The Museum of Forgotten Music #1 - Henry Cowell: The Great American Composer? - Beginning

This podcast is about the composers who slipped through history's cracks; composers so distant from the wellspring of cultural history that few were there to listen to them, and therefore few to tell others they're worth hearing; composers of such forward vision that there was no place for them in the world of their present, and the future has yet to catch up with them.

Play through The Tides of Manaunaun

So who's the Great American Composer?

Obviously, this question is half-meaningless. How does anybody quantitize quality? 'Better than' is a very nearly useless term in art, because the qualities of great artists differ so much from one another that the differences make them very nearly incomparable.

All we can do, meaningfully, is talk about the individual qualities of great artists and what makes them great. Even if you want to talk about qualities different artists share in common, the way they go about those qualities is so different from one another that it's impossible to draw a meaningful comparison. If you want to talk about spirituality in American music, then the transcendental chaos of Charles Ives is obviously very different from the simple-spoken austerity of Aaron Copland, which is very different from the mantra-like mesmerism of Philip Glass, which is obviously very different from the oracular opacity of Bob Dylan. It sheds so very little light on them to talk about what's better and what's worse.

So let's do it anyway...

Obviously most people would start with three names: Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, Charles Ives....

(play in the background) I love all three of them, but poor Gershwin didn't live to see 39. Great as he already was, we'll never know whether Gershwin could have become the American Mozart or Beethoven who bridged popular and classical music forever. What he packed into his miserably few years is astonishing, and one day the world will hear again the twenty-eight other musicals than Porgy and Bess which mostly collect dust now, not to mention the songs, the solo piano pieces, and those few orchestral works that appear on concert programs with regularity oh so mind numbing. But we never got to see Gershwin age, his music is as much the boisterous liturgy of the Roaring Twenties as Fitzgerald is its rambunctious bible, but Gershwin's take on the rest of the American story is terra incognita.

(play in the background) Obviously we know Aaron Copland's take on the American story - that pastoral, almost spiritual soundscape, containing those huge, open fifths and fourths which seem almost like a sonic incarnation of the limitless open space and opportunity in the American continent, worshipped in their different ways by American settlers and Native Americans alike. And that's not the whole Copland either! On either side of that prayerful music from the Roosevelt era is the harsh, confrontational music of a gay Jewish socialist who could only write music to please the American audiences who hated people like him for so long. But whatever the reason, Copland never reconciled those two sides of his musical personality. He was a mentor to many great American musicians, Leonard Bernstein most famously but dozens of others too, but he was a gatekeeper to as many more. To Copland, even Gershwin and Ives were amateurs, and no matter how visionary, any composer who didn't write music as flawless as Copland's was an amateur, unworthy of an academic position or performances. If he'd been willing to express that conflict in his soul more openly, either as a person or as a musician, he might not have found he had much more to say, and his ability to compose past sixty wouldn't have dried up.

(play in the background) And then there's Charles Ives - who probably has the best claim of the three. He's a composer for a future we still haven't caught up to with an all-inclusive vision of music as something where so many forces jostle together in so many dimensions that every time you listen is a completely different experience. It's music whose function is completely different from European music, a more democratic music for a country with a more democratic ethos. An ear accustomed to the orderly kingdom of European harmony will hear only the ugliness of American chaos, but those of us conversant in his musical language can hear the beauty in his dissonance. And yet, just like the country of whom he was such a magnificent example, there is a lot of ugliness in Ives too - his music was made of quotes, and while he was a Connecticut Yankee WASP whose life was understandably distant enough from the black experience that he never quoted African-American songs, he yet found space in his music to quote Stephen Foster, the songwriter beloved of Southern minstrel shows. His political beliefs were so reactionary they almost seem progressive - in 1920 he campaigned for a constitutional amendment that is a forerunner of today's movement for Direct Democracy, but in his interpretation was a means to severely limit the power of government. But as democratic as Ives's conception of music was, his entire world was nevertheless the world of New England WASPS, scarcely different from Hawthorne's or Dickinson's - the world of barn dances, holiday parades, parlor entertainments, church hymns, town meetings, and minstrel shows, all of it refracted through the brain of a musical genius with the financial means to develop his talent fully. But when the idyllic world of the New England WASP began to die after World War I, Ives's inspiration died with it.

Some younger musicians who might listen to this podcast would probably suggest a further three - Phillip Glass, Steve Reich, and John Adams, the 'Holy Trinity' of American Minimalism. And while I'm not an uncritical admirer of any of them, I do wonder if there are arguments to be made for all three, but let's let the dust settle on their careers before we attempt any kind of definitive assessment on their music. And then, of course, there are the non-classical composers, who might in fact have a still much stronger claim to musical eminence than anything at all which happened the tiny realm of American classical music.

Any kind of artistic endeavor is extremely hard, and the demands placed on any kind of artist are herculean for any number of reasons this podcast would elaborate upon. How much harder are these demands in a country for whom the means of expression, a means like classical music, is not endemic in the country's experience?

(play in background) So allow me make one other suggestion for a candidate.... a candidate with a vision for music as radical and as inclusive as Charles Ives, but who developed his vision over the course of an entire lifetime, and was open-minded enough to the experience of others to always let new influences give him more to say; who grew up not in the homogenous and rigid confines of small-town Connecticut, but in the radically inclusive environs of San Francisco Chinatown, where Asian-American children were his friends and playmates, and whose extremely Californian music was suffused with a respect and love for Eastern culture with which he had intimate acquaintance from the earliest age. A visionary composer who mentored a whole battery of other musical visionaries, not from the then quite safe confines of academia, but from the extremely insecure world of music publishing and journalism. Thanks to Henry Cowell, we not only have the music of Henry Cowell, but the discovery of Charles Ives and Carl Ruggles, and the list of composers for whom Cowell was a consequential mentor is almost like a who's who of North American musical visionaries: Edgard Varese, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Leo Ornstein, George Antheil, Colin McPhee, Carlos Chavez, Lou Harrison and even John Cage. Arnold Schoenberg so esteemed Cowell that Cowell travelled to Schoenberg's composition class in Berlin to guest lecture - in 1932 no less! In the 20s, Bela Bartok just happened upon Cowell practicing his piano music on an ocean-liner and asked Cowell for permission to use Cowell's techniques! And yet this peer of Schoenberg and Bartok is, relatively speaking, utterly forgotten. (turn up music, play to its conclusion)

That was 'The Harp of Life', played by Stefan Schleiermacher. It's probably my favorite Cowell piece, though there are plenty of other goodies we'll get to soon. At the beginning you heard 'The Tides of Mananaun.' One of Cowell's great interests was Irish Mythology...