50 Facts About Henry Cowell

Henry Dixon Cowell was an American composer, writer, pianist, publisher, teacher and the husband of Sidney Robertson Cowell.

Henry Cowell is considered one of America's most important and influential composers.

Henry Cowell was mostly self-taught and developed a unique musical language, often blending folk melodies, dissonant counterpoint, unconventional orchestration, and themes of Irish paganism.

Henry Cowell was an early proponent and innovator of many modernist compositional techniques and sensibilities, many for the piano, including the string piano, prepared piano, tone clusters, and graphic notation.

Henry Cowell was born on March 11,1897, in rural Menlo Park, California, a suburb of San Francisco.

Henry Cowell's father, Henry Blackwood "Harry" Cowell, was a romantic poet and recent immigrant from County Clare, Ireland.

Henry Cowell's mother, Clara "Clarissa" Cowell, was a political activist, author, and native of the American Plains, who was 46 when she gave birth to Henry in addition to being over ten years older than her husband.

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 Cowell took an interest in, making it his instrument of choice for a few years.

Henry Cowell was thereafter raised in Chinatown by his mother, who imbued him with her strong anarchist and feminist beliefs.

Henry Cowell had further music exposures when engaging with his new Asian-American friends and their families in the neighborhood.

Henry Cowell saved what money he could from odd jobs, and at the age of fifteen, purchased a used upright piano for $60.

Henry Cowell would begin experimenting in earnest, often by slamming the keyboard with all his strength, and rolling his mother's darning egg across the strings.

Still a teenager, Henry Cowell wrote the piano piece Dynamic Motion, his first important work to explore the possibilities of the tone cluster.

Henry Cowell only studied there for three months before dropping out, believing the musical atmosphere was too stifling and uninspiring.

In February 1917, Henry Cowell enlisted in the army to avoid being drafted in World War I and seeing direct military combat.

Henry Cowell served in the ambulance training facility at Camp Crane, Allentown, Pennsylvania, where he had a short stint as the assistant band director for a few months.

In October 1918, Henry Cowell was transferred to Fort Ontario in Oswego, New York.

Henry Cowell had been transferred just before an outbreak of the Spanish flu killed thirteen men at Camp Crane.

Henry Cowell soon returned to California, where he had become involved with Halcyon, a theosophical community in Southern California.

Henry Cowell joined the commune after befriending Irish-American poet and former Menlo Park resident John Osborne Varian.

In 1917, Henry 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 Henry Cowell's most famous and widely performed work.

Henry Cowell gave his debut recital in New York, toured through France and Germany, and became the first American musician to visit the Soviet Union, with many of these concerts sparking large uproars and protests.

Henry Cowell later made such an impression with his tone cluster technique that prominent European composers Bela Bartok and Alban Berg requested his permission to adopt it.

In early chamber music pieces, such as Quartet Romantic and Quartet Euphometric, Henry Cowell pioneered a compositional approach he called "rhythm-harmony": "Both quartets are polyphonic, and each melodic strand has its own rhythm," he explained.

In 1919, Henry Cowell had begun writing New Musical Resources, which would finally be published after extensive revision in 1930.

Henry Cowell received a notoriously hostile reception during this concert, with some modern musicologists and historians referring to the event as a turning point in Cowell's performing career.

Gasps and screams were heard, and Henry Cowell recalled hearing a man in the front rows threaten to physically remove him from the stage if he did not stop.

Henry Cowell wrote several original compositions for the instrument, including an orchestrated concerto, and Theremin built two more models.

Henry Cowell was the central figure in a circle of avant-garde composers that included his good friends Carl Ruggles and Dane Rudhyar, as well as Leo Ornstein, John Becker, Colin McPhee, French expatriate Edgard Varese, and Ruth Crawford, whom he convinced Charles Seeger to take on as a student.

Less than two years later, Henry Cowell founded the periodical New Music Quarterly, which would publish many significant new scores under his editorship, both by the ultra-modernists and many other composers, including Ernst Bacon, Otto Luening, Paul Bowles, and Aaron Copland.

Many of the scores published in Henry Cowell's journal were made even more widely available as performances of them were issued by the record label he established in 1934, New Music Recordings.

The ultra-modernist movement had expanded its reach in 1928, when Henry Cowell led a group that included Ruggles, Varese, his fellow expatriate Carlos Salzedo, American composer Emerson Whithorne, and Mexican composer Carlos Chavez in founding the Pan-American Association of Composers, dedicated to promoting composers from around the Western Hemisphere and creating a community among them that would transcend national lines.

Henry Cowell himself had performed there in 1930 and met with Caturla, whom he was publishing in New Music.

Henry Cowell would continue to work on both his behalf and Roldan's, whose Ritmica No 5 was the first free-standing piece of Western classical music written specifically for percussion ensemble.

In 1931 a Guggenheim fellowship enabled Henry Cowell to go to Berlin to study comparative musicology with Erich von Hornbostel.

Henry Cowell was never accused by authorities of pedophilia or molestation, but since the young men were typically referred to as "boys" at the time, incorrect assumptions were made by sensationalist newspapers and many in the public, severely damaging what public reputation he had along with the revelation of his homosexual activities.

Henry Cowell ultimately decided to overrule his attorneys and plead guilty, for reasons unknown.

Henry Cowell continued his experiments in aleatory music: for all three movements of the Amerind Suite, he wrote five versions, each more difficult than the last.

Henry Cowell had contributed to the Eiffel Tower project at the behest of Cage, who was not alone in lending support to his friend and former teacher.

Henry Cowell was eventually paroled in 1940; he relocated to Westchester County, New York, while under supervision, and resided with Australian ex-patriate composer and friend Percy Grainger and his wife in White Plains.

Henry Cowell was officially granted a pardon from California governor Culbert Olson on December 28,1942.

Henry Cowell was elected to the American Institute of Arts and Letters in 1951.

In October 1964, Henry Cowell was officially diagnosed with colorectal cancer after a doctor discovered an abundance of polyps in his system during an exam.

Henry Cowell died on December 10,1965, in his Shady, Woodstock, New York, home, after suffering a series of strokes and succumbing to the disease.

Henry Cowell is believed to have written over 940 compositions in whole, the majority for solo piano, although some have since been lost or destroyed.

Henry Cowell's music covers a wider range in both expression and technique than that of any other living composer.

Henry Cowell's experiments begun three decades ago in rhythm, in harmony, and in instrumental sonorities were considered then by many to be wild.

Henry Cowell remains a somewhat obscure figure in the history of both American music and experimental music more broadly.

Henry Cowell was considered a highly respected educator and promoter of classical music in America during the New Music period of his life.

Many of the techniques Henry Cowell either invented or pioneered are still relevant in the scope of today's music.