Arts and Letters

Henry Cowell was born in 1897 and died on December 10, 1965. As a boy he heard much sophisticated Chinese and Japanese music in his native state, California. He explored and formulated a systematic theory of music before he was twenty. His book, New Musical Resources, published by Knopf in 1929, was completed in 1919. In it he presented many of his new and daring ideas so clearly and with such vigor that they are still stimulating.

His compositions, beginning with the earliest ones in 1910, were experimental and audacious not only because of their theoretical applications, but also because Cowell constantly turned his hand to different styles of expressive composition.

By the mid-twenties Cowell was internationally famous. Schoenberg, Webern, Bartok, and many other composers admired him and were impressed and stimulated by his use of tone clusters and other innovations in his piano compositions, innovations that are now in wide circulation among the latter-day avant-guardists.

He founded in 1929 the publication, New Music Editions, for the printing of new music, and New Music Quarterly Recordings a few years later. These societies sponsored much of the most interesting experimental music composed in the last thirty years and the works in New Music Quarterly now represent what is perhaps the most important twentieth-century anthology of American music.

Cowell furthered his early interest in non-European music when he studied ethnomusicology with van Hornbostel in Berlin in 1931. His interest in this field continued until his death. At Columbia University and the New School for Social Research his course, Music of the World's Peoples, was unique. Radio WBAI has repeatedly broadcast this entire course in the past ten months.

Among his many composition students John Cage and Lou Harrison are the most famous, but in spite of his heavy teaching schedule he was active in most of the contemporary music societies since the twenties. He served on the Board of the League of Composers and was for several terms president of the American Composers Alliance.

As a teacher he expected his students to know among other things dissonant counterpoint and harmony, polytonality, the twelve-tone row, electronic music, modal and other counterpoint.

It is said that Cowell composed more than eight hundred works. No one seems to have made an exact count, but hundreds of his works for various combinations have been performed. In the course of his composing he drew on basic elements from his own tonal system and speculations and from various European and non-European theoretical systems alone or in combinations. American folk hymnody and Icelandic, Indian, Persian, Japanese, and Irish music also served as source material. He liked to undertake commissions and on many occasions he composed works for unusual types of solo performers or groups. About one such composition he wrote: "I don't think I'm immortal; if you don't like this piece, tell me, and I will be glad to write another."

As a man he was nothing short of heroic. During almost ten years of illness he and his wife Sidney carried on his duties and obligations under the most difficult physical conditions. At the same time he worked faithfully on various committees of the Institute and developed interesting ideas for the benefit of his colleagues. He composed every morning, met his classes in the day, and rested in the late afternoon. The composing continued almost until the day of his death.

As a lecturer he was pithy, informative, and witty. Many remarks from interviews and from his lectures have been widely quoted. In Iran in 1961 he asked an international conference, "Why should music everywhere be all alike?" On a later occasion he said, "Never close your ears." When he was a small boy he asked, "How can one learn to live in the whole world of music?" Once when walking through a classroom with musical examples written on the blackboard, Cowell pointed and said, "There are times when I like music to sound." For a finale here is what Henry Cowell said in Tokyo in 1961: "I like to think that Charles Ives was right when he declared, 'There is always something more to be said.' For myself I have more ideas for music than I can ever use. This is a happy state and I wish the same to all of you."