Cowell, Antheil, Varèse, and Crawford Seeger

Reading sections of Henry Cowell's New Musical Resources provides a nice contrast to Ives' Essays Before A Sonata. While Ives was writing about philosophical ideas and how to unite the head and the heart in music, Cowell was precise and scientific. In attempting to bring recognition to the overtone series and its potential in composition, he gives some concrete examples of chords that produce strong overtones and includes a chart. Some of this information was startlingly new to me, and I felt almost embarrassed that I had not investigated overtones already. Cowell matter-of-factly states "If we take the first six overtones [of a C major chord], we arrive at the following chord: C, E, G, G sharp, B flat, B, D, F". I couldn't believe this. I actually sat down at the piano and played all those notes together. It was even more exotic than I expected. Unfortunately I was playing on the electric piano in my apartment and could not experiment with actual acoustic phenomena.

Henry Cowell's overtone chart.

Cowell also gives a whirlwind tour of pioneering techniques in music since Monteverdi, beginning with the statement "It has become popular to assert that most great composers were accepted fully in their own time, and that many of them did not introduce new material". Of course his ensuing discussion of Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Liszt, and Debussy shows just how forward-looking they were in different ways. All of this rhetoric not-so-subtly prepares us to accept Cowell's techniques as the next step. The rest of the text concerns other musical devices like quarter-tones (where he gives a shout-out to Ives), sliding tones, and research into undertones, which blew my mind a little more.

After reading all of this heady stuff it was relieving to listen to two Cowell pieces I had heard before, but several years ago. "Tiger" is a great starting point to examine Cowell's work with overtones. He alternates textures of aggressive tone clusters with pauses that let overtones swirl into the air. Each of those moments was really magical. The tones are like musical ghosts, so ethereal and hard to pin down. It is also worth noting that this piece is more concise and unified in its material than a typical Ives piece.

"The Banshee" brings back great memories of my roommate, Nathan, in my senior year of undergrad, who learned to play this piece. I saw firsthand the logistical ordeals of practice and performance; since it is played entirely on the piano strings, Nathan brought little colored tabs with note names to the practice room and painstakingly placed them on the strings to keep track of the notes. He also became easily tired from awkwardly hunching over the sounding board. But he said something really enlightening about the piece: "It's frustrating sometimes as a pianist because we are so detached from our instrument. We sit at the very edge of it and play. But woodwind players and string players get to embrace their instruments. And when I play The Banshee, I sort of get to do that."

That said, The Banshee is an incredible piece. Nathan played it well but never quite like what I heard on the recording. I seriously thought I was hearing tremolo strings at the beginning. The sounds are intense and have wild psychological effects. I love how Cowell experiments with different intervallic possibilities. I heard some thirds near the 2-minute mark that produced absolutely wonderful colors. This piece is really quite terrifying in a way. It is true to its name.

It was humbling to read a compilation of bad reviews of Cowell's performances. Many of the phrases from those reviews surely have a place in Slonimsky's Lexicon of Musical Invective. My favorite was "[he] spanked his instrument in chunks of tone". I suppose the point of all these reviews is point out the difficulty of being both a pioneer and a good-quality composer, to unite experimentation with craft. Cowell, just like Ives, probably felt the weight of trying to move music forward while also trying to write good pieces to demonstrate new techniques, and to accept that perhaps no one would really understand it yet.

What I took away most from Christine Fena's piece on Cowell was how shocking it must have been for audiences to see the piano opened up and played on the strings or the wood. Some of these techniques have become almost cliché in contemporary music, but the horror and disgust of seeing that legendary instrument "boxed" by Cowell must have been incredibly uncomfortable.

George Antheil's Ballet mécanique features some of the most purely mechanical piano writing I know of. Antheil embraced the futurism movement of the early twentieth century, in which artists celebrated machines and things in motion. Sure enough, the video for this piece includes many spinning objects, a woman on a swing, and industrial images. The ensemble, with its repeated patterns and nonstop motion, becomes a sort of machine, but it's a very festive machine, with the occasional siren like a fanfare.

Everything moves in Ballet mécanique.

I started playing Varèse's Ionisation and thought "The sirens are back!" Though this is still futurist music, it has a more sophisticated texture than Ballet mécanique. The percussion writing is quite spectacular; this was a turning point in percussion history for sure. At times the writing borders on controlled chaos, but other times it simply explores complex divisions of the beat.

I was not familiar with Ruth Crawford Seeger at all before this, but I'm glad I am now. Her piece Piano Study in Mixed Accents sounds like it was written yesterday, but now I understand that in her time she laid the groundwork for future composers like Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez and others who concern themselves with constant motion and offbeat accents. I will have to investigate more of her piano music.