Customer Reviews

Cowell: Mosaic

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This CD presents Cowell's experimental side ('10s-'30s) in chamber music in the most successful way. It moreover contains pieces of his nowhere else to be found:

His 3 string quartets stand out, with the 3rd in especial (Mosaic Quartet-1935) being the precursor of Boulez-Stockhausen's & Cage-Feldman's experiments in "open-form" 20 years later.
Quartet Euphometric & Quartet Romantic (1915-19) are Cowell's wildest realization of the concept of "rhythm-harmony" (extremely difficult to perform).
Return (1939) is one his 3 pieces written exclusively for percussion, and at the same time one of the first pieces of such a setting in western history (the first being Amadeo Roldan's Ritmicas V & VI-1930). Cowell wrote it while in prison...
Suite for wind quintet (1934) blends consonance and dissonance in a very Cowellian way, and Polyphonica for chamber orchestra (1928) shows him at his more abstract and austere, much in the manner of the Sinfonietta.
In 26 Simultaneous Mosaics "all players start & stop as they please and choose the order of the movements as they please" (Cowell's instructions); the piece, written at the end of his life (1963), is presented here in 3 different takes, something that does justice to the alternative universe it belongs to. The freedom of the resulting sound gives out a characteristic Ivesian aroma...
Last but not least, an oddity named Quartet for flute, oboe, cello and harp is there to remind us of Cowell's parallel, completely consonant likings, which are, however, not to be found in this double CD...

A 'must' for anyone who's interested in immersing one's head in Cowell's versatile experiments!