pitches coordinated according to ratios of overtone series, as described later in New Musical Resources. 16 pp., complete in one movement. Probably unplayable, except perhaps electronically.

1914-20 Vestiges MS - Fleisher For large orchestra; elaborate multiple meters. Probably unplayable.

1915 Quartet Euphometric MS - Fleisher For string quartet. Meters derived from ratios of overtone series, requiring special note lengths: 1/5, 1/7 of a whole note, etc. Unplayable except perhaps electronically. Simple harmonic phrase is source of ratios that produce very complex metrical organization. 3 pp., complete in one movement.

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Date Title and First Performance Publisher

1915-16 Some Music MS- Fleisher Some More Music

Two brief very dissonant pieces for large orchestra. Massive tone clusters for orchestra, used polyphonically against each other.

1916-17 Symphony No. I in B minor MS - Fleisher A student work, indebted to Mahler.

1923 Aeolian Harp Quincke - Shilkret First piece for the strings of the piano.

1924 Ensemble For string quintet. MS - Fleisher For chamber orchestra (1925). Feb. 8, 1925, New York. International MS Composers Guild, Vladimir Shavitch, cond. This version expanded (1928) into the Sinfonietta, q.v.

For string orchestra (1959). April 12, 1959, New York. New School, AMP Carlos Surinach, cond. Movement for solo 'cello ace. by Indian thundersticks is omitted from string orchestra version.

1924-25 Irish Suite: Fairy Bells, Leprechaun, Banshee MS - Fleisher Solo played on piano strings, acc. by chamber orchestra. 1926, Boston Chamber Orch., N. Slonimsky, cond., composer at piano. 2nd mvt. uses small mutes and hammers.

1926 Morceau pour piano avec cordes Courrier Musical, Paris For piano, using piano strings and piano keyboard. 1926, Salle Pleyel, Paris, composer at the piano.

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1928 Sinfonietta Adler-Heinrichshofen - AMP A development for small orchestra from the string quintet Ensemble. First movement, Marked Passages, played April 28, 1928, Boston Cham- ber Orch., N. Slonimsky, cond. First complete performance, Nov. 23, 1931, Boston Chamber Orch., N. Slonimsky, cond.

1928 Concerto for Piano and Orchestra Senart Dec. 28, 1929. Havana Phil., Pedro Sanjuan, cond., composer at piano.

1929-30 Synchrony Adler-Heinrichshofen - AMP For large orchestra. June 6, 1931, Paris. Orchestre Straram, N. Slonimsky, cond.

1930 or Suite for Woodwind Quintet (sometimes Ensemble for.. .) Merrymount 1931 1934, New York. Georges Barrbre and his ensemble.

1934 String Quartet No. 2: Movement for String Quartet Privately printed Summer, 1934, Mills College, Calif. Pro Arte Quartet.

1936 String Quartet No. 4: United Quartet Privately printed ?1936, Philadelphia, Stringart Quartet.

1937 Old American Country Set: Blarneying Lilt, Comallye, Charivari (Shivaree), AMP Meeting House, Cornhuskers' Hornpipe. For large orchestra. ?1938, Kansas City Phil., Karl Krueger, cond.

1938 Toccanta Arrow - Boosey & Hawkes For flute, soprano (vocalise), 'cello, and piano. 1938, Bennington, Vt. Otto Luening, flute; Ethel Luening, soprano; Margaret Aue, 'cello; Gregory Tucker, piano.

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1938-39 Symphony No. 2: Anthropos (Mankind) ACA For large orchestra. April 26, 1945, Rochester, N. Y. Eastman-Rochester Orch., Howard Hanson, cond. (last mvt. only).

1938-39 Celtic Set G. Schirmer For band. Also for orchestra, 2 pianos 4-hands, and piano solo. 1939, San Francisco. Goldman Band, Richard F. Goldman, cond.

1939 Shoonthree Mercury For symphonic band. Also for orchestra. June 18, 1941, New York. Goldman Band, Richard F. Goldman, cond.

1939 Symphonic Set, Op. 17 Arrow- Boosey & Hawkes Version of Toccanta (1938) for large orchestra. The only opus no. Cowell has given a work: it was his 17th work for large orchestra. Apr. 1, 1940, Chicago. Illinois Sym. Orch., Izler Solomon, cond.

1942 Symphony No. 3: Gaelic AMP For band with strings or orchestra with saxophones.

1942 How Old Is Song Ernest Williams - Edwin Morris For high voice and piano strings; text by Harry Cowell. For violin and piano. 1944, New York. Joseph Szigeti, violin; Henry Cowell, piano.

1942 Hymn and Fuguing Piece (for piano) ACA

1943 Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 1 (for symphonic band). Summer 1943, New Leeds York. Goldman Band, Edwin Franko Goldman, cond.

1943 Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 1 (for piano) ACA All three have the same fuguing tune; the item immediately above has a different hymn because the one originally written with the piano version was mislaid.

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1944 Animal Magic Leeds For symphonic band. Summer 1945, New York. Goldman Band, composer conducting.

1944 Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 2 AMP For string orchestra. Oct. 8, 1944, New York. Saidenberg Little Symphony, Daniel Saidenberg, cond.

1944-45 Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 3 AMP For large orchestra. Jan. 26, 1954. Boston Sym. Orch., Pierre Monteux, cond.

1944-45 Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 4 ACA For recorders or any 3 voices or instruments.

1945 Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 5 AMP For 5 voices or instruments. April 14, 1946, New York. Randolph Singers, David Randolph, cond. For string orchestra. Oct. 26, 1952, Museum of Modern Art, N. Y., Stokowski, cond.

For symphony orchestra. Expanded to become 2 mvts. of Symphony No. 10; playable separately. Jan. 16, 1958, St. Louis Phil., Franz Bibo, cond.

1945 Sonata No. 1 for violin and piano AMP Commissioned by Joseph Szigeti, at whose request a fifth movement was added to the original four. Nov. 10, 1947, Evenings on the Roof, Los Angeles. Sol Babitz, violin; Henry Cowell, piano.

1946 Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 6 ACA For piano. Incorporated into last mvt. of Symphony No. 4.

1946 Symphony No. 4 AMP Oct. 24, 1947, Boston Sym. Orch., Richard Burgin, cond.

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1946 Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 7 Peer Int. For viola and piano. Dec. 10, 1947, Univ. of Chicago Chamber Music Series. Milton Preves, viola; Henry Cowell, piano.

1947 Hymn, Chorale and Fuguing Tune No. 8 AMP For string quartet. Material used in Symphony No. 10, but not in hymn- and-fuguing-tune form. May 11, 1948, Tallahassee. Florida State Univ. School of Music Faculty Concert.

1948 Symphony No. 5 AMP Commissioned by Hans Kindler. Jan. 5, 1949, Washington, D. C. Na- tional Sym. Orch., H. Kindler, cond.

1950 Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 9 AMP For 'cello and piano. Material used in Symphony No. 9, but not in hymn-and-fuguing-tune form. Nov. 16, 1953, New York. Cowell 25th Anniversary Concert, New School. Sidney Edwards, 'cello; David Tudor, piano.

1950-55 Symphony No. 6 ACA Nov. 14, 1955. Houston Sym. Orch., Stokowski, cond.

1952 Symphony No. 7 AMP For small orchestra. Nov. 25, 1952. Baltimore Little Orch., Reginald Stewart, cond.

1952 Symphony No. 8 ACA For chorus (SATB) and orch. Mar. 1, 1953, Wilmington College, Ohio. All-Ohio High School Festival Orch., Thor Johnson, cond.

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1952 Set of Five ACA Commissioned by Maro and Anahid Ajemian. 5 mvts. for violin, piano, and percussion. Dec. 21, 1952, New York. Maro and Anahid Ajemian with Eldon Bailey, percussion.

1952-53 Symphony No. 9 AMP Commissioned by Otto Kaap. For small orch. Mar. 14, 1954, Green Bay, Wis. Green Bay Symphonette, Ralph Holder, cond. See Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 9.

1952-53 Symphony No. 10 AMP Commissioned by Vienna Sym. Orch. for tour of Israel; performance record unknown. Mar. 1, 1957, New York Orch., Franz Bibo, cond. See Hymn and Fuguing Tunes Nos. 5 and 8.

1953-54 Symphony No. 11: Seven Rituals of Music AMP Louisville Commission. May 29, 1954, Louisville Orch., Robert Whitney, cond.

1955 Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 10 AMP For strings and oboe. Sept. 10, 1955, Santa Barbara, Calif. Pacific Coast Music Festival, Stokowski, cond.

1956 Variations for Orchestra AMP Commissioned by Thor Johnson. Nov. 23, 1956, Cincinnati Sym., Thor Johnson, cond.

1955-56 Symphony No. 12 AMP

1955-56 A Thanksgiving Psalm, from the Dead Sea Scrolls (transl. Millar Burrows). For men's chorus and orchestra. July 7, 1956, Tanglewood. Yale Glee Club and Boston Sym. Orch., Hugh Ross, cond. This work began life as Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 11 but outgrew that form.

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1955-56 String Quartet No. 5 Peters Commissioned by the Coolidge Foundation. Oct. 5, 1956, Cleveland, O., Critics' Circle Workshop, Juilliard Quartet.

1955-56 Septet ACA For 5 voices without words, clarinet, and keyboard. Commissioned by the Baltimore Chamber Music Society. Mar. 12, 1956, Baltimore Chamber Music Society, Hugo Weisgall, cond.

1956-57 Persian Set Peters For 12 instruments, incl. tar (or mandolin; or guitar) and drum. Fall, 1957, Tehran. Minneapolis Sym. Orch., Antal Dorati, cond. Dec. 3, 1958, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Stokowski, cond.

1957 Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 12 ACA For 3 horns. Performance record unknown.

1957 Music for Orchestra, 1957 AMP Sept. 7, 1957, Athens, Greece. Minneapolis Sym. Orch., Antal Dorati, cond. Nov. 1, 1957, Minneapolis. Same orch. and cond.

1957 Ongaku ("Music" or "The Art & Science of Sound") AMP Louisville Commission. Mar. 26, 1958. Louisville Orch., Robert Whitney, cond.

1957-58 Symphony No. 13: Madras Symphony Peters For small orch. with 3 Indian instruments, or equivalents. Mar. 3, 1959, Madras, India, auspices Music Academy of Madras. Little Orchestra Society, Thomas Scherman, cond., with Indian artists playing the jala- tarang and the tablatarang. Oct. 19, 1959, New York. Same orch. and cond.

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1958-59 Antiphony ACA For divided orchestra. Premiere announced for Nov. 14, 1959, Kansas City Phil., Hans Schwieger, cond.

1958-59 Concerto for Percussion and Orchestra Peters Solo (concertante) for percussion (4-5 players) and symphony orchestra.

1959- Symphony No. 14 Koussevitzky Foundation Commission. Work in progress. H,,d

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Documents

The Music of Henry Cowell