Henry Cowell was one of the leading figures of 20th century avant-garde music. He's remembered as much for his life as his work: he was a teacher and a catalyst for large parts of his career. It's easy to feel an affinity with the man, as Cowell seemed to love music in a particularly modern way, omnivorously and with a huge appetite. The Harp of Life is one of the works he wrote during the 1910s and '20s that were influenced by Celtic myth. In some of them you can hear what [...]
Classical music is full of references to the macabre: supernatural forces, evil boogeymen who kill children at night, and, of course, the original scary persona, the devil. Often, composers represent these moments with dark timbres, minor keys, sad languishing melodies, or grotesqueries of dance. Few pieces are really, genuinely, bone-chillingly scary, at least for our modern ears. Thankfully, there's Mr. Henry Cowell, a pioneer of 20th century music, who published The Banshee in 1925, a work for piano in which everything is played inside the piano. No keys are pushed; the player moves hands and fingers both across the [...]
Andrya of Talk Normal sent us these answers to our questions in this next installment of the q and also a series. q: What is the last song you (really) heard? a: The Tides of Manaunaun by Henry Cowell . He's a piano man; early 20th century. It's like an earthquake with the most rewarding melodies on top. Deep stuff. Streamable: The Tides of Manaunaun (youtube) q: What is your [...]
Henry Cowell, parte 2 Cowell foi uma das figuras centrais no círculo de compositores de vanguarda, onde se incluem nomes como Cal Ruggles e Dane Rudhyar, Leo Ornstein, Colin McPhee, John Becker, Edgard Varèse e Ruth Crawford. Em 1927 fundou a revista New Music onde viriam a ser publicados muitos dos futuros nomes da composição ultra-modernista. Em 34 fundou a editora New Music Recordings, onde, para além dos seus próprios trabalhos, editou trabalhos de jovens autores ultra-modernistas. Em 1928, Cowell, Ruggles, Varèse, Carlos Salzedo, Emerson Whithorne, Carlos Chávez constituíram a associação Pan-americana de compositores, cujo objectivo [...]
Henry Cowell, parte 1 Henry Cowell é considerado, mesmo pelos seus detractores, como um do s maiores compositores do século XX. Poucos foram os criadores musicais que produziram um conjunto de obras tão radicais e tão normais, e, simultaneamente, tão penetrantes e abrangentes. A sua carreira ficou marcada pela produção maciça bem como por ter sido um dos maiores pedagogos musicais norte-americano. Cowell nasceu a 11 de Março de 1897 na zona rural Menlo Park, na Califórnia, filho de dois escritores, sendo seu pai imigrante irlandês e a [...]
On Saturday, October 2, a new trio of Denman Maroney, John Morton and Miguel Frasconi are performing at The Stone in Alphabet City. I can't make it, as I'll be preoccupied with this year's Views From the Avant-Garde (the only affordable part of the New York Film Festival), but fans of far-left improvised music should definitely check it out. Maroney plays piano--or more properly, "hyperpiano," a term he coined to describe his surgical approach to the instrument. Using a 6-foot grand, Maroney sounds off notes with one hand while playing the [...]
Henry Cowell is a fascinating figure in 20th century classical music. His methods and theories would prove an inspiration to composers as varied as Béla Bartók, John Cage and Burt Bacharach, yet despite his prolific output he remains little known today. What I've been able to hear of Cowell's music has been uniformly fascinating. But that's the only thing that is uniform about it. Compositionally, he seems to have been completely unable to settle. (Or, if you prefer, to get stuck in a rut.) There's no easy way in to his work, no easy [...]
A while back , I made reference to my receiving a new, free Cingular phone in the mail. The phone entitled me to "free data transfer" for one month, and my only required action was to post on the website MyBlueNotes about my experiences with the phone. I finished work today early, and noticed the phone collecting a fine layer of dust as it sat on my computer desk. I decided that today I would post my "blog" entry about the phone on their website. Let's see how long it takes someone to delete it. If you haven't [...]
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