Henry Dixon Cowell (; March 11, 1897 – December 10, 1965) was an American composer, writer, pianist, publisher, and music teacher. Marchioni, Tonimarie (2012). "Henry Cowell: A Life Stranger Than Fiction" . The Juilliard Journal. Retrieved 19 June 2022.Campbell, Brett (2014). "Liberating Henry Cowell's Music at San Quentin". San Francisco Classical Voice. Retrieved 19 June 2022. Earning a reputation as an extremely controversial performer and eccentric composer, Cowell became a leading figure of American avant-garde music for the first half of the 20th century. His writings and music served as a great influence on composers such as Lou Harrison, George Antheil, and John Cage.Buja, Maureen (2022) "Playing With the Piano: Henry Cowell and John Cage" Interlude. Retrieved 11 June 2022Cage, John "Composers' Voices From Ives To Ellington: John Cage on Henry Cowell" Oral History of American Music, Retrieved 11 June 2022Swed, Mark (2010). "Critic's notebook: Revelatory Henry Cowell revival at Lincoln Center". The Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 19 June 2022. He is considered one of the most important and influential composers from the United States.Sachs, p. 7
Cowell was mostly self-taught and developed a unique musical language, often blending folk melodies, dissonant counterpoint, unconventional orchestration, and influences from ancient Celtic religion. He was an early proponent and innovator of many modernist compositional techniques and sensibilities, including string piano, prepared piano, tone clusters, and graphic notation.Peyser, Joan (1981). "Henry Cowell — an Influential 'American Original'" The New York Times, Retrieved 20 June 2022. The Tides of Manaunaun, originally a theatrical prelude, is the best-known and most widely-performed of Cowell's tone cluster pieces for piano.
He was married to ethnomusicologist Sidney Robertson Cowell.
Early life Childhood Cowell was born on March 11, 1897, in rural Menlo Park, California. His father, Henry Blackwood "Harry" Cowell, was a romantic poet and then-recent immigrant from County Clare, Ireland.Rischitelli, p. 17 His mother, Clara "Clarissa" Cowell (née Dixon), was a political activist, author, and native of the Great Plains. She was 46 when she gave birth to Henry and over ten years older than her husband.Sachs, pp. 14-15Clarissa Dixon in the California, U.S., Death Index, 1905-1939, ancestry.com. Retrieved April 13, 2022.Peters, Cathy; Livingston, Guy (2014). "The extraordinary life of Henry Cowell" Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Retrieved 20 June 2022 Clarissa's ancestry was similarly Scottish and Irish, although her paternal lineage had been in America for centuries, with figures including Jeremiah Dixon.Sachs, p. 11 After meeting for the first time, the two quickly wed and undertook bohemian lifestyles, residing in a small, crude cottage Harry had built on the outskirts of the city and where Henry would eventually be born. It was in his first few years that Henry had his first exposure to music.Sachs, p. 19
His parents often sang to him the folk songs of their native homelands, and he was soon able to recite them before he learned to speak.(30 November 1953). "Music: Pioneer at 56". Time. Retrieved 11 June 2022.Blumhofer, Jonathan (2018). "Rethinking the Repertoire #23 – Henry Cowell's Piano Concerto". The Arts Fuse. Retrieved 13 June 2022. During occasional visits to downtown San Francisco, he also recalled hearing the traditional music of Indonesia, China, Japan, and others. The family was gifted small instruments by friends and neighbors, including a mandolin harp and a quarter-size violin, the latter of which the young Henry took an interest in, making it his instrument of choice for a few years.Sachs, pp. 23-24 His mother eventually decided to stop both the private lessons and his public school career after Cowell had severe bouts of Sydenham's chorea and scarlet fever — from which he eventually recovered.Carwithen, Edward Ralph, "Henry Cowell: Composer and Educator," (1991) PhD Diss., University of Florida, p. 200
Due to an ongoing affair between Harry and a French mistress, the Cowells amicably divorced in 1903, by which time Henry was 5.Tommasini, Anthony (1997), "Modern Times Catch Up to a Past Maverick", The New York Times, Retrieved 11 June 2022. He was thereafter raised in Chinatown by his mother, who imbued him with her strong anarchist and feminist beliefs. It was during this time he exhibited a strong defiance of gender stereotypes — he refused to have his hair cut, often wore women's clothing and adored the color pink while preferring to be called "Mrs. Jones". He also had further music exposures when engaging with his new Asian-American friends and their families in the neighborhood.Hicks, p. 22Daniel, p. 73 After the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, much of the Cowells' possessions and memorabilia were destroyed in the ensuing fire, after which Henry and his mother fled California. With no permanent place to live, Henry resided with his mother's family and friends around the American Plains and Midwest, later in New York City. School teachers of this time often took note of his "musical genius" and eccentric personality that was hindered by "extreme poverty".Lewis M. Terman, The Intelligence of School Children (1919), p. 246 Lewis Terman, an eventual pioneer of the IQ test, met with the young Henry during the family's brief stay in rural Iowa. He would posit that Cowell had, "language almost literary. No college professor of English could have improved upon it. And it was so natural. His conversation breathes intelligence. I had the feeling that no unschooled boy who was not a genius of the first order could speak thus"Lewis M. Terman, "Notes on Henry. March 1, 1917." Copy of holograph. and, "Although the IQ is satisfactory, it is matched by scores of others. [...] But there is only one Henry."Skinner, pp. 107-108 Clarissa's career as a progressive feminist writer did not earn her much money, and by the time they eventually returned to San Francisco, she had become terminally ill with breast cancer. They found their home destroyed from the prior earthquake, and looted by vandals after standing unoccupied for so long. Neighbors housed the two as the then thirteen-year-old Henry restored it. In order to keep them financially afloat, he took up small jobs such as picking and selling flower bulbs at the Menlo Park Train Station, janitorial work, farming, and cleaning a neighbor's chicken houses.Daniel, p. 74
Education and early career
While receiving no formal musical education and little schooling of any kind beyond his mother's home tutelage, Cowell began to compose in his mid-teens. Cowell saved what money he could from odd jobs, and at the age of fifteen, purchased a used upright piano for $60.Hicks, p. 68 The piano significantly aided his compositional output — by 1914, he had written over 100 pieces, including his first surviving piece for solo piano, the repetitive Anger Dance (originally Mad Dance). He would begin experimenting in earnest, often by slamming the keyboard with all his strength, and rolling his mother's darning egg across the strings.Hays, Sorrel (2017). "Henry Cowell: Mellifluous Cacophony and Its Legacy" Smithsonian Folkways Magazine. Retrieved 13 June 2022. In the same year, at the age of 17, Cowell enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, studying composition with renowned American musicologist and composer Charles Seeger. Seeger later made note of their "concurrent but entirely separate pursuit[s] of free composition and academic disciplines." After showing Seeger the drafts of his music, he encouraged Cowell to write about the methods and theory behind his tone clusters, which later became the draft for his book New Musical Resources.
Still a teenager, Cowell wrote the piano piece Dynamic Motion (1916), his first important work to explore the possibilities of the tone cluster (). It requires the performer to use both forearms to play massive secundal chords and calls for keys to be held down without sounding for sympathetic resonance. After two years at Berkeley, Seeger recommended that Cowell study at the Institute of Musical Art (later the Juilliard School) in New York City. Cowell only studied there for three months (October 1916 to January 1917) before dropping out, believing the musical atmosphere was too stifling and uninspiring.Bartok et al., p. 14 It was in New York, however, where he met fellow modernist piano composer Leo Ornstein. The two would collaborate in later decades.
In February 1917, Cowell enlisted in the army to avoid being drafted into World War I and seeing direct military combat. He served in the ambulance training facility at Camp Crane in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where he had a short stint as the assistant band director for a few months. In October 1918, Cowell was transferred to Fort Ontario in Oswego, New York. He was transferred just before the Spanish flu pandemic killed thirteen men at Camp Crane.Hicks, pp. 91-96
Time at Halcyon
Cowell soon returned to California, where he had become involved with Halcyon, a theosophical community in Southern California. Cowell joined the commune after befriending Irish-American poet and former Menlo Park resident John Osborne Varian.Hammond, p. 13 Cowell's connection to Irish folk music from his father meant he was instantly drawn to Varian, Irish nationalism, Celtic legends, and theosophy more broadly. Although the residents at Halcyon embraced a tolerant and communist-leaning lifestyle, their music preferences were considered quite conservative for the time. Varian described it as "sangtified raggtime [sic]" and, "rehymnified hymn music [sic]." Cowell managed to convince members to embrace his music, and wrote incidental and programmatic music to be performed at Halcyon. In 1917, Cowell wrote the music for Varian's stage production The Building of Banba; the prelude he composed, The Tides of Manaunaun, with its rich, evocative clusters, would become Cowell's most famous and widely performed work.Hicks, p. 58 Irish symbology later became a broader theme in his music, as an unwitting extension of the Celtic Revival movement of the 20th century.Lichtenwanger, pp. xxvii-xxviii
Musical career New music and first tours