Henry Cowell

Of all the early-20th-century American musical revolutionaries, it is composer Henry Cowell whose influence was most vivid and far-reaching. Born in 1897 to a rural California family, Cowell began to study the violin at age five, though his parents' hopes of creating a prodigy on the instrument remained unfulfilled when the lessons had to be stopped on account of the boy's poor health. After his parents' divorce in 1903 Cowell spent several years traveling around the country visiting relatives with his mother; it was during one such journey in 1908 that he began to write his own music (his first known effort at composition being an unfinished setting of Longfellow's Golden Legend). Until he began musical studies with Charles Seeger at the University of California at Berkeley in 1914 Cowell remained a basically self-taught musician (as well as a young man who had never spent so much as a day in school during his life). Seeger was impressed by Cowell's output (Cowell had over a hundred compositions, of lesser or greater quality, to his name in 1914), but was much more interested in the young composer's hyper-creative, open-minded musical personality. Free of the often confining attitudes which govern formal musical education, Cowell had come to view any sound as musical substance with which he could work, and his early music owes more to the influence of birdsong, machine noises and folk music than it does to any knowledge of earlier masterworks (in his 1912 work The Tides of Manaunaun Cowell asks the pianist to use his or her fist and forearm on the keys of the instrument's bass register in order to represent massive tidal waves; thus was born the tone "cluster", used in many of Cowell's later works and by a number of other composers as well). However, Seeger felt that...