Thursday, 11/4/10
Violins teach us what it would be like to fly.
Henry Cowell, Symphony No. 13 (“Madras,” 1956-58), excerpt (first two movements), San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra, live, San Francisco, 2005
Want to hear all five movements? Here.
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lagniappe
Henry Cowell, the all-American composer of the 20th century, did it all. “I want to live in the whole world of music,” he said. He was “the open sesame of new music in America,” John Cage said.
He was famous once and is now all but forgotten. There was a time when Leopold Stokowski championed him in New York, as did Eugene Ormandy in Philadelphia and Serge Koussevitzky in Boston. Schoenberg thought the world of him. So did Busoni. But since Cowell’s death in 1965, the musical establishment has concluded his music, and particularly the plentiful late orchestral music, doesn’t hold up.
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A century ago, he was a teenage piano pioneer in Menlo Park, Calif. He was the first to hit clusters of tones on the piano with fist and forearm (Bartók noticed) and the first to play directly on the piano strings. He all but invented the concept of world music and was on the front line of flexible phrasing, extreme polyrhythms, percussion music and mechanical music. He was a celebrated pedagogue. Cage, Burt Bacharach, George Gershwin and Lou Harrison were among those who found their own voices through him. Cowell, who was born in 1897, was known in New York, Berlin and Moscow by the ’20s. He helped found the study of ethnomusicology at UC Berkeley. He published and organized the concerts of progressive music from all over.
Cowell is primarily known for is his Bohemianism, which led to the creation of the California school of music and, sadly, for his arrest on morals charges. He was publicly shamed in a celebrity trial for having had consensual oral sex with young men and sentenced to 15 years in San Quentin.
After four years of incarceration, he was paroled and eventually pardoned by Gov. Earl Warren so that he could become a musical ambassador for the State Department. He moved to New York and taught at the New School for Social Research, traveled and absorbed the musics of Asia and Latin America, wrote 21 symphonies and much else. When Malaysia was looking for a national anthem in the ’50s, the country turned to him and Benjamin Britten for help.
—Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times (blog), 1/31/10
