Henry Cowell“I WANT TO LIVE IN THE WHOLE WORLD OF MUSIC”

A LIFE STRANGER THAN FICTION

Short Biography

• Born: March 11, 1897, Menlo Park, California

• Divorced parents 1903

• Enormous Vocabulary and Short piano Pieces

• He was discovered by a Stanford Professor

• Study in the University of California, Berkeley

• Mentor Charles Seeger

• Died: December 10, 1965, Shady, New York

Career

• 1920, Cowell toured widely in North America and Europe

• Experimentalist and atonality, polytonality, polyrhythms and non-Western modes.

• 1923, Grete Sultan

• Tone Clusters

• Relationship between Bela Bartok and John Cage

Tone Cluster

• Large groups of successive notes played on the piano with the flat of the hand or the arm

• Made up of Major and Minor seconds

• 3 Adjacent tones in a scale

• Diatonically, pentatonically and microtonally

Works

• Anger Dance 1914

• The Tides Manaunaun 1917

• Dynamic Motion 1916

• The Banshee 1925