Henry Cowell was born 11 March 1897 in Menlo Park, California, to a family of anarchist bohemian writers. After his parents divorced in 1903, Henry lived with his mother. Their financial difficulties led them to leave California for New York in 1906. Throughout his childhood, Cowell’s schooling was disrupted by poor health and by the odd jobs he did to supplement the household income. Very early, he showed exceptional musical talent, learning violin from the age of four. At the age of nine, he began learning piano, which would become his principal means of expression. Returning to California in 1910, he encountered the music of Japan and China in the immigrant neighborhoods of San Francisco.

In 1914, he was introduced to Charles Seeger, who admitted him to the department of music at the University of California, Berkeley, and with whom Cowell studied composition. In addition, he studied counterpoint with Wallace Sabin and Edward Stricklen (harmony). After his mother’s death, in 1916, he studied briefly at the Institute of Musical Art in New York. He returned to California the following year, where he joined the theosophical community Halcyon, led by the Irish poet John Varian. Cowell composed numerous works for piano using tone clusters, such as The Tides of Manaunaun (1912?) and Dynamic Motion (1914). Cowell enlisted in the army and served as an assistant band director and flutist in Pennsylvania (February 1918-May 1919). Having completed his military service, he began a career as a pianist and composer, which, over the next three years, would send him all over the United States and Europe. He forged a strong reputation for his unusual virtuosity, particularly for using the palms of his hands and his forearms to play clusters. He also advanced a novel method he called “string piano,” in which piano cords were played directly with the performer’s hands, as in The Aeolian Harp (1923) or The Banshee (1925). An indefatigable traveller, he returned to Europe in 1926 and in 1929, when he visited the USSR and established relations with the Russian avant-garde.

In 1924, Cowell founded the New Music Society to help promote modern music on the West Coast. The Society began publishing scores in the New Musical Quarterly in 1927, expanding their activities to include recordings with the New Musical Quarterly Recordings in 1934. In 1927, with Edgard Varèse, Carlos Chávez, and Carlos Salzedo, he co-founded the Pan American Association of Composers. In 1931-32, he travelled to Berlin on a Guggenheim Fellowship to study world music in the phonographic archives of the University of Berlin. Upon his return to New York, he and Charles Seeger, Joseph Yasser, and Joseph Schillinger founded the New York Musicological Society, which in 1934 became the American Musicological Society.

In 1928, Cowell met Charles Ives, who went on to provide financial support for most of Cowell’s musical activities. In 1955, Cowell paid tribute to him with Charles Ives and his Music, the first book ever written about the composer.

In 1929, he began a long and fruitful collaboration with the New School of Social Research in New York, organizing lectures and concerts and teaching a wide variety of courses in many subjects including world music, modern music, and percussion.

In 1930, he published New Musical Resources, a theoretical work in which he discussed his research into rhythm and harmony and a renewed approach to counterpoint through harmonic rhythm, in which the ratio of notes in a given chord could be used to determine the rhythms in a given bar. He had experimented with these concepts in his Quartet Romantic (1915-1917) and Quartet Euphometric (1916-1919). To create these complex polyrhythms, he commissioned Leon Theremin to invent the Rhythmicon, for which he composed Concerto for Rhythmicon and Orchestra (Rhythmicana) in 1931. He also collaborated with choreographers such as Martha Graham, for whom he wrote Six Casual Developments (1933), among other pieces.

In 1936, Cowell was arrested on a “morals” charge for alleged participation in illicit sexual conduct and sentenced to a term in San Quentin State Prison. During the four years he spent there, he taught music to hundreds of prisoners and conducted multiple instrumental formations, writing numerous pieces and arrangements.

Cowell was paroled in 1940 and pardoned in 1942; after his parole, he relocated to the East Coast and the following year married Sidney Hawkins Robertson, a prominent folk music scholar who would become his main collaborator. He began work composing eighteen Hymns and Fuguing Tunes (1944-1963). During World War II, between 1943 and 1945, he worked for the Office of War Information, supervising the creation of radio programs for broadcast overseas. He continued his collaboration with the New School of Social Research and taught at the Columbia School of General Studies (1948-1956), as well as at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore (1951-1956). In the early 1950s, he worked as a consultant for the Folkways record label, writing the liner notes for a collection titled Music of the World’s Peoples (1951-1961).

In 1955-1956, he and Hawkins Robertson travelled to Iran, India, and Japan with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation’s Arts and Humanities program to study folk and art music, and the phenomenon of hybridized musical language in Asia. His travel inspired several of his compositions: Persian Set (1956-1957) was inspired by his time in Iran; Symphony n°13, “Madras,” (1955-1956) by his time in India; and Ongaku for orchestra (1957), by his time in Japan. He also joined the Asia Society, of which he would remain a particularly devoted member.

In 1961, at the invitation of Nicolas Nabokov, the secretary general of the International Congress for Cultural Freedom, he gave a series of lectures at conferences in Iran and Japan. He published American Composers on American Music, a collection of portraits of modern composers written by himself and his colleagues. Works from this late period of his life include Concerto n° 1 and Concerto n° 2 for koto and orchestra (1961-1962 and 1965), as well as 26 Simultaneous Mosaics (1963).

After several years of ill health, Henry Cowell died in his home in Shady, New York, on 10 December 1965.