Essential Cowell: Selected Writings on Music by Henry Cowell, 1921-1964. (Book Reviews: Composers).(Book Review)

Essential Cowell: Selected Writings on Music by Henry Cowell, 1921-1964. Edited by Dick Higgins. New York: McPherson, 2002. [345 p. ISBN 0-929701-63-1. $35.] Music examples, discography, index.

Henry Cowell: Selected Writings, compiled by Dick Higgins, gathers fifty-five diverse writings of American composer Henry Cowell into a single, compact volume, accompanied by a discography updated to the year 2001. Kyle Gann supplies a preface describing Cowell's enduring, relatively unheralded influence on North American composers since about 1933. A welcome complement to the rapidly growing body of Cowell scholarship, this collection includes nearly one-quarter of Cowell's total output--Bruce Saylor's bibliography The Writings of Henry Cowell (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Institute for Studies in American Music, Brooklyn College, 1977) lists just fewer than 240 items. Editor Dick Higgins (1938-1998) studied composition with Cowell at Columbia University, was later a student of John Cage, and was among the original members of Fluxus, the avant-garde performance art movement that included La Monte Young. Yoko Ono, and others. Higgins acknowledges Cowell's influence on his own work and brings a composer s perspective to th e project.

In addition to being a prolific composer (as many as twelve hundred works, although scholars disagree on the precise number), Cowell also produced more than two hundred articles, speeches, and essays during his lifetime. After her marriage to Cowell in 1941, the accomplished folklorist Sidney Robertson either cowrote or ghostwrote an unknown number of these, and this is a topic that deserves further study, as Higgins acknowledges. The collection conveniently brings together writings from diverse sources sometimes difficult to obtain. Higgins includes ten pages excerpted from Cowell's unpublished manuscript "The Nature of Melody," four sections from the out-of-print American Composers on American Music (Cowell on Charles Ives, Charles Seeger, Edgard Varese, and John J. Becker [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1933; reprint, New York: Ungar, 1962]), and an early essay not listed in most sources, "Tonal Therapy," from 1922. More than half the essays originated as introductions to books, prefaces to scores, o r notes to recordings; some were originally articles from such diverse publications as Folkways, Listen, This I Believe, American Journal of Psychiatry, New Republic, and The Music Vanguard. The remainder first appeared in Musical Quarterly, Modern Music, or Notes. Apart from comments in the preface and introduction, the readily available New Musical Resources (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930; reprint, Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1996) is altogether bypassed. The collection effectively--and sometimes entertainingly--represents the breadth of Cowell's thought. Cowell's famous advocacy of music outside the Western art music tradition appears in writings such as "Music of the World's Peoples" (originally a recording note), his note to the score to Persian Set, and his commentary on music of Cohn McPhee. Musical inventions and possibilities figure prominently in these writings, for example, expanding notational innovations (in "On Inadequate Notation"), tone clusters (in "Harmonic Development in Music") , and new percussive sound resources (in "The Joys of Noise'). He relates his experiences with music and politics in "Shaping Music for Total War" (written as an employee of the Office of War Information), in "Music Is My Weapon" (contributed to a Cold War anticommunist publication), and in "Playing Music in Moscow" (an account of his logistically chaotic 1929 trip to the Soviet Union). The earliest essay in the collection, "Tonal Therapy" (1922), theorizing that the pitches E and B may actually cure cancer and syphilis, resulted from his witnessing certain experiments at architect John Varian's Halcyon community in California.

Cowell's centrality to American music is indisputable. Beyond the impressive number of compositions and writings he produced, he made available recordings and scores of music by Milton Babbitt, John Cage, Aaron Copland, Morton Feldman, Charles Ives, Colin McPhee, and many others through his New Music Quarterly (begun in 1927) and his New Music Recordings (issued 1934-42). In addition, Cowell's American Composers on American Music brought the thoughts of Roy Harris, Nicolas Slonimsky, George Gershwin, Wallingford Riegger, Carlos Chavez, Aaron Copland, and others to a wider readership. Growing up mostly in California, Cowell's exposure to Asian music and to the Anglo-Irish folksong of his ancestors ...