Henry Cowell

Inventor of tone clusters and inside-the-piano playing, treating the piano as a machine to modify

Related

ModernPianoHarmonic Dissonance

Who he was

Henry Cowell (1897–1965) was born in Menlo Park, California, and worked as composer, pianist, teacher and publisher. He was largely self-taught and studied theory with Charles Seeger as a teenager. In 1927 he founded the quarterly New Music to publish contemporary scores; in the 1930s he served several years in prison on a morality charge and was pardoned in 1942. He later taught at Columbia University and died in 1965.

His place

He belongs to the first generation of American experimental music. While Ives was still printing his own scores, Cowell treated the piano as a machine that could be modified: clusters pressed with palm and forearm, hands reaching inside the instrument to pluck and scrape strings, producing sounds that notation could barely capture. He was a theorist too, and New Musical Resources, with its discussion of rhythmic ratios and clusters, gave later experimenters their vocabulary. In later life he wrote some twenty symphonies, their manner calmer than the early experiments.

What to hear

Listen first for the weight of a cluster. In Dynamic Motion a whole forearm goes down and a dozen notes sound at once; hear how it makes direction and climax without melody. Then mechanical repetition, where the rhythm of Fabric works like a loom and the pattern itself becomes the subject. Then sounds from inside the piano, since another group of pieces asks for direct work on the strings, producing a colour between harp and percussion. Finally late restraint — the two pieces of HC 463 set clusters inside quiet harmony, showing technique turning into tone of voice.

Key works

• Piano: Dynamic Motion, Fabric, Two Pieces HC 463, The Banshee, Aeolian Harp
• Writings: New Musical Resources
• Other: some twenty symphonies, chamber music, the New Music quarterly

Influence

Cowell directly shaped John Cage and Lou Harrison and made extended technique a legitimate American tool. He proved the piano need not sound only like a piano, a line of thinking that leads to prepared piano, inside-the-piano playing and noise music. His New Music quarterly published Ives, Varese and Cage, a service to the music no smaller than his own composing. For decades his own scores lacked a systematic edition, while the composers he published became famous.

Sources

• 考威尔生平、加州童年与哥伦比亚任教，参 The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians 的 Cowell 条目；本文为原创表述
• 音簇技法与《新音乐资源》的理论背景，参通行美国实验音乐研究；实例说明由本站撰写

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.