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Cowell learned the violin early in life, showing such talent that when he was nine years old his father planned to have him perform in public around San Francisco. But Cowell abruptly abandoned the violin for the piano, trying out keyboards around the neighborhood, before acquiring in his early teen years an old and out-of-tune upright. He may not have conquered this piano, but he did manage to tame it, converting it into an impressive reservoir of sound. The pianistic inventions that would later make him famous grew from his solitary and playful exploration of this instrument, during which he shed any concern for conforming to convention. While it is difficult to determine the exact dates of his numerous adolescent compositions, it is highly likely that many of them began as improvisations and experiments at the piano and were subsequently honed into works.
This youthful inventiveness would not have had the opportunity to flourish were it not for the special context of Menlo Park, California, where Cowell spent his youth in poverty but enjoyed tremendous independence. The education he received from his mother — herself an anarchist intellectual resisting conventions and institutional doctrines — incited him to remain free, to diverge from the beaten path whenever an established system of thought risked infringing upon that freedom. Cowell occasionally had piano teachers who introduced him to the great European piano repertoire. In autumn 1916, he enrolled at the Institute of Musical Art in New York (the precursor of the Juilliard School) to study piano, orchestration, and counterpoint; but incapable of ceding to the institution’s pedagogy and conformism, he was expelled in January 1917 and he returned to his native California.
Cowell drew poetic stimulus from the intellectual environment of the theosophical community in Halcyon, in San Luis Obispo County, California, where he was a keen participant during his young adulthood. Many of his pieces are also inspired by Irish myths and legends, by way of the poet and mystic John Varian, for whom Cowell composed the music for The Building of Bamba, a quasi-opera about an Irish creation myth. All that remains of this 1917 production is The Tides of Manaunaun, which was composed perhaps five years earlier. Already, this early work features Cowell’s characteristic mix of novelty and conventionality. Large cluster chords played in the instrument’s lower register resound like bells to accompany a simple tonal melody played in octaves. Likewise, The Lilt of the Reel (1925) contains little chromatic clusters and large diatonic clusters, which accompany a modal melody of Gaelic inspiration.
Through his famous clusters, Cowell revolutionized how the piano was approached. The Californian public would most likely hear them for the first time in Adventures in Harmony (1913) at Cowell’s first professional concert, on 6 March 1914, in San Francisco. Using the palm of the hand, the fist, or the forearm would become his signature piano technique. It required a new form of virtuosity and opened doors to his international career as a composer-performer. He was described as “extravagant” by detractors, or “ultramodern” by defenders.
Beyond the veneer of scandal that accompanied these atypical performances, Cowell emerged as an artist proposing an authentically American repertoire that rivaled the boldest European premieres — a status that only his compatriot Leo Ornstein had acquired. In his highly dissonant and atonal works, such as Dynamic Motion (1914) and Tiger (1928), Cowell used different kinds of clusters. Some were depressed silently to release the strings from the dampers and allow the harmonics to resonate. The resulting sound masses — traversing the registers in hammered rhythms, strongly syncopated or repeated as though powered by a motor — are clearly futurist. The pitch blurring brought by the saturation of clusters led to noise becoming an essential component of the piano’s timbral palette. At that time, only Edgard Varèse had taken such account of noise as a musical element.
Cowell’s works for piano offer highly varied universes. For example Nine Ings (1922) is a series of evocative miniatures: in “Floating,” Cowell uses a chromatic counterpoint in a rhythmic ratio of 7:4; in “Frisking,” he uses bitonality; “Scooting” features a harshness of sound that recalls Béla Bartók, while “Fleeting” recalls the spirit of Frédéric Chopin’s waltzes.
If clusters are a quintessential technique in Cowell’s piano music, they should not overshadow another major contribution, the string piano — that is, when the pianist plays the strings of the piano directly. Though the true originator of this practice was probably Percy Grainger, who used it as early as 1916 in his suite In a Nutshell, Cowell used this technique widely from 1922 onward. The Aeolian Harp (1923), as its title indicates, calls for the strings of the piano to be played like a harp. The musical material, which is simple, is composed of series of arpeggiated chords and individual notes of triads played one by one. One of the most innovative pieces for its time was The Banshee (1925), a study in the timbral properties of piano strings as they are rubbed or scraped. What emerges from the soundboard sometimes seems as if it were produced by electronic instruments that would only exist many years later. One further type of experimentation in which Cowell engaged deserves mention: the use of objects on or between the piano strings to modify their sound. He never exploited this invention in his compositions, but his experimentation inspired the prepared piano used by John Cage for Bacchanale (1938).
The Great Depression that plunged America into economic disaster was fatal to Cowell’s pianistic career. From 1933, opportunities to appear in concert became rarer. The “phenomenon” of the modern piano that had caused reactions (as much in opposition as in favor) no longer interested the public. Cowell’s pianistic output thus considerably declined in favor of works of chamber music or for various orchestral ensembles. Yet Cowell’s pianistic inventions had an important impact on a younger generation of American composers, with George Crumb among those who most explored and developed them, for example in his Makrokosmos.
Cowell quickly felt the need to establish a theoretical framework for his exploration of the piano’s sound resources. The theorist Charles Seeger — whose composition courses at the University of California, Berkeley, Cowell attended between 1914 and 1917 — encouraged him to rationalize his ideas, which until then had been informed mainly by intuition and experimental trial. Seeger taught Cowell the art of “dissonant counterpoint,” which consisted in inverting the conventional rules of harmony such that dissonant intervals (seconds, sevenths, tritones) were established as the norm, with consonant intervals (fourths, fifths, octaves) as the exception, all while avoiding binary divisions of the beat. Cowell applied this technique in 1916 in the Andante sostenuto of his String Quartet No. 1 (“Pedantic”), which presents strong intervallic dissonance, both melodically and harmonically. Other works also demonstrate Seeger’s influence: Ensemble (1924) for string quintet and Polyphonica (1925) for chamber orchestra. Each translates various types of melodic, harmonic, and contrapuntal writing into dissonance.
Cowell also developed his interest in the sciences, and in phenomena of vibration, following his contact with the son of John Varian, Russell Varian, who showed him his research on the audio bulb, an instrument capable of producing just intonation and quarter tones. It is likely that Cowell also had access to an English translation of Hermann von Helmholtz’s Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen (1896) (On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music), as well as to Sound and Music (1873) by Sedley Taylor, who used sirens as pitch generators to measure acoustic phenomena — an experiment Cowell reproduced at Berkeley. Cowell further enriched his knowledge and bolstered his theories following visits, in 1926, to Alois Hába’s Department of Quarter-Tone Music in Prague, and in 1929, to the State Department for the Science of Music in Moscow.
With incredible maturity, Cowell undertook to produce his own theoretical volume. Most of the writing took place between 1916 and 1919, but it was only published in 1930, under the title New Musical Resources. For Cowell, modern music could no longer be content with old and obsolete rules; what was needed was a systematic approach to putting materials in relationship with one another. The solution, in his view, was to be found in the immutable laws of acoustics, and, more precisely, in the arithmetic relationships between the partials in the overtone series.
In “Tone Combinations,” which is the first part of the volume, Cowell sets out his concepts in a historical perspective. He shows how the major breakthroughs in harmonic evolution were each brought about by a genius composer who imposed a level of dissonance that had previously been rejected. He then analyzes the relations between intervals and frequencies, which also becomes a basis for his exploration of rhythm. Relying most likely on experiments carried out by Nikolai Garbusov at the Moscow Institute for Musicology, he draws up a table of undertones, which were an inversion of the overtone series. On the basis of this data, Cowell theorizes a “polyharmony,” which he views as a means of transcending harmony. The notes of a major triad (which correspond to the first, third, and fifth overtones of a fundamental frequency) are considered, one by one, as another potential fundamental that may give rise to its own major triad. A similar procedure is carried out with the undertones, thereby producing a polyharmony of minor triads. As a next step, one can produce a new polyharmony by combining the overtones and undertones and their major and minor tonalities. Cowell rarely ever applied this concept of polyharmony in composition, and even then only loosely. Examples may be found in Maestoso (1926), Two Woofs (1928) for piano, or in certain passages of Synchrony for orchestra (1929-1930), which build chords using the undertone series.
The middle section of the volume, “Rhythm,” is by far the most revolutionary. Cowell considers the domain of rhythm to have been neglected, having not been theorized since the Middle Ages. He proposes establishing a link between rhythm and harmony based on the frequency ratios of the harmonic series. Accordingly, a chord whose members vibrate at a ratio of 4:5:6 may be expressed by corresponding rhythmic values — four sixteenth notes, a quintuplet, and a sextuplet. The speeds of different melodic lines may also be defined by the frequency ratios of the notes of a chord, bringing about a novel conjunction of polyphony and polyrhythm. Cowell applies these concepts in his “Romantic” Quartet for two flutes, violin, and viola (1915-1917) and in his Quartet “Euphometric” (1916-1919) for string quartet, a work of formidable difficulty. With the traditional notational system of durations based on binary divisions of the whole-note no longer useful for this music, Cowell establishes a new system to notate divisions of a whole-note into third-, fifth-, seventh-, and thirteenth-notes, which he would use in Fabric (1917) for piano.
To play such highly complex rhythms generated by this new method, Cowell recommends recourse to the pianola. Conlon Nancarrow, very much influenced by New Musical Resources, adopted this solution in order to realize his own studies in rhythm which he wrote from the late 1940s onwards. Cowell also collaborated with Leon Theremin on the development of the Rhythmicon, an instrument capable of playing complex polyrhythms, for which he composed a Concerto for Rhythmicon and Orchestra (Rhythmicana) in 1931. Ultimately disillusioned by the instrument’s limitations, he did not pursue this instrument further, and distanced himself from technological experiments.
In the third and final part of the volume, “Chord-Formation,” Cowell broaches the construction of chords based on various intervals, and then attempts a theoretical justification of his early use of clusters. Here, however, he focuses less on the generation of the material than on its notation, proposing to blacken the sections of the staff encompassed by the cluster — a notational convention still used today.
The innovations contained in New Musical Resources had little impact on contemporary American composers, nor on those of the following generation — a fact most likely due to the work’s poor dissemination prior to its reedition in 1958. In addition, Cowell himself did not deploy these ideas in enough major compositions to draw attention to them. After the volume was published, he departed rather quickly from the path he had just set out, adopting a far less avant-gardist musical language.
And yet Cowell never stopped innovating. In the first half of the 1930s, he became particularly interested in dance. His work with choreographers brought him to reimagine the relationship between music and dance — a topic that would be pursued by Cage and Merce Cunningham. In collaboration with Martha Graham, Cowell composed Six Casual Developments (1933) for clarinet and piano, based on a contrapuntal and equal relation between music and dance. When the music reached its moments of greatest intrigue, the dance was calm and discrete; when the dance drew greater attention from the spectator, the music receded to the background. Cowell conceived a sort of music capable of being adapted to choreography of variable length, using the concept of “elastic form” — an array of musical phrases, the lengths of which could be extended or contracted by increasing or decreasing the duration of certain key notes according to the circumstances.
With his Mosaic Quartet (1935), Cowell anticipated the concept of the “open work” explored in Europe after World War II. In this string quartet, he let the players decide upon the order of the movements. His 26 Simultaneous Mosaics (1963) for violin, clarinet, cello, percussion, and piano, would take back up this idea, also allowing musicians to begin and cease playing whenever they liked.
As for most avant-garde composers, the financial crisis that shook the nation in the early 1930s also shook Cowell’s prior convictions. Faced with the question of whether to continue composing “ultramodern” and “elitist” art music, which did not meet the immediate need to entertain a populace plagued by despair, Cowell responded by evolving toward the very simplification that he had formerly rejected, having previously considered it a form of musical impoverishment or a rejection of modernism. The reasons for this development are multiple and cannot be reduced to the hypothesis that he was unable to master his own visionary concepts and realize them in composition. One must also take into account his sympathies for socialist ideas, reactivated by a stay in Moscow in 1929. These ideas brought him to join the Pierre Degeyter Club, a branch of the Workers Music League close to the Communist Party, which, in keeping with the Russian model, encouraged composing less sophisticated music that could appeal to workers. This turn toward simplification may also be explained by his love of both American and foreign folk and popular music, which became for him an essential source of inspiration. Finally, the years he spent imprisoned at San Quentin from 1936-1940 for a sex scandal deprived him of the possibility of pursuing his influence in the musical avant-garde, and led him to other means of conceiving musical composition.
For Cowell, simplification implied an increased place for melody, which had been deprioritized in Western art music in favor of harmony. Melodic lines should draw upon speech, avoiding unnaturally large intervals. Building on his knowledge of non-Western music, Cowell conceptualized his approach in his handbook The Nature of Melody (1937, unpublished) and in his article “Towards Neo-Primitivism” (1933), in which he envisioned a music dominated by melody and rhythm. In the same article, he stated that “primitive” did not necessarily mean savage and brutal. For Cowell, it was appropriate to react against the overcomplexity of modern music from the prior generation, but not against experimentation — which could draw upon the same age-old primary materials. These ideas were enriched by Cowell’s increasing experience with non-Western music.
In his childhood in San Francisco, Cowell lived on Laguna Street, situated between the Japanese and Chinese neighborhoods. His East Asian playmates taught him to sing music using their scales. He heard koto music, but also Indian music played by political refugees. In Chinatown, he attended traditional Chinese operas long before ever attending a Western opera. At home, he could hear his mother’s songs from Tennessee, and his father’s Irish melodies. This musical amalgam instilled Cowell with a conviction that Western music could not claim to be of superior quality to other traditions. Later, in 1926, a trip to the isolated regions of Czechoslovakia opened his mind to the richness and vast diversity of musical cultures even between villages that were geographic neighbors. In 1927, he began studying ragas and the system of talas of Northern India, as well as Arabic music. The following year, he studied percussion at Yale with a Ugandan student. He also learned to play the shakuhachi.
This consciousness of the immense diversity of the world’s musics, and the need to better understand them, led Cowell to spend a year (1931-1932) working at the Phonogram Archive at the University of Berlin, where he had access to thousands of cylinders of global music. During his stay, he also studied Javanese music. His exchanges with Bartók, whom he met for the first time in 1923, also inspired his reflections on folk music. All of these experiences — not least of which was the yearlong study journey he made across a large part of Asia in 1955-1956 — fed into Cowell’s music.
Cowell was likely the first American composer to introduce non-Western instruments into art music, and thus served as a model for Lou Harrison. Ensemble (1924), for string quintet, calls for “thundersticks” from indigenous American cultures. In Ostinato Pianissimo (1934) for piano and four percussionists, and in the second movement (Presto) of Set of Five (1952) for violin, piano, and percussion, Cowell uses the Indian jalatarang (an ensemble of tuned bowls). He composed two concertos for koto (Concerto No. 1, 1961-1962; and Concerto No. 2, 1965). The cultural hybridity that he studied during his travels inspired him to mix idioms himself, as in Persian Set (1956-1957) for chamber orchestra, which combines Western and Persian musical languages. In 1957, he composed the orchestral piece Ongaku, which imitates two styles of Japanese music — gagaku and sankyoku. Irish folk music also remained an important source of inspiration, giving rise to several pieces including Irish Suite (1928-1929) for string piano and chamber orchestra and Celtic Set (1938) for ensemble. Adopting an attitude that might be described as postmodern, Cowell also turned toward his own nation’s musical past, composing eighteen Hymns and Fuguing Tunes for various instruments between 1944 and 1964, taking inspiration from the style of William Billings and William Walker, themselves both strongly influenced by American popular music.
Cowell made a major contribution to the knowledge and diffusion of world music by organizing concerts, lectures, and courses at the New School for Social Research in New York and at several other American universities, as well as by publishing numerous articles. He collaborated with efforts to publish recorded collections under the title Music of the World’s Peoples (1951-1961) for the Folkways Records label.
The first American to truly work with sound as a raw material, Cowell opened paths for composers like Cage, La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Harry Partch, and Alvin Lucier. In proposing a unified theory of the treatment of rhythm and pitch, he anticipated by several decades the work of Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Milton Babbitt. He was the first American composer to open Western art music to other world music in a non-colonialist spirit. The exceptional variety in his output, which ranges from vastly complex to elementarily simple, has often disconcerted commentators. But it showed future generations that it was possible to topple hierarchies in developing new forms of musicality. Cage, Harrison, Henry Brant, Peter Garland, and many more of his disciples have each, in their own ways, benefited from his rich teaching.
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