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Overview
In this first full-length study of Henry Cowell, Michael Hicks shows how the maverick composer, writer, teacher, and performer built his career on the intellectual and aesthetic foundations of his parents, community, and teachers -- and exemplified the essence of bohemian California. Author of the highly influential New Musical Resources and a teacher of other composers from John Cage to Burt Bacharach, Cowell is regarded as an innovator, a rebel, and a genius. One of the first American composers to be celebrated for the novelty of his techniques, Cowell popularized a series of experimental piano-playing techniques that included pounding his fists and forearms on the keys and plucking the piano strings directly to achieve the exotic, dissonant sounds he desired.Henry Cowell, Bohemian traces the venerated experimentalist's radical ideas back to his teachers, including Charles Seeger, Samuel Seward, and E. G. Stricklen, the tight-knit artistic communities in the San Francisco Bay area where he grew up and first started composing, and the immeasurable influence of his parents. Mining the published and unpublished writings of Cowell's mother, a politically motivated novelist from the Midwest who carefully monitored the pulse of her son's creativity from birth, Hicks provides insight into the composer's heritage, artistic inclinations, and childhood.
Hicks focuses on Cowell's formative and most prolific years, from his birth in 1897 through his incarceration on a morals conviction in the 1930s. The author also examines the philosophical fervor that drove Cowell's whirlwind compositions and tracks the ways the composer's irrepressible bohemian spirit helped foster an appreciation in the United States and Europe for a new brand of American music.
Synopsis
In this first full-length study of Henry Cowell, Michael Hicks shows how the maverick composer, writer, teacher, and performer built his career on the intellectual and aesthetic foundations of his parents, community, and teachers -- and exemplified the essence of bohemian California. Author of the highly influential New Musical Resources and a teacher of other composers from John Cage to Burt Bacharach, Cowell is regarded as an innovator, a rebel, and a genius. One of the first American composers to be celebrated for the novelty of his techniques, Cowell popularized a series of experimental piano-playing techniques that included pounding his fists and forearms on the keys and plucking the piano strings directly to achieve the exotic, dissonant sounds he desired.
Henry Cowell, Bohemian traces the venerated experimentalist's radical ideas back to his teachers, including Charles Seeger, Samuel Seward, and E. G. Stricklen, the tight-knit artistic communities in the San Francisco Bay area where he grew up and first started composing, and the immeasurable influence of his parents. Mining the published and unpublished writings of Cowell's mother, a politically motivated novelist from the Midwest who carefully monitored the pulse of her son's creativity from birth, Hicks provides insight into the composer's heritage, artistic inclinations, and childhood.
Hicks focuses on Cowell's formative and most prolific years, from his birth in 1897 through his incarceration on a morals conviction in the 1930s. The author also examines the philosophical fervor that drove Cowell's whirlwind compositions and tracks the ways the composer's irrepressible bohemian spirit helped foster an appreciation in the United States and Europe for a new brand of American music.