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 John Cage, Lou Harrison, and 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 tightknit 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 Mining the published and unpublished writings of his mother, a politically motivated novelist from the Midwest who carefully monitored the pulse of her son's creativity from birth, Hicks provides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. Focusing on Cowell's formative and most prolific years, from his birth in 1897 through his incarceration on a morals conviction in the 1930s, Hicks examines the philosophical fervor that fueled his whirlwind compositions, and the ways his irrepressible bohemian spirit helped foster an appreciation in the United States and Europe for a new brand of American music.
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"The author of many important and fascinating musicological works about this radical 20th-century American composer, Hicks now offers a volume that manages to depict the free artistic atmosphere of northern California in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the lives of Cowell's parents, Cowell's own experiences until the late 1930s, and the ideas and materials of Cowell's music--and to do so much more succinctly than one might think possible... Thoroughly documented and buttressed with quotations and musical examples, this excellent study deserves to be widely read." -- Choice
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Pioneering Look,
By
This review is from: Henry Cowell, Bohemian (Music in American Life) (Hardcover)
Hicks ventures where few have had opportunity to go. This well-documented, in-depth look at Cowell, his philosophically anarchistic parents and the young composer's formative years paints the portrait of an inquisitive youth raised by struggling authors from the San Franciscan Bohemian Club of the early 20th century.Henry's wife, Sydney Robertson Cowell (also a musicologist), supressed much information surrounding Cowell, going as far as to suppress Joscelyn Godwin's 1969 dissertation for its critical approach to the composer's music. Archives in New York City's Library became available to public eyes for the first time in 2002. Hicks takes full advantage of this fortuitous event and assembles an entertaining, informative, and new look at one of America's most prolific and eclectic composers.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
annoying, biased, and poorly researched,
This review is from: Henry Cowell, Bohemian (Music in American Life) (Hardcover)
This book does an immense disservice to the study of Henry Cowell's life. Because it reads well, one is fooled into thinking it's reliable, but there are gaping holes in the research, indeed there are many items in the book that are entirely conjecture.
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Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Inside This Book
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First Sentence:
Amid the eucalyptus groves and wildflower meadows in the foothills above the San Francisco peninsula, far from a hospital but close to a university, a forty-six-year-old woman sat in a cabin made of scrapwood, holding her newborn son. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
string piano piece, new musical resources, cluster pieces, pardon file, tone clusters, dissonant counterpoint, overtone series, harmonic development Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
San Francisco, New York, Henry Cowell, Menlo Park, Ellen Veblen, Palo Alto, Sidney Cowell, John Varian, Dynamic Motion, Charles Seeger, Creation Dawn, Cowell Collection, Music Division, New School, Temple of the People, Forest Theater, United States, San Quentin, Edna Smith, Russell Varian, Camp Crane, Clarissa Dixon, Stanford University, Des Moines, George Sterling New!
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Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Amid the eucalyptus groves and wildflower meadows in the foothills above the San Francisco peninsula, far from a hospital but close to a university, a forty-six-year-old woman sat in a cabin made of scrapwood, holding her newborn son. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
string piano piece, new musical resources, cluster pieces, pardon file, tone clusters, dissonant counterpoint, overtone series, harmonic development Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
San Francisco, New York, Henry Cowell, Menlo Park, Ellen Veblen, Palo Alto, Sidney Cowell, John Varian, Dynamic Motion, Charles Seeger, Creation Dawn, Cowell Collection, Music Division, New School, Temple of the People, Forest Theater, United States, San Quentin, Edna Smith, Russell Varian, Camp Crane, Clarissa Dixon, Stanford University, Des Moines, George Sterling New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 100
books:
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10
books
cite this book:
See all 10 books citing this book
- New Musical Resources by Henry Cowell on 13 pages
- Perfect Pitch: A Life Story by Nicolas Slonimsky on 4 pages
- Music in the New World by Charles Hamm in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
- Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong (2d ed.) (Music in American Life) by Norm Cohen in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
- Charles Ives and His Music, by Henry, Cowell in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
See all 100 books this book cites
- The Queer Composition of America's Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity by Nadine Hubbs in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
- "MAXIMUM CLARITY" AND OTHER WRITINGS ON MUSIC by Ben Johnston in Back Matter
- Marian McPartland's Jazz World: All in Good Time (Music in American Life) by Marian McPartland in Back Matter
- Chosen Voices: THE STORY OF THE AMERICAN CANTORATE (Music in American Life) by Mark Slobin in Back Matter
- Come Hither to Go Yonder: PLAYING BLUEGRASS WITH BILL MONROE (Music in American Life) by Bob Black in Back Matter
See all 10 books citing this book
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