Henry Dixon Cowell ( / ˈ k aʊ əl / ; March 11, 1897 – December 10, 1965) was an American composer, writer, pianist, publisher, teacher, and the husband of ethnomusicologist Sidney Robertson Cowell. He became a well-known figure in American experimental music during the first half of the 20th century. His work and writings greatly influenced other artists, such as Lou Harrison, George Antheil, and John Cage. Cowell is regarded as one of America's most important and influential composers.

Cowell was mostly self-taught and created a unique style of music. He often combined folk melodies with unusual musical techniques, such as complex harmonies, creative ways to use instruments, and themes inspired by Irish traditions. He was among the first to develop many modern musical methods, especially for the piano. These included techniques like the string piano, prepared piano, tone clusters, and graphic notation. His piece The Tides of Manaunaun, originally written as a theatrical prelude, is his most famous and frequently performed work using tone clusters on the piano.

Early life

Henry Cowell was born on March 11, 1897, in Menlo Park, California, a small town near San Francisco. His father, Henry Blackwood "Harry" Cowell, was a poet who had recently moved to the United States from Ireland. His mother, Clara "Clarissa" Cowell (born Dixon), was a writer and activist who had grown up in the American Plains. She was 46 years old when Henry was born and was more than ten years older than his father. Clarissa’s family had Scottish and Irish roots, and her ancestors had lived in America for many generations, including Jeremiah Dixon, a scientist who helped create the Mason–Dixon line. After meeting, the couple married quickly and lived a simple life in a small house that Harry built outside the city. Henry was born there.

As a young child, Henry heard his parents sing traditional songs from Ireland and other countries. During visits to San Francisco, he also heard music from Indonesia, China, and Japan. Friends and neighbors gave the family small musical instruments, including a mandolin harp and a small violin. Henry became interested in the violin and used it for several years. His mother stopped his music lessons and school when he became very sick with Sydenham’s chorea and scarlet fever, but he recovered.

In 1903, when Henry was 5 years old, his parents divorced because Harry had a relationship with a French woman. Henry then lived with his mother in San Francisco’s Chinatown. His mother taught him about anarchist and feminist ideas, and Henry showed a strong dislike for traditional gender roles. He refused to cut his hair, wore women’s clothing, and preferred the color pink. He also made friends with Asian-American families in the neighborhood. In 1906, the San Francisco earthquake and fire destroyed much of the family’s belongings. Henry and his mother left California and moved around the United States, staying with relatives and friends in the Midwest and later in New York City.

Teachers noticed Henry’s musical talent and unusual personality, even though he lived in poverty. Lewis Terman, a future leader in intelligence testing, met Henry in Iowa and said his language skills were unusually advanced for someone his age. Clarissa’s writing career did not earn much money, and by the time the family returned to San Francisco, she was very sick with breast cancer. Their home had been destroyed in the earthquake and was later looted. Henry helped rebuild the house while working odd jobs like selling flowers, cleaning, and farming.

Henry did not attend formal music school but began writing short musical pieces in his mid-teens. He saved money from his jobs and bought a used piano for $60 in 1912 (equivalent to $1,772 in 2022). The piano helped him compose more music, and by 1914, he had written over 100 pieces, including his first piano work, Anger Dance. He experimented with new techniques, such as hitting the piano keys hard and using a darning egg to create unusual sounds. In 1916, at age 17, Henry enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, to study composition with Charles Seeger, a respected music teacher. Seeger noted that Henry’s creative methods were separate from traditional academic studies. After showing Seeger his music, Henry was encouraged to write about his unique techniques, which later became the basis of his book New Musical Resources.

At 19, Henry composed Dynamic Motion, a piano piece that explored a technique called tone clusters. This method involves playing many notes at once to create dissonant, unusual sounds. After two years at Berkeley, Seeger suggested Henry study at the Institute of Musical Art in New York City. Henry stayed there for three months but left because he found the environment too restrictive. In New York, he met another modernist composer, Leo Ornstein, and they later collaborated.

In February 1917, Henry joined the army to avoid being drafted for World War I. He worked as an ambulance driver at Camp Crane, Pennsylvania, and later at Fort Ontario, New York. He was transferred just before an outbreak of the Spanish flu killed several soldiers at Camp Crane.

After the war, Henry returned to California and joined a spiritual community called Halcyon in Southern California. He became friends with John Osborne Varian, an Irish-American poet, and was drawn to Irish music and culture. At Halcyon, Henry wrote music for Varian’s play The Building of Banba, including the famous piece The Tides of Manaunaun. His use of Irish themes in music later connected him to the Celtic Revival movement of the 20th century.

Musical career

Beginning in the early 1920s, Cowell traveled widely in North America and Europe as a pianist, with help from his former teachers. He performed his own experimental music, which explored new ideas like atonality, polytonality, polyrhythms, and non-Western musical scales. He gave his first recital in New York, toured France and Germany, and became the first American musician to visit the Soviet Union. Many of these concerts caused strong reactions from audiences, including protests. During one of these tours in 1923, Cowell met Grete Sultan, a young pianist, in Berlin through his friend Richard Buhlig. They worked closely together, which was important for Sultan’s growth as a musician. Cowell’s tone cluster technique later impressed European composers Béla Bartók and Alban Berg, who asked for permission to use it in their own work.

In a letter to a friend on January 10, 1924, Cowell wrote, "I caused a lot of excitement in London and Berlin, and I received both positive and negative reviews from both places." During this time, Cowell developed a new method called "string piano," in which the pianist plucks or moves the strings inside the piano directly, rather than using the keys. This technique inspired John Cage’s later work with the prepared piano. In earlier chamber music pieces, such as Quartet Romantic (1915–17) and Quartet Euphometric (1916–19), Cowell created a style he called "rhythm-harmony," where each musical line had its own unique rhythm.

In 1919, Cowell began writing New Musical Resources, a book that was published in 1930 after many revisions. In it, he described new rhythmic and harmonic ideas he used in his music, as well as some that were still theoretical. He explained how harmonic series influenced music throughout history and how these principles could be used to create a wide range of musical materials. The book had a lasting impact on American avant-garde musicians, including John Cage, who copied the book by hand and studied Cowell’s work. Conlon Nancarrow later said the book had "the most influence of anything I've ever read in music."

During his first European tour, Cowell performed at the famous Gewandhaus concert hall in Leipzig, Germany, on October 15, 1923. The audience reacted very negatively to his performance, and some historians call this event a turning point in Cowell’s career. As he played louder and more challenging pieces toward the end of the concert, the crowd became increasingly hostile. People gasped and screamed, and one man in the front row threatened to remove Cowell from the stage if he did not stop. During the fourth movement of Antinomy from Five Encores to Dynamic Motion, a man in the audience shouted, "Do you take us for idiots in Germany?" Others threw program notes and other items at Cowell. Soon after, two groups of audience members began arguing on stage, leading to a physical fight. The Leipzig police arrived and arrested 20 young men. Cowell continued playing until the end of the concert, though he was visibly shaken afterward.

Local newspapers in Leipzig criticized Cowell’s performance and his style. The Leipziger Abendpost described his playing as "a coarse obscenity" and called his music "a cacophony." The Leipziger Neuste-Nachrichten referred to his techniques as "musical grotesqueries." This event was later compared to other controversial performances by European experimental composers, such as the Paris premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and the works of Italian futurist Luigi Russolo.

Cowell’s interest in harmonic rhythm, as discussed in New Musical Resources, led him to commission Léon Theremin to invent the Rhythmicon, a keyboard instrument that could play notes in rhythmic patterns based on the harmonic series. The Rhythmicon, the first electronic rhythm machine, could produce up to 16 different rhythms at once. Cowell wrote several compositions for the instrument, including an orchestral concerto. However, the Rhythmicon was largely forgotten until the 1960s, when music producer Joe Meek used its rhythmic ideas.

Through the mid-1930s, Cowell continued to develop bold musical styles, with solo piano pieces remaining central to his work. Important compositions from this time include The Banshee (1925), which required unusual techniques like plucking and scraping the piano strings, and Tiger (1930), inspired by a poem by William Blake. A critic from the San Francisco News in 1932 called Cowell’s "tone clusters" the most original contribution by an American musician. Cowell also composed over 180 songs during his career. In 1930–31, he adapted Aeolian Harp as the accompaniment for a poem by his father, How Old Is Song? He expanded his chamber music, including Adagio for Cello and Thunder Stick (1924), which used unusual instruments, and Six Casual Developments (1933), which resembled music from the 1960s. Cowell also wrote scores for percussion ensembles, such as Ostinato Pianissimo (1934). He composed large-ensemble works like the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1928) and the Sinfonietta (1928), with its scherzo conducted by Anton Webern in Vienna. In the early 1930s, Cowell began to explore aleatoric procedures, which involve chance-based elements in music.

Later life

Although he received a pardon that allowed him to work at the Office of War Information and create radio programs for overseas audiences, his arrest, imprisonment, and widespread attention had a serious impact on Cowell. Conlon Nancarrow, who met him in 1947, described Cowell as appearing very frightened, as if he believed "they're going to get him." Reporters often asked him about his crimes and arrest, but he usually refused to comment. This experience greatly affected his music: after his release from San Quentin, Cowell’s compositions became much more traditional, with simpler rhythms and more common harmonic patterns.

Many of his later works were inspired by American folk music, such as the eighteen Hymn and Fuguing Tunes (1943–64). Folk music had influenced some of Cowell’s earlier compositions before the war, but the bold, unusual changes that had once defined his style were no longer used. As Nancarrow noted, Cowell also became more cautious politically after his imprisonment, even though he had previously held strong radical views.

Although Cowell was no longer an artistic radical, he remained interested in new ideas and helped introduce musical styles from other parts of the world. Examples include the Japanese-inspired Ongaku (1957), Symphony No. 13, "Madras" (1956–58), and Homage to Iran (1959). His most emotionally powerful songs from this time include Music I Heard (1961) and Firelight and Lamp (1962). In 1951, Cowell was elected to the American Institute of Arts and Letters. He also helped revive his friendship with Charles Ives and, with his wife, wrote the first major study of Ives’s music. He supported his former student, John Cage, in promoting Ives’s work.

Cowell continued to teach, mentoring students such as Burt Bacharach, Dominick Argento, J. H. Kwabena Nketia, and Irwin Swack. He also worked with Folkways Records for over a decade, starting in the early 1950s, writing liner notes and editing collections like Music of the World's Peoples (1951–61) and Primitive Music of the World (1962). He hosted a radio program with the same name. In 1963, he recorded performances of twenty of his important piano pieces for a Folkways album. In his final years, Cowell created several unique works, such as Thesis (Symphony No. 15; 1960) and 26 Simultaneous Mosaics (1963).

In October 1964, Cowell was found to have colorectal cancer after a doctor discovered many polyps in his body during an exam. Surgery was not possible because the cancer had gone undetected for too long and had spread throughout his large intestine. Cowell died on December 10, 1965, in his home in Shady, Woodstock, New York, after a series of strokes and from the disease.

Compositions

Over the course of more than 50 years, Cowell composed music in many different styles, each with his unique approach. These styles include serialism, jazz, romanticism, neoclassicism, avant-garde, noise music, minimalism, and others. It is estimated that he created more than 940 musical pieces, most of which were written for solo piano. Some of these works are no longer available because they were lost or destroyed. His body of work is generally divided into three stages: an early period known for unusual and creative ideas, a middle period characterized by more complex and precise techniques, and a late period that reflects a style similar to the Romantic era.

Legacy

Henry Cowell is not very well known in the history of American music or experimental music in general. During his lifetime, people had very different opinions about his music and performances. Some critics called him a "creative genius" who played "fantastically well," while others said his music was "without rules" and "the highest example of atonal music." Cowell even used one of these negative descriptions as part of a promotion for a later tour.

Some critics, like Evelyn Wells from The San Francisco Call and Post, described his music as "like a painting that needs to be viewed from a distance to see the pattern." International newspapers often focused on his unusual and energetic way of playing piano. For example, The Daily Mail wrote, "A piano played with an elbow. His fingers are too small for his style. The result is like a nursery in rebellion." The Daily Express called him "The Elbow Pianist. A wonderful test for the instrument."

Cowell was highly respected as a teacher and supporter of classical music in America during the New Music period. In November 2009, a two-day event celebrating Cowell's music was held in the San Francisco Bay Area near his birthplace, Menlo Park, by a group called Other Minds.

Many of the techniques Cowell created or helped develop are still used in music today. For example, "tone clusters" (groups of notes played together) have been used by famous classical composers like Béla Bartók, George Crumb, Olivier Messiaen, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis, Einojuhani Rautavaara, and Krzysztof Penderecki. Experimental and progressive rock musicians such as Keith Emerson, Rick Wright, and John Cale also used similar techniques. Free jazz pianists like Dave Burrell, Cecil Taylor, and Sun Ra used these methods as well.

His 1930 book New Musical Resources is still used today by composers, ninety years after it was published. It has been supported by his colleagues and students over the years.

Selected discography

• Henry Cowell: Piano Music (Smithsonian Folkways 40801)—recordings of twenty of his piano compositions, including Dynamic Motion, The Tides of Manaunaun, Aeolian Harp, The Banshee, and Tiger, along with a commentary track (album shown in the article)
• Tales of Our Countryside (American Columbia 78 rpm Set X 235, recorded July 5, 1941)—a performance by the All-American Youth Orchestra, conducted by Leopold Stokowski, with Cowell as the piano soloist
• American Piano Concertos: Henry Cowell (col legno 20064)—pieces for large groups of musicians, including Concerto for Piano and Orchestra and Sinfonietta, as well as The Tides of Manaunaun and other solo piano works; performed by the Saarbrücken Radio Symphony Orchestra, Michael Stern—director, Stefan Litwin—piano
• The Bad Boys!: George Antheil, Henry Cowell, Leo Ornstein (hatHUT 6144)—solo piano pieces, including Anger Dance, The Tides of Manaunaun, and Tiger; performed by Steffen Schleiermacher
• Dancing with Henry (mode 101)—solo and small-group pieces, including two versions of Ritournelle (Larghetto); performed by California Parallèle Ensemble, Nicole Paiement–conductor and director, Josephine Gandolfi—piano
• Henry Cowell (First Edition 0003)—orchestral works, including Ongaku and Thesis (Symphony No. 15); performed by Louisville Orchestra, Robert S. Whitney and Jorge Mester—conductors
• Henry Cowell: A Continuum Portrait, Vol. 1 (Naxos 8.559192) and Vol. 2 (Naxos 8.559193)—solo, small-group, vocal, and large-group pieces; performed by Continuum, Cheryl Seltzer and Joel Sachs—directors
• Henry Cowell: Mosaic (mode 72/73)—solo and small-group pieces, including Quartet Romantic, Quartet Euphometric, Mosaic Quartet (String Quartet No. 3), Return, and three versions of 26 Simultaneous Mosaics; performed by Colorado String Quartet and Musicians Accord
• Henry Cowell: Persian Set (Composers Recordings Inc. CRI-114 recorded April 1957 and reissued on Citadel CTD 88123)—Four movements for Chamber Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski—conductor
• Henry Cowell: Persian Set (Koch 3-7220-2 HI)—orchestral and large-group pieces, including Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 2; performed by Manhattan Chamber Orchestra, Richard Auldon Clark—conductor
• New Music: Piano Compositions by Henry Cowell (New Albion 103)—solo piano pieces
• Songs of Henry Cowell (Albany–Troy 240)—including How Old Is Song?, Music I Heard, and Firelight and Lamp; performed by Mary Ann Hart—mezzo-soprano, Robert Osborne—bass-baritone, Jeanne Golan—pianist