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Henry Cowell: A Man Made of Music
Joel Sachs offers the first complete biography of one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century American music. Henry Cowell, a major musical innovator of the first half of the century, left a rich body of compositions spanning a wide range of styles. But as Sachs shows, Cowell's legacy extends far beyond his music. He worked tirelessly to create organizations such as the highly influential New Music Quarterly, New Music Recordings, and the Pan-American Association of Composers, through which great talents like Ruth Crawford Seeger and Charles Ives first became known in the US and abroad. As one of the first Western advocates for World Music, he used lectures, articles, and recordings to bring other musical cultures to myriad listeners and students including John Cage and Lou Harrison, who attributed their life work to Cowell's influence. Finally, Sachs describes the tragedy of Cowell's life, being sentenced to fifteen years in San Quentin -- of which he served four --
after pleading guilty to a morals charge that even the prosecutor felt was trivial. Providing a wealth of insight into Cowell's ideas and philosophy, Joel Sachs lays out a much-needed perspective on one of the giants of twentieth-century American music.
after pleading guilty to a morals charge that even the prosecutor felt was trivial. Providing a wealth of insight into Cowell's ideas and philosophy, Joel Sachs lays out a much-needed perspective on one of the giants of twentieth-century American music.
600 pages, Hardcover
First published April 1, 2007
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December 20, 2017
review of
Joel Sachs's Henry Cowell - A Man Made of Music
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - December 7-19, 2017
The full review starts here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...
I've retired from working for other people for money so my life more than ever revolves around reading, book reviewing, listening to music, playing piano, witnessing movies, making movies, making websites, etc.. One of the websites I'm making is titled "Top 100 Composers" which means that it's a list of the 100 composers whose work I've found most interesting & enjoyable ( http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Top100C... ). Considering how much music I listen to & how obsessed with music I am, I thought it would be easy to pick my favorite 100 composers. Nope, I've been struggling with the choices since October & I'm still finding it very difficult. A few were obvious, most are ones whose work I like but who don't quite awe me with their brilliance.
Henry Cowell, at 1st, was in an ambiguous zone: I like his music, I've been listening to it for 40+ years, I'll pick up any recording of his I find, but most of it's a little too conventional for me. Sortof. Its the "sortof" that complicates things. When I listen to the later works they seem laden with history, they're stately old growths, not wildly budding saplings - but there's always something about them that makes them significantly different from other somewhat 'simple' contemporaneous works. In the long run, how could I not have Cowell on the list? ( http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Top100C... ) I include very few who didn't use electronics, Cowell's one of them. Reading Sachs's bk certainly helped fuel my enthusiasm for Cowell immensely.
The bk is dedicated "To my beloved family, and in memory of Sidney Cowell, who did not live to read it." (p v) Do you ever think about that sort of thing? Sidney Cowell was married to Henry. Maybe she wd've liked reading this bio, maybe she wdn't've - Sachs seems to try to be fair so he's not always kissing his subjects's asses. To us, the readers of this bk, Henry Cowell is in some sense alive: the bk keeps him alive, the recordings keep him alive. Of course, that's not much use to the actual Henry Cowell, who's been dead for 52 yrs. Cowell's life had its ups & downs, to put it mildly, & he got plenty of respect & love even at the worst of times so maybe he wouldn't've 'needed' a bk like this in his lifetime to help keep him emotionally afloat - but what about the rest of us? The ones who get little or no love, little or no respect? Is it enough to suspect that one's contribution to culture will be appreciated post-mortem? Not really.
"Sidney Cowell made the project possible by providing me with complete access to the Cowell papers, annotated copies of her personal correspondence, information about some little-known actors in this drama, and fresh insights (plus occasional confusion) in letters to and conversations with me." - p xi
"Now, at the end of the eternity that this book has taken, an apology is overdue to those who waited for it. I deeply regret that his widow Sidney Cowell—whom I liked tremendously—my colleague H. Wiley Hitchcock, and most of the people who kindly allowed me to interview them did not live to read this book. I confess, however, that a knowledgeable person, who shall remain anonymous, suggested only half-facetiously that I write slowly, lest I complete it during Sidney Cowell's lifetime. Otherwise I would be bombarded with corrections, largely of imagined errors. As I got deeper into the materials and saw Sidney's hair-trigger response mechanism in action with other authors, and became aware of the errors, confusion, and contradictions that infected her later writings and some of our conversations, I realized the seriousness of that warning. As it happened, however, deliberate delay was unnecessary. Sidney passed away in 1995, after a long and distinguished life. I still had years of work ahead and missed her greatly.
"The longevity of my labors had two principle causes. One is the richness of my life and activities over these twenty-three years" - p xvi
23 yrs, he spent 23 yrs writing this. Even so, Sidney Cowell had more of her life invested in Henry Cowell than Sachs did so I can relate to her possible fanaticism in relation to the telling of his story. I'm sure that many people dread or dislike my opinion on matters that I've been heavily involved w/, such as Neoism, but tough shit!, it's been my life, not yours. Ahem.
"The complexity of Henry's life in particular requires a preliminary visit with the three women who, believing that a biography would have to be written, created the archive of his papers.
"The first of them, Henry's mother Clara (or Clarissa) Dixon Cowell, a professional writer, saved her own papers and the scraps of his early life, and wrote an extensive memoir of his first eighteen years. The second collector, Olive Thompson Cowell, was Henry's second stepmother, that is, his father Henry's third wife. Accordingly, once she began to appreciate his talents, she amassed everything she could and wrote copious notes about their conversations, his lectures, his professional activities, his musings, and her own assessments of him. Although some of her literary legacy seems colored by the expectation that she would live on through her services to Henry, and much of her writing tends toward hagiography of Henry and his father, Olive's papers are indispensable.
"The third hoarder was Henry's wife, Sidney Robertson Cowell. A brilliant, determined, reserved yet fiery woman with extraordinary talents as a writer, photographer, folklorist, and musician, Sidney far surpassed Olive as a preserver of paper. The most objective of the three women, she loved Henry yet could be very critical of him. That duality gives special weight to her writing, which steers clear of hagiography, even at its most positive." - p 3
"Olive, convinced that his life would demand good documentation, now set up an archive into which went everything from scraps of paper to important documents and countless letters including many from friends in Menlo Park who were not professionally "useful"—even the first letters from Elsa Schmolke, his Berlin landlady". - p 128
Fancy that! Are your relatives respectful & supportive of your activities? I have some friends whose parents are, it's somewhat amazing to witness. My father told me once that he found some 8mm films of my childhood but that he didn't know what to do w/ them. I explained that they could be transferred to VHS, the most common medium for movies viewable at home at the time, & that I cd do the transfer. I asked him for the films but I never got them. History, even if it is only personal history, lost. When my mom was moving out of the house that I spent most of my childhood in she told me that she found a drawing I'd given her. I remembered it, it was a colored pencil drawing of a vacuum cleaner in nature. Now, yes, it was a parody of my mom's OCD mania for sterilizing everything that moved & that's why I gave it to her. It was 1 of the only surviving drawings from the days when I made such things, I might've been 16 when I drew it. I wanted to see it again after 35+ yrs! She asked me if I wanted it, after all, why wd she want it? I told her yes. When I asked her about it she sd "I don't know what happened to it." Translation: 'I threw it away.'
The point is here: some people really get the 'luck of the draw' & Henry Cowell was one of them. Reading his biography is reading about a person who was loved & supported to a fantastic extent. I've often joked that if my family were to get their religious hands on my estate post-mortem they'd erase all traces of my existence ASAP except, maybe, for some pictures of me in suits as a child. Then, if they were to talk about me at all, it wd be to either make up something that has nothing to do w/ me or say that the 'devil got me' & to then begin to pray. I didn't get the 'luck of the draw' & some friends of mine are even worse off than I am. Nonetheless, Cowell STILL didn't have an easy life. Don't that just beat all?!
Probably like most people who've pd some attn to Cowell's music & life I've read about his time spent in prison. I'd read 2 different stories: 1 that made him seem like a victim & 1 that made him seem somewhat ethically senseless. Sachs's 1st mention of this is still in his Prologue:
"At some stage, possibly as early as their marriage in 1941, she" [Sidney] "decided that the story of his imprisonment on a morals charge should not be told for the first time outside the context of a full biography." - p 4
Righto. As my friend etta cetera, a prison activist, says, people aren't the worst thing they do - & I think that's very succinct. Alas, once convicted, or even tarred w/ the brush, of certain crimes the perpetrator becomes very little else to most people. As such, a person cd be incredibly nice & generous & then snap & kill someone & from then on in they're a murderer & very little else - unless they're in the military, of course: in wch case: KILL AWAY HERO! It's all so tragic. Fortunately Cowell didn't kill anyone so he suffered a less-tarnished fate.
Sidney's next mentioned b/c "she had spent some seven years working on the biographical section of the Cowells' book about Ives, whose life was far less eventful than Henry's." (p 4) Maybe so, but, still 23 yrs on this bio?! Ahem. At least you got it done.
As for Henry's mom Clarissa?! Now there was an interesting woman - although her alleged anti-sex position rubs me the wrong way (pun intended):
"One editor also sought a romantic relationship with her. From 1889 to 1891 she was assistant editor of an anarchist weekly, The Beacon. In San Francisco, she teamed up with a young Irish immigrant to publish a fortnightly anarchist paper, Enfant Terrible (1891-1892), with which she built a following. One sample of her contributions unmasks the underlying temperament of this ex-housewife who was anything but placid.
" ['] The clergyman has no more right than the clown to marry people. The judge has no more right than the jail-bird to sentence people. The policeman has no more right than the pauper to arrest people. The tax-collector has no more right than any other thief to filch people's property. The legislator has no more right than the lackey to make laws. I have no reverence for God, nor parents, nor sovereigns, nor presidents, nor popes, nor bishops, nor dead bodies, nor ancient institutions; in short, I have no reverence for any person or thing. ['] " - p 14
Yes! I cdn't've sd it better meself.. Although.. I probably do have some reverence for life & I'm not sure how that wd've fit into Clarissa's philosophy but I imagine she & I wd've been close to being on the same page.
"The Clarissa Dixon of the early 1890s that was perfectly suited to the individualistic world of San Francisco, as was her co-publisher of Enfant Terrible, an Irish immigrant named Henry Cowell, known as Harry." - p 15
You can see where this is going.
"Unlike some famous childhoods, Henry's is not shrouded in mystery. In 1914, Clarissa felt so driven by fate to document his development that although mortally ill, she began drafting a biographical sketch, amplifying it until her strength gave out." - p 18
His parents edited an anarchist fortnightly called Enfant Terrible. His mother drafted a biographical sketch about him. "The Scotch Club of San Francisco later pronounced him the most beautiful child in the city. "Crowds used to gather around him ["]" (p 18) If crowds were to gather around me in BalTimOre it wd've been reasonable to expect them to begin stoning me to death. I might've met a guy w/ a tattoo of a knife on his lower leg but wd I've met the equivalent of Jack London? I think not. People wd've met me.
"A ditch-digger who happened to hear Henry and Clarissa discussing writing proved to be self-educated but with "astounding ideas and great clarity of speech." The laborer, Jack London, accepted Harry's invitation to see them for the first of many visits when Henry was about seven." - p 20
"self-educated but with "astounding ideas and great clarity of speech.": as if that's some sort of unusual combination. Maybe it is, but doesn't 'university educated' mean semi-illiterate?
"Henry enjoyed referring to his third grade certificate of promotion as his highest academic degree until he received an honorary doctorate in 1953." - p 29
That's more like it. Clarissa was remarkable. She was connected to early anarchist publications so what's not to like? She also published a novel:
"Janet and Her Dear Phebe, which appeared in February, 1909, was warmly received by the press, but only 310 copies were sold in four months. In fact, it is a fine book, but truly straddled the borderline between teenage and adult. Politely but decisively, Stokes dropped further options." - p 31
"only 310 copies were sold in four months"? That strikes me as a stunning success. My latest bk, "Paradigm Shift Knuckle Sandwich & other examples of P.N.T. (Perverse Number Theory)" has sold, maybe, 70 copies in the last 9 mnths & 60 of those were to friends (or reasonable facsimiles thereof). If I'd sold 310 copies in 4 mnths I'd be expecting the key to the city & a queue of bride-wannabes. Damn, I'd figure that I cd walk naked down the streets & the police wd tip their hats to me & call me SIR. I'd expect bankers to give me the combinations to their vaults & the alarm system codes.
"With sales peaking at 400, neither royalties nor contracts were on the horizon. She never received a penny for Janet." - p 34
Well that much hasn't changed. Maybe the publisher shd've promoted it more.
"A tone cluster is a chord in which all intervals are seconds. (Henry eventually called it "secundal harmony.") These chords, which can be found as early as the eighteenth century, were part of the arsenal of the piano virtuoso Leo Ornstein (1893-2002). Henry later found that Vladimir Rebikov (1866-1920) used them in Russia. Henry, however, wished to use them with more than a handful of pitches. Lacking enough fingers, he expanded the resources of pianism by using the flat of his hand, the side of the fist, or the entire arm. This too was not entirely unprecedented. Daniel Steibelt's late eighteenth century "battle pieces" included passages played with the flat of the hand, and Ives had used a board to produce oversized clusters in the "Concord" Sonata, but Henry would not have known either of them. He might, however, have heard of the ex-slave Blind Tom, a virtuoso pianist in his own Civil War battle pieces." - p 36
& here we get to what torched off Cowell's fame, his use of tone clusters & his playing of the inside of the piano are what 1st caught my interest 60 yrs or so later even tho such techniques wd've been somewhat common by then. Sachs's scholarliness comes thru here, I don't recall knowing about Rebikov or Blind Tom before. Steibelt I'm not sure about.
1898: "a new Theosophical sect, the Brotherhood of Man" - p 49
When I was 19 & hitch-hiking back from the West Coast of the USA to BalTimOre I was picked up in a station wagon driven by a youngish man accompanied by a woman of roughly the same age, a little girl, & 5 dogs. All 5 dogs had scars from ear-to-ear. The driver explained that he'd found them w/ their throats slit in a river where they'd apparently been thrown to die. He saved them. The 2 adults looked very fried - as if they'd been awake entirely too long, possibly w/ the aid of LSD. I've written about this in greater detail elsewhere so I'm just giving a synopsis here. He said he was in a group called The Brotherhood of Man. I'd never heard of them before but this was 1972 & it sounded like a hippie cultish sort of thing. I had very long hair at the time so most people wd've thought of me as a hippie.
He picked up 2 more hitch-hikers. He told us that he'd been spreading the word on the radio that there was a Satanic group who'd put a hit out on him. He sd that the group found where he was hiding & was going to kill him. He hadn't had a car but as he was walking down the street he saw this stn wagon w/ the keys in it & knew it was a sign from the Brotherhood (or some such) that the car was his for his get-away from the death cult. He took the car & his family & the dogs & here he was & here we were - in a stolen car. We all got arrested. I've only run across one other mention of the Brotherhood of Man since that experience 45 yrs ago until I read this Cowell bio. I hope that man & his family are ok. I liked him. His story might've been true.
"He planted rows of daffodils in his garden along with rows of garlic, and "the bulbous plants crossed and there were horrible little green budlike daffies that smelled like garlic. This could only have happened to Henry, we said."" - p 53
That's funny, when I lived in South BalTimOre & my neighbor threw all his garbage in my backyard, a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 crossed with a tree & some sort of carnivorous plant grew up & ate the neighbor. It didn't smell weird but the screams of the neighbor were really loud & went on for wks. I didn't mind, tho, I found it rather pleasant.
Henry Cowell, being, as the title of this bk says, "a man made of music", he began performing early, wowing & shocking people w/ his extended piano techniques. Not everyone was enthusiastic:
"Mason had more mixed reactions. The music was "lawless, without a trace of counterpoint"; on the other hand, Henry knew how to get his ideas "across the footlights." Convinced that Henry had not the faintest notion of "what is meant by development," he advised packing him off to Germany, "where he would be out of the reach of idolizing women folk who mistake anarchistic rhapsodizing for inspiration."" - p 58
So what, eh?! Who needs counterpoint?! Cowell may not've understood counterpoint or development but he was blazing a newer path & that path has grown up very nicely, no thanks to that reviewer very much. A new path is welcome, the old sights & sounds get boring after awhile. But Cowell was adulated:
"According to a reviewer, the Musical Association performance also led a San Franciscan to contribute enough money to justify planning six months of lessons with a fine teacher. (Henry identified the sponsor as a German baron who wanted to send him for lessons with Richard Strauss.)" - p 18
"As of October Seward had raised nearly $335 [2010: $7,540] from donors in Palo Alto and San Francisco of which little more than half remained." - p 18
Now Henry & his mom hadn't had it easy. They'd survived poverty & the San Francisco earthquake by this point. His mom was having trouble succeeding as a professional writer, difficult at any time if you have anything intelligent to say but insufficient publishing world connections, esp difficult for a woman in the early 20th century. But $7,540 raised from donors for his musical education?! That's mind-boggling. I had someone offer to pay me to leave BalTimOre once but I don't think she had more than enough for a one-way bus ticket in mind.
Joel Sachs's Henry Cowell - A Man Made of Music
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - December 7-19, 2017
The full review starts here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...
I've retired from working for other people for money so my life more than ever revolves around reading, book reviewing, listening to music, playing piano, witnessing movies, making movies, making websites, etc.. One of the websites I'm making is titled "Top 100 Composers" which means that it's a list of the 100 composers whose work I've found most interesting & enjoyable ( http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Top100C... ). Considering how much music I listen to & how obsessed with music I am, I thought it would be easy to pick my favorite 100 composers. Nope, I've been struggling with the choices since October & I'm still finding it very difficult. A few were obvious, most are ones whose work I like but who don't quite awe me with their brilliance.
Henry Cowell, at 1st, was in an ambiguous zone: I like his music, I've been listening to it for 40+ years, I'll pick up any recording of his I find, but most of it's a little too conventional for me. Sortof. Its the "sortof" that complicates things. When I listen to the later works they seem laden with history, they're stately old growths, not wildly budding saplings - but there's always something about them that makes them significantly different from other somewhat 'simple' contemporaneous works. In the long run, how could I not have Cowell on the list? ( http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Top100C... ) I include very few who didn't use electronics, Cowell's one of them. Reading Sachs's bk certainly helped fuel my enthusiasm for Cowell immensely.
The bk is dedicated "To my beloved family, and in memory of Sidney Cowell, who did not live to read it." (p v) Do you ever think about that sort of thing? Sidney Cowell was married to Henry. Maybe she wd've liked reading this bio, maybe she wdn't've - Sachs seems to try to be fair so he's not always kissing his subjects's asses. To us, the readers of this bk, Henry Cowell is in some sense alive: the bk keeps him alive, the recordings keep him alive. Of course, that's not much use to the actual Henry Cowell, who's been dead for 52 yrs. Cowell's life had its ups & downs, to put it mildly, & he got plenty of respect & love even at the worst of times so maybe he wouldn't've 'needed' a bk like this in his lifetime to help keep him emotionally afloat - but what about the rest of us? The ones who get little or no love, little or no respect? Is it enough to suspect that one's contribution to culture will be appreciated post-mortem? Not really.
"Sidney Cowell made the project possible by providing me with complete access to the Cowell papers, annotated copies of her personal correspondence, information about some little-known actors in this drama, and fresh insights (plus occasional confusion) in letters to and conversations with me." - p xi
"Now, at the end of the eternity that this book has taken, an apology is overdue to those who waited for it. I deeply regret that his widow Sidney Cowell—whom I liked tremendously—my colleague H. Wiley Hitchcock, and most of the people who kindly allowed me to interview them did not live to read this book. I confess, however, that a knowledgeable person, who shall remain anonymous, suggested only half-facetiously that I write slowly, lest I complete it during Sidney Cowell's lifetime. Otherwise I would be bombarded with corrections, largely of imagined errors. As I got deeper into the materials and saw Sidney's hair-trigger response mechanism in action with other authors, and became aware of the errors, confusion, and contradictions that infected her later writings and some of our conversations, I realized the seriousness of that warning. As it happened, however, deliberate delay was unnecessary. Sidney passed away in 1995, after a long and distinguished life. I still had years of work ahead and missed her greatly.
"The longevity of my labors had two principle causes. One is the richness of my life and activities over these twenty-three years" - p xvi
23 yrs, he spent 23 yrs writing this. Even so, Sidney Cowell had more of her life invested in Henry Cowell than Sachs did so I can relate to her possible fanaticism in relation to the telling of his story. I'm sure that many people dread or dislike my opinion on matters that I've been heavily involved w/, such as Neoism, but tough shit!, it's been my life, not yours. Ahem.
"The complexity of Henry's life in particular requires a preliminary visit with the three women who, believing that a biography would have to be written, created the archive of his papers.
"The first of them, Henry's mother Clara (or Clarissa) Dixon Cowell, a professional writer, saved her own papers and the scraps of his early life, and wrote an extensive memoir of his first eighteen years. The second collector, Olive Thompson Cowell, was Henry's second stepmother, that is, his father Henry's third wife. Accordingly, once she began to appreciate his talents, she amassed everything she could and wrote copious notes about their conversations, his lectures, his professional activities, his musings, and her own assessments of him. Although some of her literary legacy seems colored by the expectation that she would live on through her services to Henry, and much of her writing tends toward hagiography of Henry and his father, Olive's papers are indispensable.
"The third hoarder was Henry's wife, Sidney Robertson Cowell. A brilliant, determined, reserved yet fiery woman with extraordinary talents as a writer, photographer, folklorist, and musician, Sidney far surpassed Olive as a preserver of paper. The most objective of the three women, she loved Henry yet could be very critical of him. That duality gives special weight to her writing, which steers clear of hagiography, even at its most positive." - p 3
"Olive, convinced that his life would demand good documentation, now set up an archive into which went everything from scraps of paper to important documents and countless letters including many from friends in Menlo Park who were not professionally "useful"—even the first letters from Elsa Schmolke, his Berlin landlady". - p 128
Fancy that! Are your relatives respectful & supportive of your activities? I have some friends whose parents are, it's somewhat amazing to witness. My father told me once that he found some 8mm films of my childhood but that he didn't know what to do w/ them. I explained that they could be transferred to VHS, the most common medium for movies viewable at home at the time, & that I cd do the transfer. I asked him for the films but I never got them. History, even if it is only personal history, lost. When my mom was moving out of the house that I spent most of my childhood in she told me that she found a drawing I'd given her. I remembered it, it was a colored pencil drawing of a vacuum cleaner in nature. Now, yes, it was a parody of my mom's OCD mania for sterilizing everything that moved & that's why I gave it to her. It was 1 of the only surviving drawings from the days when I made such things, I might've been 16 when I drew it. I wanted to see it again after 35+ yrs! She asked me if I wanted it, after all, why wd she want it? I told her yes. When I asked her about it she sd "I don't know what happened to it." Translation: 'I threw it away.'
The point is here: some people really get the 'luck of the draw' & Henry Cowell was one of them. Reading his biography is reading about a person who was loved & supported to a fantastic extent. I've often joked that if my family were to get their religious hands on my estate post-mortem they'd erase all traces of my existence ASAP except, maybe, for some pictures of me in suits as a child. Then, if they were to talk about me at all, it wd be to either make up something that has nothing to do w/ me or say that the 'devil got me' & to then begin to pray. I didn't get the 'luck of the draw' & some friends of mine are even worse off than I am. Nonetheless, Cowell STILL didn't have an easy life. Don't that just beat all?!
Probably like most people who've pd some attn to Cowell's music & life I've read about his time spent in prison. I'd read 2 different stories: 1 that made him seem like a victim & 1 that made him seem somewhat ethically senseless. Sachs's 1st mention of this is still in his Prologue:
"At some stage, possibly as early as their marriage in 1941, she" [Sidney] "decided that the story of his imprisonment on a morals charge should not be told for the first time outside the context of a full biography." - p 4
Righto. As my friend etta cetera, a prison activist, says, people aren't the worst thing they do - & I think that's very succinct. Alas, once convicted, or even tarred w/ the brush, of certain crimes the perpetrator becomes very little else to most people. As such, a person cd be incredibly nice & generous & then snap & kill someone & from then on in they're a murderer & very little else - unless they're in the military, of course: in wch case: KILL AWAY HERO! It's all so tragic. Fortunately Cowell didn't kill anyone so he suffered a less-tarnished fate.
Sidney's next mentioned b/c "she had spent some seven years working on the biographical section of the Cowells' book about Ives, whose life was far less eventful than Henry's." (p 4) Maybe so, but, still 23 yrs on this bio?! Ahem. At least you got it done.
As for Henry's mom Clarissa?! Now there was an interesting woman - although her alleged anti-sex position rubs me the wrong way (pun intended):
"One editor also sought a romantic relationship with her. From 1889 to 1891 she was assistant editor of an anarchist weekly, The Beacon. In San Francisco, she teamed up with a young Irish immigrant to publish a fortnightly anarchist paper, Enfant Terrible (1891-1892), with which she built a following. One sample of her contributions unmasks the underlying temperament of this ex-housewife who was anything but placid.
" ['] The clergyman has no more right than the clown to marry people. The judge has no more right than the jail-bird to sentence people. The policeman has no more right than the pauper to arrest people. The tax-collector has no more right than any other thief to filch people's property. The legislator has no more right than the lackey to make laws. I have no reverence for God, nor parents, nor sovereigns, nor presidents, nor popes, nor bishops, nor dead bodies, nor ancient institutions; in short, I have no reverence for any person or thing. ['] " - p 14
Yes! I cdn't've sd it better meself.. Although.. I probably do have some reverence for life & I'm not sure how that wd've fit into Clarissa's philosophy but I imagine she & I wd've been close to being on the same page.
"The Clarissa Dixon of the early 1890s that was perfectly suited to the individualistic world of San Francisco, as was her co-publisher of Enfant Terrible, an Irish immigrant named Henry Cowell, known as Harry." - p 15
You can see where this is going.
"Unlike some famous childhoods, Henry's is not shrouded in mystery. In 1914, Clarissa felt so driven by fate to document his development that although mortally ill, she began drafting a biographical sketch, amplifying it until her strength gave out." - p 18
His parents edited an anarchist fortnightly called Enfant Terrible. His mother drafted a biographical sketch about him. "The Scotch Club of San Francisco later pronounced him the most beautiful child in the city. "Crowds used to gather around him ["]" (p 18) If crowds were to gather around me in BalTimOre it wd've been reasonable to expect them to begin stoning me to death. I might've met a guy w/ a tattoo of a knife on his lower leg but wd I've met the equivalent of Jack London? I think not. People wd've met me.
"A ditch-digger who happened to hear Henry and Clarissa discussing writing proved to be self-educated but with "astounding ideas and great clarity of speech." The laborer, Jack London, accepted Harry's invitation to see them for the first of many visits when Henry was about seven." - p 20
"self-educated but with "astounding ideas and great clarity of speech.": as if that's some sort of unusual combination. Maybe it is, but doesn't 'university educated' mean semi-illiterate?
"Henry enjoyed referring to his third grade certificate of promotion as his highest academic degree until he received an honorary doctorate in 1953." - p 29
That's more like it. Clarissa was remarkable. She was connected to early anarchist publications so what's not to like? She also published a novel:
"Janet and Her Dear Phebe, which appeared in February, 1909, was warmly received by the press, but only 310 copies were sold in four months. In fact, it is a fine book, but truly straddled the borderline between teenage and adult. Politely but decisively, Stokes dropped further options." - p 31
"only 310 copies were sold in four months"? That strikes me as a stunning success. My latest bk, "Paradigm Shift Knuckle Sandwich & other examples of P.N.T. (Perverse Number Theory)" has sold, maybe, 70 copies in the last 9 mnths & 60 of those were to friends (or reasonable facsimiles thereof). If I'd sold 310 copies in 4 mnths I'd be expecting the key to the city & a queue of bride-wannabes. Damn, I'd figure that I cd walk naked down the streets & the police wd tip their hats to me & call me SIR. I'd expect bankers to give me the combinations to their vaults & the alarm system codes.
"With sales peaking at 400, neither royalties nor contracts were on the horizon. She never received a penny for Janet." - p 34
Well that much hasn't changed. Maybe the publisher shd've promoted it more.
"A tone cluster is a chord in which all intervals are seconds. (Henry eventually called it "secundal harmony.") These chords, which can be found as early as the eighteenth century, were part of the arsenal of the piano virtuoso Leo Ornstein (1893-2002). Henry later found that Vladimir Rebikov (1866-1920) used them in Russia. Henry, however, wished to use them with more than a handful of pitches. Lacking enough fingers, he expanded the resources of pianism by using the flat of his hand, the side of the fist, or the entire arm. This too was not entirely unprecedented. Daniel Steibelt's late eighteenth century "battle pieces" included passages played with the flat of the hand, and Ives had used a board to produce oversized clusters in the "Concord" Sonata, but Henry would not have known either of them. He might, however, have heard of the ex-slave Blind Tom, a virtuoso pianist in his own Civil War battle pieces." - p 36
& here we get to what torched off Cowell's fame, his use of tone clusters & his playing of the inside of the piano are what 1st caught my interest 60 yrs or so later even tho such techniques wd've been somewhat common by then. Sachs's scholarliness comes thru here, I don't recall knowing about Rebikov or Blind Tom before. Steibelt I'm not sure about.
1898: "a new Theosophical sect, the Brotherhood of Man" - p 49
When I was 19 & hitch-hiking back from the West Coast of the USA to BalTimOre I was picked up in a station wagon driven by a youngish man accompanied by a woman of roughly the same age, a little girl, & 5 dogs. All 5 dogs had scars from ear-to-ear. The driver explained that he'd found them w/ their throats slit in a river where they'd apparently been thrown to die. He saved them. The 2 adults looked very fried - as if they'd been awake entirely too long, possibly w/ the aid of LSD. I've written about this in greater detail elsewhere so I'm just giving a synopsis here. He said he was in a group called The Brotherhood of Man. I'd never heard of them before but this was 1972 & it sounded like a hippie cultish sort of thing. I had very long hair at the time so most people wd've thought of me as a hippie.
He picked up 2 more hitch-hikers. He told us that he'd been spreading the word on the radio that there was a Satanic group who'd put a hit out on him. He sd that the group found where he was hiding & was going to kill him. He hadn't had a car but as he was walking down the street he saw this stn wagon w/ the keys in it & knew it was a sign from the Brotherhood (or some such) that the car was his for his get-away from the death cult. He took the car & his family & the dogs & here he was & here we were - in a stolen car. We all got arrested. I've only run across one other mention of the Brotherhood of Man since that experience 45 yrs ago until I read this Cowell bio. I hope that man & his family are ok. I liked him. His story might've been true.
"He planted rows of daffodils in his garden along with rows of garlic, and "the bulbous plants crossed and there were horrible little green budlike daffies that smelled like garlic. This could only have happened to Henry, we said."" - p 53
That's funny, when I lived in South BalTimOre & my neighbor threw all his garbage in my backyard, a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 crossed with a tree & some sort of carnivorous plant grew up & ate the neighbor. It didn't smell weird but the screams of the neighbor were really loud & went on for wks. I didn't mind, tho, I found it rather pleasant.
Henry Cowell, being, as the title of this bk says, "a man made of music", he began performing early, wowing & shocking people w/ his extended piano techniques. Not everyone was enthusiastic:
"Mason had more mixed reactions. The music was "lawless, without a trace of counterpoint"; on the other hand, Henry knew how to get his ideas "across the footlights." Convinced that Henry had not the faintest notion of "what is meant by development," he advised packing him off to Germany, "where he would be out of the reach of idolizing women folk who mistake anarchistic rhapsodizing for inspiration."" - p 58
So what, eh?! Who needs counterpoint?! Cowell may not've understood counterpoint or development but he was blazing a newer path & that path has grown up very nicely, no thanks to that reviewer very much. A new path is welcome, the old sights & sounds get boring after awhile. But Cowell was adulated:
"According to a reviewer, the Musical Association performance also led a San Franciscan to contribute enough money to justify planning six months of lessons with a fine teacher. (Henry identified the sponsor as a German baron who wanted to send him for lessons with Richard Strauss.)" - p 18
"As of October Seward had raised nearly $335 [2010: $7,540] from donors in Palo Alto and San Francisco of which little more than half remained." - p 18
Now Henry & his mom hadn't had it easy. They'd survived poverty & the San Francisco earthquake by this point. His mom was having trouble succeeding as a professional writer, difficult at any time if you have anything intelligent to say but insufficient publishing world connections, esp difficult for a woman in the early 20th century. But $7,540 raised from donors for his musical education?! That's mind-boggling. I had someone offer to pay me to leave BalTimOre once but I don't think she had more than enough for a one-way bus ticket in mind.
August 13, 2016
It is marvelous that Henry Cowell's life has finally been captured in a biography written by a musician who is sympathetic to his music. Unfortunately, the book is hampered by two problems: 1) The inconsistent documentation of Cowell's life, and 2) The refusal of the Oxford University Press to allow space for Sach's analyses of Cowell's compositions. One can only hope for another book to overcome the latter shortcoming.
What is here is fascinating and shows the remarkable range of Cowell's contacts and enthusiasms. John Cage called Cowell the "open sesame" of contemporary American music. He was a vital figure who championed composers such as Ives, Ruggles, and Lou Harrison. He was also the first Western composer to value the music of Iran, India, Indonesia, and Japan. He pioneered such radical techniques as tone clusters and the manipulation of piano strings in his early music, which Bartok and Berg both asked Cowell's permission to use. As a theorist, he elevated melody and rhythm above harmony opening up some of the more revolutionary ideas of modern music. Not bad for someone whose highest officially completed level of education was the third grade!
What is here is fascinating and shows the remarkable range of Cowell's contacts and enthusiasms. John Cage called Cowell the "open sesame" of contemporary American music. He was a vital figure who championed composers such as Ives, Ruggles, and Lou Harrison. He was also the first Western composer to value the music of Iran, India, Indonesia, and Japan. He pioneered such radical techniques as tone clusters and the manipulation of piano strings in his early music, which Bartok and Berg both asked Cowell's permission to use. As a theorist, he elevated melody and rhythm above harmony opening up some of the more revolutionary ideas of modern music. Not bad for someone whose highest officially completed level of education was the third grade!
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