The Music of Henry Cowell Program Notes

1. Collection/Song Title: Pulse

   Performers:

   1. Pacific Rims Percussion Quartet
   2. Jarrad Powell
   3. Paul Taub

   Pulse and Return, both written in 1939, were Cowell’s enthusiastic responses to Cage’s call for scores for his newly formed percussion ensemble at what was then known as the Cornish School.

   Pulse, dedicated to John Cage and his percussion group, is scored for six players. Each player has two sets of three like instruments. Player one has woodblocks and dragon’s mouths, player two has Chinese tom-toms and drums, three, rice bowls and cup gongs, four, cymbals and gongs, and five, pipe lengths and brake drums. A sixth player moves back and forth between the others, assisting them by dampening instruments or playing on one of the sets of instruments. The piece is in 7/8 time throughout. —Matthew Kocmieroski

2. Collection/Song Title: Night Fliers

   Collection/Song Title: Sunset

   Collection/Song Title: Rest

   Performers:

   1. Kathryn Weld
   2. Stephen Drury

   The eleven songs on tonight’s program represent only a small sampling of Cowell’s enormous output, which includes more than 180 works for voice with piano or small ensemble. The songs span his entire long career, with the first written in 1914 and the final in 1964. Yet most of the works are unknown and unperformed, with the unpublished scores held in nonlending collections at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and the Library of Congress.

   Night Fliers, which opens the first of the two song sets, was composed in 1956 to the poetry of Padraic Colum. It is one of three poems by the Irish-born American poet, playwright, and folklorist that Cowell set to music, all three referring to different birds. The score for the set of Colum songs exists only in the composer’s own hand and has never been published. According to The Music of Henry Cowell: A Descriptive Catalog by William Lichtenwanger, the first documented performance was by the singer Margaret Aherns with Paul Alan Levi, pianist, at Merkin Concert Hall in New York in 1983.

   Sunset and Rest, set to poetry of Catherine Riegger (daughter of American composer Wallingford Riegger), were composed in 1933 and published in 1938 in the periodical that Cowell founded, New Music, now out of print but readily available in many libraries. The songs were likely premiered for San Franciso’s New Music Society by Radiana Pazmor, a leading California contemporary music proponent who was known for her performances of music of Charles Ives. Sunset and Rest were included in a radio broadcast of American vocal music to Moscow in 1938. —Paul Taub

3. Collection/Song Title: Songs on Poems of Langston Hughes

   • Collection of Songs:

     1. Demand
     2. Moonlight Night: Carmel
     3. Fulfillment

   • Performers:

     1. Kathryn Weld
     2. Richard Eckert
     3. Sean Osborn
     4. Paul Taub

   The three Songs on Poems of Langston Hughes are the most recent works on tonight’s program, composed in 1964. Demand, Moonlight Night: Carmel, and Fulfillment are dedicated to the singer Georgia Davis, who was scheduled to give the premiere at The Town Hall, New York, in 1964. No record of the recital has been found. Hughes, whose life span (1902–1967) closely parallels Cowell’s (1897–1965), was the most important poet of the Harlem Renaissance movement. These songs, set for mezzo-soprano with flute, clarinet, and cello, were finally performed in 1986, when mezzo Elaine Bonazzi sang the set with the Da Capo Chamber Players in New York at Carnegie Recital Hall. —Paul Taub

4. Collection/Song Title: The Tides of Manaunaun

   Collection/Song Title: The Banshee

   Collection/Song Title: Aeolian Harp

   Collection/Song Title: Exultation

   Performers:

   1. Stephen Drury

   Cowell’s early piano works are well-known for his experimentation with unusual techniques for the instrument. The four pieces on tonight’s program have been recorded multiple times and performed all over the world. Cowell himself recorded and documented the works extensively in writing and in recorded interviews.

   The Tides of Manaunaun, composed in 1917, explores the use of massive tone clusters produced by the palm and forearm. Cowell wrote that it was composed “as a prelude to an opera based on Irish mythology. In Irish mythology, Manaunaun was the god of motion and of the waves of the sea; and according to the mythology, at the time when the universe was being built, Manaunaun swayed all of the materials out of which the universe was being built with fine particles which were distributed everywhere through cosmos. And he kept these moving in rhythmical tides so that they should remain fresh when the time came for their use in the building of the universe.”

   The Banshee (1925) is perhaps the best-known of the works for “piano strings,” where the performer is required to strum, pluck, and scrape the strings inside the piano with different parts of the hand. The twelve ways of playing the piano are annotated in the preface to the score.

   Aeolian Harp was written “about” 1923 and is another of the piano-strings works. As he did with a number of his piano pieces, Cowell recorded it himself on a Folkways LP. He wrote: “An aeolian harp is a tiny wind harp that children make of silk threads stretched across an arched twig like a bow. Hung in a windy spot, the silken strings give forth high, faint, indiscriminate sounds, loud or soft according to the force of the wind. Aeolian Harp is sounded entirely on the strings of the piano. Chords are depressed silently on the keyboard to release their dampers so that when the strings are stroked only the tones so selected will sound. Single tones are plucked, pizzicato, as the proper key is depressed to free the string desired. The form is that of a prelude. The simple chord melody is sounded in several related phrases that are joined by the short pizzicato leading passages.”

   Exultation (1921) combines an Irish-style melody with large tone clusters played by both forearms. Cowell wrote: “This is the kind of walking-tune rhythm familiar in Ireland; it is in triple meter, so that the accent falls first on one foot and then on the other—the Irish consider us silly to walk to a tune that accents only the left foot, so that ‘one foot is worn out while the other is still perfectly good!’ Both tune and accompanying clusters are pentatonic; metrically, 3/4, 4/4, and 5/4 appear simultaneously, but the 3/4 remains uppermost; and the piece is in the form of a sonatina.” —Paul Taub

5. Collection/Song Title: Homage to Iran

   • Collection of Songs:

     1. Andante rubato
     2. Interlude – Presto
     3. Andante rubato
     4. Con spirito

   • Performers:

     1. Stephen Drury
     2. Paul Hansen
     3. Michael Lim

   Homage to Iran, from 1957, demonstrates Cowell’s interest in the music of other cultures. He had long been aware of the world’s musical offerings. Both instruments (for example, gongs from China and Japan and porcelain bowls from India) and techniques derived from various cultures’ musical traditions were used as elements in his work. He was one of the pioneers in teaching about the music of other cultures and laid much groundwork for the young field of ethnomusicology.

   This influence was felt by many of Cowell’s students, including Cage, and, most noticeably, Lou Harrison. Both at different times had taken Cowell’s course titled Music of the Peoples of the World, which was taught at San Francisco State College and at the New School in New York as well as through a radio series on WBAI in New York. Harrison often spoke of Cowell opening up the world for him, and remembered his first hearing of many traditions in Cowell’s class. As a result, Harrison felt that a musician who did not know at least one tradition other than his own was not really whole.

   After the 1940s, the pioneering experimentalism in Cowell’s music lessened, or rather became a synthesis and digestion of all that he had done and experienced before. He had married Sidney Robertson, an ethnomusicologist, in 1941, and her work influenced his own. In 1956, with the aid of a Rockefeller Foundation grant, they visited a wide number of countries, and Cowell began compositions influenced by the various traditions they visited. In addition to Ireland, where Cowell had family roots, they visited Turkey, Japan, India, Pakistan, and Iran. Resulting compositions include his Madras Symphony, the orchestral work Ongaku, and from Iran the chamber orchestra works Teheran Movement and Persian Set, and the work performed tonight, Homage to Iran.

   Homage to Iran is written for violin and piano and was performed by violinist Leopold Avakian, to whom it is dedicated, for the Shah of Iran in a 1959 concert in Tehran. A tradition, the origin of which I am not certain of, developed of adding a Middle Eastern drum in three of the movements. In the first and third movements, the drum replaces the piano, whose single-line rhythmic part was in imitation of a drum. The second movement remains for violin and piano, and all three players join in the rousing fourth movement, with the drum improvising in accordance with the rhythmic structure. —Matthew Kocmieroski

6. INTERMISSION

7. Collection/Song Title: Return

   Performers:

   1. Pacific Rims Percussion Quartet

   Return is for three “percussers” and wailer. The instruments, as in Pulse, are used in sets of threes: woodblocks, dragon’s mouths, gongs, tom-toms, cup gongs, and drums. In addition there is a pane of glass (which is in effect bowed with a rosined string), a string of small bells, and Japanese wind-glasses (wind chimes). These are used just before the da capo, which is perhaps the “return” of the title. The coda features a wail, which may be taken by one of the players (female preferred) or by a siren, and ends with a gentle blowing on the wind-glasses.

   Return and Pulse were premiered on May 19, 1939 at the second of a series of percussion concerts John Cage presented at Cornish. Both pieces were repeated on Cage’s third Cornish percussion concert, on December 9, 1939. Today’s performance marks the first time since then that Return, still unpublished, will be played here at Cornish. —Matthew Kocmieroski

8. Collection/Song Title: 26 Simultaneous Mosaics

   Performers:

   1. Stephen Drury
   2. Richard Eckert
   3. Gunnar Folsom
   4. Michael Lim
   5. Sean Osborn

   Written in 1963, 26 Simultaneous Mosaics uses an elastic form that allows for a large variety of possible outcomes, making every performance a unique event without the use of improvisation. There are indeed twenty-six distinct little pieces divided amongst the players: five pieces each for violin, cello, clarinet, and percussion, with the percussionist’s pieces each for a different set of instruments; and six pieces for the piano. Each piece is in an individual focused style exploring various rhythmic, harmonic, melodic, and textural techniques. They range from broad Romantic sweeps to rapidly moving clusters on the piano, to a jig in the clarinet, to a typically gnarly chromatic piece for xylophone and glockenspiel. Overall the work is a sample glossary of many of the devices and techniques favored by Cowell over the breadth of his career. As with many of his later works, this is not so much a look forward as a gathering and coalescing of past techniques and practices. The freedom of the piece bears a resemblance to his Mosaic Quartet – String Quartet No. 3 of 1935, in which the order of the movements is determined by the players for each performance, with the additional option of repeating movements. In 26 Simultaneous Mosaics the players also determine the order of the movements, but individually rather than as a group. Thus there is no actual coordination between the players, and the overall effect is akin to a mobile: pieces come and go without anyone, even the performers, knowing what the others may play next or when, nor what their own pieces may be played with, or against. —Matthew Kocmieroski

   Composer Note: All players start and stop as they please and choose the order of the movements as they please. Use repeats and/or da capo ad lib. Use lots of rest between movements so that everything is not always going at once. There is no score; each is on his own. The pianist may give a sign when he feels that the last round has come (7 or 8 minutes) but each player finishes whatever mosaic he is playing. —Henry Cowell

9. Collection/Song Title: The Donkey

   Collection/Song Title: The Dream–Bridge

   Collection/Song Title: Spring Pools

   Collection/Song Title: Three Anti–Modernist Songs

   • Collection of Songs:

     1. A Sharp Where You’d Expect a Natural
     2. Hark! From the Pit a Fearsome Sound
     3. Who Wrote This Fiendish “Rite of Spring”?

   • Performers:

     1. John Duykers
     2. Stephen Drury

   The Donkey was composed in 1946 to a poem by G. K. Chesterton and dedicated to the great African-American lyric tenor Roland Hayes, who gave the premiere at the Kutztown (PA) State Teachers College. Unpublished, the music is held in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

   The Dream Bridge is the earliest Cowell work on tonight’s program, composed in 1915 when Cowell was seventeen years old. The poem is from a collection published in 1912 in San Francisco by the almost equally young and precociously talented Clark Ashton Smith, who later became known as a contributor to Weird Tales. A copy made many years after the song was written was dedicated to Roland Hayes.

   Spring Pools, composed in 1958, is one of three settings Cowell made to the poems of Robert Frost. The poem is published in Frost’s collection West-Running Brook, but the song remains unpublished.

   Three Anti-Modernist Songs are among the few Cowell songs that have been published. Edition Peters provides an excellent preface by H. Wiley Hitchcock:

   “The moment he saw them, Henry Cowell could hardly wait to set to music the texts of the Three Anti-Modernist Songs. He owed them to Nicolas Slonimsky, who had included them in his Music Since 1900 (published late in 1937). Slonimsky sent an early copy of the book to Cowell (then imprisoned in San Quentin), and in a letter of 31 January 1938 to fellow-composer John Becker, Cowell wrote excitedly, ‘Have you seen Slonimsky’s book? I am setting the three “Anti-Modernist Poems” in it to music.’ Within a month he had finished them, and he sent a copy of the score to the soprano Radiana Pazmor, who sang at least one of the songs … at a Pro Musica concert in Los Angeles on March 18th.

   The first poem comes from an unidentified American newspaper of about 1884, where it was titled “Directions for Composing a Wagner Overture” and signed “A Sufferer.” The second, also from a newspaper (the New York World of 25 February 1909), was titled there “Modern Opera” and printed over the byline of one Henry Tyrrell; its text explicitly vilifies Richard Strauss, most likely the Strauss of Salome and Elektra. The third, with no title or author’s credit, brightened the Boston Herald of 20 April 1924—not long, apparently, after Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps had been heard there.” —Error! Contact not defined.

10. Collection/Song Title: Ostinato Pianissimo

    Performers:

    1. Pacific Rims Percussion Quartet
    2. Stephen Drury
    3. Jarrad Powell
    4. Paul Taub
    5. Adrienne Varner

    In his youth, Cowell was no stranger to percussion music. As an active board member and later director of the Pan American Association of Composers, he had been involved in several groundbreaking concerts that included percussion music. He had played the piano part in the premiere of Varèse’s Ionisation in 1933 in New York and also directed it on a 1934 concert of his New Music Society along with percussion music by William Russell. Cowell’s New Music Society’s astonishing array of activities included publishing, and percussion music was enthusiastically represented. In 1933 he published William Russell’s Fugue for Eight Percussion Instruments, in 1934, Ionisation, and in 1936, an edition of six percussion works by various composers. He also wrote the small gem Ostinato Pianissimo in 1934.

    Ostinato Pianissimo (for percussion band) is dedicated to another early pioneer of percussion music, Nicolas Slonimsky, who had conducted the premiere of Ionisation. The work includes two string pianos and a typical Cowell device where the strings of the piano are muted by one hand while the keys are played with the other. The other six percussion parts are typical of Cowell’s percussion writing throughout his career and served as models for both Cage and Harrison in their later percussion writing. The nonpitched percussion instruments used include sets of like instruments, arranged from high to low: three each of gongs and drums, eight rice bowls, and so on. A number of the instruments are Asian in origin, such as the bowls used as in the Indian tradition of jal tarang, which Lou Harrison later used throughout his life. (In fact, there was a tongue-in-cheek competition between Harrison and Cowell in their substitution, or Americanization, of the traditional porcelain bowls. Cowell touted Pyrex, and Harrison preferred Fire King Oven Ware.) Cowell also uses a tambourine with the jingles removed, a guiro tapped with a stick instead of rubbed, two woodblocks for the four-toned “instrument” in one player’s part, and a pair of bongos for another. The practice of using existing instruments from other cultures and of inventing or substituting new ones was another prime attribute of the percussion work of all three composers, Cowell, Harrison, and Cage.

    The notation in Ostinato Pianissimo also displays some novel deviations from the norm that were picked up by Harrison and Cage, notably showing formal and phrase aspects with note-beams crossing beats, rather than traditional phrase lines. This adds considerably to the difficulty of the xylophone part, which is heavily chromatic and gnarly to play due to its rapidity. The xylophone serves as a soloist of sorts, with Cowell stating that “only one professional player is needed; this is for the xylophone.”

    In the work, four players begin, with the other four entering one by one during the first half of the piece. All the parts use the same procedure. Each player has an ostinato pattern of a different length; most patterns precede each repetition with a trill; and with each repetition, a new regular pattern of accents is added, layering rhythmic ostinati on top of melodic ones. The addition of players and the increasing play of the accents build the work up steadily while maintaining the ostinati, tempo, and the pianissimo until eight measures from the end, where fortissimo accents emerge as a rhythmic cadence to bring us to the three concluding measures. —Matthew Kocmieroski