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New appreciation for composer Henry Cowell

The extraordinarily innovative American composer Henry Cowell took Europe by storm as a touring pianist in the 1920s, playing his unforgettable compositions that often required using the entire forearm to play dozens of keys simultaneously. In later years he returned to give talks about his music and American music under the auspices of the State Department. Yet now, if he is remembered at all, it is only for a few of those solo piano pieces.

That situation is beginning to change, and it is gratifying that my biography of Cowell has put me in a position to help bring back his music, even in England. My talks at the Royal College of Music, the Royal Academy of Music, and the University of London have helped re-acquaint young musicians, scholars from multiple fields, and music lovers with Cowell’s astonishing life, his crucial work for the development of an infrastructure of support for composers, and, above all, his music.

Now the best news of all: BBC Radio 3 will feature Cowell on its award-winning “Composer of the Week” show, thanks to the indefatigable program host Donald Macleod, who realized that the combination of Cowell’s almost unbelievable life and the quality and variety of his music make perfect material for this series. Preparing such a show about a composer who wrote hundreds of compositions and had an action-packed life was no easy matter. Donald Macleod planned from the beginning to make me part of the process and I offered to record some of his less-known piano pieces. After months of boiling down this immense repertory to about four hours of selections that could represent its variety, producer Johannah Smith prepared a playlist that is brilliantly comprehensive, considering the enormity of Cowell’s output, which then allowed Donald to write the five scripts of 13-14 minutes each, which he hoped would communicate a sense of a life that I had had to boil down to 513 pages. In July, when the show was ready for assembling, I spent a day at BBC Salford (Manchester) recording the piano music. I was eager to include some piano pieces from his later days, when his style was less obviously “radical” but still very innovative, since many people believe that he had become an arch-conservative in his older age. Three days after the Manchester session, producer Smith, host Macleod, and I convened at Broadcasting House in London to record the commentary — Macleod’s extraordinary scripts, into which my spontaneous commentary was inserted as if we were live-on-the-air. (Indeed, although the show sounds as if it is live, it may be broadcast so long after it was recorded that when Macleod is asked by this or that acquaintance “Who is the composer this week?” he often does not know.) The shows will be broadcast 19-23 October 2015.

As delighted as I was to have a role in Composer of the Week, I am gratified to have had absolutely nothing to do with another major Cowell event in London this summer. On 30 August, at the BBC Proms concerts, Michael Tilson Thomas conducted the San Francisco Symphony in a program of Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra, Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, and Cowell’s rarely-heard, tone cluster-filled piano concerto, superbly played by American pianist Jeremy Denk. Particularly wonderful was Denk’s thoroughly sensitive approach to the concerto; one heard real music, not the usual crashing and banging to which Cowell’s music is often subjected. The performers were rewarded by a huge ovation from the near-capacity crowd of, I would estimate, 4,500-5,000 people. The large audience may have be partly attributable to a BBC broadcast the previous morning, Radio 3’s “CD Review,” which devoted half an hour to Cowell and made his accomplishments vivid. (Of course, I was delighted to hear that host Andrew McGregor included one of my performances and a plug for the book too.)

Needless to say, I now enjoy fantasies of happy Proms-goers and BBC listeners eager to learn more about Henry Cowell.

Featured image: An altered version of W.P.A. concerts of unusual music Pre-Bach to moderns (1936). Federal Music Project (U.S.). Library of Congress.

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