Henry Cowell An D John Cage. Intersections and Influences, 1933-1941

Henry Cowell and John Cage: Intersections and Influences, 19331941
Author(s): LETA E. MILLER

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Source: Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 59, No. 1 (Spring 2006), pp. 47-112
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Henry Cowell and John Cage: Intersections
and Inuences, 19331941
LETA E. MILLER
I
n July 1940 John Cage sent Henry Cowell a program from a percussion
concert at Mills College in Oakland, California. Cage and his colleagues
had performed Cowells Pulse on 18 July, along with works by Lou
Harrison, William Russell, Amadeo Roldn, Jos Ardvol, and Cage himself.
In the lower right corner of the program, enclosed in a box for emphasis,
Cage had inserted a quotation by Cowell predicting the future of music: I
honestly believe and formally predict that the immediate future of music lies in
the bringing of percussion on one hand, and sliding tones on the other, to as
great a state of perfection in construction of composition and exibility of
handling on instruments as older elements are now, Cowell proclaimed (see
Fig. 1). Though he was pleased to receive this program, Cowell was appar-
ently quite mystied by the quotation, whose source he could not recall. Cage
wrote to him on 8 August 1940: I am sorry that I didnt let you know about
using the quotation for the program. I had used it on a program in Seattle
also. It comes from one of your letters to me, and I am glad that you seem to
agree with it.
1
The letter to which Cage referred (sent by Cowell from prison in 1937 and
transcribed in Appendix B) has been buried for some years in the voluminous
Cowell papers at the New York Public Library. Examination of materials in
Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 59, Number 1, pp. 47112, ISSN 0003-0139, electronic ISSN 1547-
3848. 2006 by the American Musicological Society. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to
photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Presss Rights and Permissions website, at
www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.
This article developed from a paper I read at the Annual Meeting of the American Musico-
logical Society in Seattle in November 2004. I am very grateful to the Committee on Research
and the Arts Research Institute of the University of California, Santa Cruz, for their nancial assis-
tance, and to many individuals who commented on drafts or offered help on this project. Thanks
especially to Amy Beal, George Boziwick, Sam Brylawski, Rob Collins, Peter Elsea, Michael
Hicks, Laura Kuhn, Fredric Lieberman, Janet McKee, Gordon Mumma, David Nicholls, Nancy
Rao, Christopher Shultis, Kenneth Silverman, and Richard Teitelbaum.
1. Letter, Cage to Cowell, 8 August 1940 (New York Public Library [NYPL] Cowell Col-
lection, box 2, folder 44). All quotations from Cages letters are used with the permission of the
John Cage Trust.
48 Journal of the American Musicological Society
this collection (which has only recently become available to researchers)
2
serves not only to enhance our understanding of Cowells life and works but
2. Access to the Cowell Collection prior to the year 2000 was restricted by the will of
Cowells widow Sidney. The library has attempted to assemble both sides of the correspondence;
therefore some letters fromCowell cited here are copies.
Figure 1 Program for Cages second percussion concert at Mills College, 18 July 1940
Henry Cowell and John Cage 49
also to reveal and/or verify the extent of his impact on numerous gures in
the new music world, among them John Cage.
That Cage was inuenced by Cowell is hardly news. Cages biographers
cite his study with Cowell in 193334, although the exact timing and curricu-
lum have heretofore been a matter of speculation.
3
Some authors also men-
tion professional interactions in the succeeding years and a few speculate on
direct inuence, based on Cowells New Musical Resources (1930) or analysis
of individual works. David Nicholls and David Bernstein, for example, have
pointed to similarities in instrumentation and/or rhythmic structure between
Cowells Ostinato Pianissimo, United Quartet, and Pulse on the one hand and
Cages Metamorphosis, Imaginary Landscape No. 1, and three Constructions
on the other.
4
Cage himself, as well as numerous commentators, cite the
impact of Cowells adventurous inside-the-piano works on Cages prepared
piano.
5
Through an examination of primary sources, the present article reinforces
such evidence of professional and artistic linkage. Indeed these sources docu-
ment interaction between the two composers in nearly every area Cage ex-
plored during the 1930s and 1940s: recording technology, percussion, dance,
performance indeterminacy, sliding tones, extended instrumental techniques,
and formal structures based on rhythmic organization. In pursuing this lin-
eage, I am not positioning Cowell as the sole (or even primary) inuence on
Cage in all of these areas. Questions regarding the transmission of ideas must
always be approached with some caution. In Cages case in particular, stimuli
have been shown to emanate from numerous sources, creating a fuzzy web of
interconnections, cross-inuences, and intertextual linkages. Nevertheless,
there is value in untangling this web to focus on a single strandin this case,
the Cowell-Cage connectionnot to suggest a simple cause-and-effect rela-
tionship, but rather to illuminate the complexity of the transmission process
itself.
3. James Pritchetts article on Cage in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians is
unclear on this matter (2nd ed. [2001], 4:796). Michael Hicks correctly concluded that Cage
studied in New York in 1934 (John Cages Studies with Schoenberg, American Music 8
[1990]: 12627).
4. See, for example, David Nicholls, American Experimental Music (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990), 169, 17374, 19294, 2078, 211; and his article Henry Cowells
United Quartet, American Music 13 (1995): 195217, esp. 21415; and David Bernstein,
Music I: To the Late 1940s, in The Cambridge Companion to John Cage, ed. David Nicholls
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 65, 69, 75.
5. Cage, How the Piano Came to Be Prepared, in Empty Words: Writings 7378 (Middle-
town, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1979), 7. Cage particularly cites Cowells Banshee, noting
that he acted as one of what Lou Harrison called Cowells pedal boys. Despite the authority of
Cages article, his recollections contain several errors. The performance of Bacchanale took place
at Seattles Repertory Playhouse, not in the Cornish School Theater. Cage also implies that
Bacchanale was the rst work in which he inserted a screw between the piano strings, although he
had used the same preparation in the Second Construction, as discussed below.
Cowell shared his ideas freely, not only with Cage, but also with numerous
composers, performers, publishers, and patrons, as well as friends outside of
music. He treated his ideas rather like community property, hastily dashing
off exuberant letters about various concepts, some of which were only in
their formative stages. Cowells motivation was partly social, partly aesthetic,
and partly practical; and in many cases his correspondence generated concrete
nancial support. Charles Ives, in particular, funded numerous projects
some groundbreaking (such as New Music), others impractical (such as the
rhythmicon)in response to Cowells letters.
Cowell himself seems to have been genuinely pleased when others used
techniques or concepts he developedthough he was hardly hesitant about
claiming credit for his originality.
6
Perhaps for this reason, as well as his habit
of sharing ideas as soon as they popped into his head, he sometimes failed to
credit others, notably his own teacher, Charles Seeger.
7
Thus Cowell was not
bothered by any use Cage (or anyone else) may have made of the ideas he of-
fered; nor is Cages own originality thereby diminished. But it does conrm,
as David Nicholls put it, that neither Cage nor any other composer can be
seen as an orphan.
8
6. An interesting example is an undated letter from Cowell to Bla Bartk (probably ca.
192425), also mentioned in David Nichollss article on Cowell in The New Grove Dictionary of
Music, 2nd ed. (2001), 6:621. Cowell notes that he would be delighted if Bartk used tone clus-
ters. He writes: I am delighted to hear you have found an entirely different use for them, because
I think that the more different ways that are found to employ them, the better they will establish
themselves. They sound so natural to me, it is surprising that no one seems to have thought of
them before, but so far as I know I invented the idea and the name, and how to write them
down. (The letter is in the NYPL Cowell Collection, box 16, folder 497.) Cowell briey reviews
his use of clusters, concluding that they certainly never sounded like noise to me either! Since
major and minor seconds are to be heard in the overtone series I think they will come to sound
like music to the people who now nd them too dissonant to bear. (The justication of tone
clusters as deriving from the overtone series is posited by Cowell in New Musical Resources [New
York and London: Alfred Knopf, 1930; repr., ed. David Nicholls, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996], 11416.) Quotations from Cowells letters and other unpublished mate-
rials are used with the permission of the David and Sylvia Teitelbaum Fund, as successors to
Henry and Sidney Cowell.
7. Seegers statement (in Henry Cowell, Magazine of Art 33, no. 5 [May 1940]: 288) that
Cowell swiped many of his best (and some of his worst) ideas from me, and occasionally ac-
knowledges it has been quoted by many authors. For example, see David Nichollss essay accom-
panying the 1996 reprint of Cowells New Musical Resources, 163. An acknowledgment to Seeger
as my friend and former teacher in the preliminary, unpublished version of New Musical
Resources (ca. 1919) was omitted in the published version (1930). Some of the ideas Cowell trans-
mitted to his students seem to have come from Seeger. For instance, the opening section of Lou
Harrisons Music Primer (New York: C. F. Peters, 1971) deals with composing with melodicles
(or neumes). Harrison credits his source (Henry Cowell taught me most of this) but the
concepts seem to have come from Seeger; see Charles Seeger, Studies in Musicology II: 19291979,
ed. Ann M. Pescatello (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1994),
13849.
8. David Nicholls, Cage and the Ultra-Modernists, paper presented at the Annual Meeting
of the Society for American Music, Fort Worth, TX, 12 March 1999; published in German trans-
Questions of direct inuence aside, Cowells and Cages approaches to mu-
sical composition were often at the root quite different. Cowells inventiveness
was fed by his insatiable appetite for new approaches to composition, espe-
cially those he could derive from non-European musics. He seems always to
have been chasing a new idea. Cage, on the other hand, frequently focused
considerable time and energy on the systematization of a single concept: he
built overarching theories and precompositional systems by carrying the aes-
thetic implications of novel ideas to logical, yet often radical conclusions.
Despite their contrasting personalities and approaches, however, the two men
nourished each others creativity. In fact, Cages theories, some of them built
on ideas pioneered by Cowell, in turn inuenced Cowells work. (A chronol-
ogy of events mentioned in this article is given in Appendix A.)
Initial Contacts and Inuences, 193335
Cage rst met Cowell in 1933 after sending his Sonata for Clarinet for possi-
ble publication in New Music. Cowell rejected the piece for that purpose, but
suggested that it might be played at a New Music Society Workshop in San
Francisco.
9
In a 1975 interview with Rita Mead, Cage recalled hitchhiking to
San Francisco only to nd the clarinetist woefully unprepared. So, to the
amusement of those present, he picked out the sonata with one nger on the
piano.
10
The precise date of this event is undocumented, but it most likely
took place between mid-April 1933, when Cowell returned to California from
New York, and mid-July of the same year, when Cages name and phone
number appear in Cowells personal calendar.
11
lation as Nicht jedermann kann ein Waisenkind sein: John Cage und die Ultramodernen,
MusikTexte 106 (August 2005): 2630.
9. The workshops were organized in February 1933; an article by Marjory Fisher in the San
Francisco News, 18 Feb. 1933 (New Projects Promise Aid to Composers), announced the orga-
nizational meeting. See Rita Mead, Henry Cowells New Music, 19251936: The Society, the Music
Editions, and the Recordings (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1978), 227.
In the Henmar Press works catalog Cage describes the Sonata for Clarinet as an unaccompa-
nied chromatic work in three movements, the last of which though not rhythmically is a retro-
grade canon of the rst (John Cage [Catalog of Works; New York: Henmar Press, 1962], 24,
no. 6753).
10. Mead cites the recollections of Ray Green in a 1976 interview (Henry Cowells New
Music, 228). Cage also tells this story in A Composers Confessions, an address he gave at
Vassar College on 28 February 1948, which is published in Musicworks 52 (Spring 1992): 615,
esp. 9; reprint in John Cage, Writer: Previously Uncollected Pieces, selected and ed. Richard
Kostelanetz, 2744 (New York: Limelight Editions, 1993).
11. Cages name and phone number are entered on 14 July. Many of Cowells calendars are
in the NYPL Cowell Collection, box 72. Cages name and address in Los Angeles also appear on
31 August. (The entries on particular days are often not linked to specic times.) That Cowell was
present for this informal concert is conrmed by Cage, who wrote Weiss that he saw Cowell
Despite this less-than-successful rst impression, Cage was (typically) per-
sistent. At the end of October 1933 he wrote to Cowell in New York, describ-
ing his in-progress Sonata for Two Voices and asking for career advice: might
Cowell be able to suggest any solution to the economic problems of the
composer that would give Cage leisure to study and write?
12
Cowell sug-
gested that Cage contact Adolph Weiss in New York to prepare for study with
Schoenberg, who had just emigrated to the U.S. and was considering moving
from Boston to New York City.
13
(Instead of settling in New York, of course,
Schoenberg moved to Los Angeles in 1934, where Cage caught up with him
the following year.) Cowell seems to have referred students to Weiss routinely:
in a letter of 7 March 1934, for example, he told Weiss that, following a lec-
ture, two young ladies asked me with whom to study in the East, and I gave
them your address. . . . They wished to coach for Schoenberg, I think. . . .
14
Weiss replied that he was now Schoenbergs assistant. I take his pupils
through harmony and counterpoint and [I include] such outsiders as are will-
ing to join the class.
15
That spring Cage wrote to Weiss asking for lessons,
but also (with some boldness) requesting a scholarship, since he had no
money to pay for the instruction.
16
By fall 1934 Cage was in New York studying with Weiss for a dollar an
hour, followed by bridge matches involving Weiss, his wife Mitzi, Cowell, and
Cage or Wallingford Riegger.
17
At the same time Cage enrolled in Cowells
courses at the New School. His name appears (c/o A. Weiss, 23 W. 8th St.,
there. In A Composers Confessions (p. 9), Cage also says that he met Cowell on this
occasion.
12. Letter, Cage to Cowell, 26 October 1933 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 2, folder 44).
Composed in 1933, the six-minute Sonata for Two Voices is written for any two or more instru-
ments encompassing the following ranges: I: c to c and II: c to c (John Cage [Catalog of
works, 1962], #P6754).
13. On 18 March 1934 Weiss wrote to Cowell that Schoenberg is coming to N.Y. next
month to stay. He will probably take up residence in Forest Hills, so that we can get in a lot of
tennis (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 16, folder 460). Weiss had studied with Schoenberg in
Germany beginning in the mid-1920s.
14. Letter, Cowell to Weiss, 7 March 1934 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 18, folder 538).
15. Letter, Weiss to Cowell, 18 March 1934 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 16, folder 460).
16. Letter, Cage to Weiss, undated, but probably March 1934; transcribed in William
George, Adolph Weiss (PhD diss., University of Iowa, 1971), 26768. George suggests a date
of 1933, which Michael Hicks has shown to be too early. Hicks places it more realistically in
March 1934 (John Cages Studies with Schoenberg, 136n7).
17. Letter, Cage to William George, 14 February 1965, transcribed in George, Adolph
Weiss, 46. See also Richard Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage (New York and London:
Routledge, 2003), 7. I have found no evidence to support Cowells claim that Cage studied dis-
sonant counterpoint and composition with me for a season in California before going to New
York to work with Weiss (Cowell, Current Chronicle, Musical Quarterly 38 [1952]: 124;
reprinted in Richard Kostelanetz, comp., John Cage [New York and Washington: Praeger, 1968],
94). Since Cages name appears in Cowells 1933 calendar twice, however (see note 11 above),
it is possible that some instruction took place in this year.
N.Y.C.) among the twenty students on the enrollment sheet for Cowells
Primitive and Folk Origins of Music, twelve hour-and-a-half lectures in
which Cowell promised to show the beginnings of music and its slow devel-
opment through folk music, Oriental cultivated music and early European cul-
tivated music into our present system (see Fig. 2).
18
The charge for the class
was $10 (equivalent to nearly $145 in 2005) but Cage received one of ten
scholarships offered by Cowell, compliments of Ives.
19
Cage later recalled also
taking Modern Harmony and Survey of Contemporary Music.
20
The lat-
ter course was probably Cowells Contemporary American Music, which
consisted of presentations by leading composers of the day. Cage might also
have sat in on Cowells Work Course in Music, entitled New Possibilities
in Piano Playing, where Cowell demonstrated extended techniques on the
keyboard. Among Cowells class lists in the New York collection, however,
Cages name appears only on the one for Primitive and Folk Origins of
Music.
Cowells objective in this course was to show that the history of music
could be studied laterally. As he later explained: Music in every stage of devel-
opment exists somewhere today;
21
its origins could be seen in what at the
time was often called (with no pejorative or patronizing intent) primitive
music, and its development could be traced through the cultivated traditions
of Asian musics and through folk music (which both inuenced and was inu-
enced by art music) into the work of modernist composers. The course in-
cluded units in Primitive Music (musics of the Eskimos, Bushmen, Indian
tribes, South Sea Islanders, Africans); Oriental Music (ancient Indian and
Chinese musics, Japanese, Siamese, Balinese, and Javanese musics); Folk
Music as a hybrid between primitive and cultivated systems; and Euro-
pean cultivated music (how it grew from Oriental and folk sources and its
18. Most references to the course Cage took from Cowell cite its title as Music of the
Worlds Peoples, which was a different class (with a similar but not identical syllabus). The enroll-
ment sheet for Primitive and Folk Origins of Music is found in the NYPL Cowell Collection,
box 146, folder 91. The course description is taken from the New School catalog, Fall 1934.
19. Cage mentions the scholarship in his interview with William George (George, Adolph
Weiss, 47). The funding of the scholarships by Ives is mentioned in a letter from Cowell to Ives,
2 October 1934 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 18, folder 539): A thousand thanks for this ad-
ditional $100 check. I . . . offered ten scholarships to modern music courses at the New School.
Since there have been lots of applicants I may give ve more, the $50 to be taken out of the sur-
plus which you write will be available later. I feel that these students who apply, and have no
money to pay for the education in modern music which they sincerely desire, should be encour-
aged as far as we possibly can.
20. For the Birds: John Cage in Conversation with Daniel Charles (Boston and London:
Marion Boyars, 1981), 70. Cage later recalled that Cowell presented regular informal concerts
that brought about a parade of modern composers, their music and ideas, that was more to my
liking than anything offered by the League of Composers or the International Society for
Contemporary Music (Kostelantez, John Cage, 118).
21. Cowell, liner notes to the LP recording Music of the Worlds Peoples, Ethnic Folkways
Library Albums FE 45048, 195155.
development from Palestrina to the modern era). One is struck by Cowells al-
most postmodern linkage of what H. Wiley Hitchcock called the cultivated
and vernacular traditions,
22
as well as his concern with commonalities among
the worlds musical cultures. (In this vein, it is interesting to recall Cowells
role in the prehistory of the American Musicological Society. On 29 January
1930 a small group of men [including Cowell, Joseph Schillinger, Charles
Seeger, Joseph Yasser, and Otto Kinkeldey] interested in the rapprochement
22. H. Wiley Hitchcock, Music in the United States: A Historical Introduction (Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969).
Figure 2 Enrollment sheet for Henry Cowells course, Primitive and Folk Origins of Music,
New School for Social Research, Fall 1934 (Reprinted by permission of the David and Sylvia
Teitelbaum Fund, as successors to Henry and Sidney Cowell)
of science and music met . . . with the purpose of organizing a purely local so-
ciety. At meetings of this organization, members read scholarly papers focus-
ing not only on the Western art music tradition, but also on world music
topics.
23
At the New York Musicological Society, precursor of the American
Musicological Society, Cowell read three papers on theory and comparative
musicology in 1932 and 1933.)
24
During his 1934 course at the New School,
Cowell illustrated his lectures by hosting live performances of world musics
and playing numerous recordings he had brought back from Germany during
his studies at the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv in fall 1931 and fall 1932.
By the time Cowell went to Germany in 1931, the Berlin institution had
become the worlds preeminent archive of recordings of indigenous musics
from around the world.
25
Cowell had the opportunity there to study Indian
and Indonesian music with noted specialists, and to listen critically to numer-
ous recordings in the collection. He reported excitedly on his sonic journey
around the world in letters to his family, Ives, and Carlos Chvez. In October
1931, for instance, Cowell described to his stepmother Olive his very inter-
esting work with Prof. Sam[b]amoorthy, of Indian music at the U. of Madras,
here on visit and reported that he was allowed to borrow recordings from
the archives collection to take home for study.
26
On 7 November he wrote
that he was working with records from Malacca (north of Singapore) and [I]
will switch today to Central Africa records.
27
A week later he ecstatically
reported to Ives that the African Pygmy music with which I am working is
23. Bulletin of the New York Musicological Society, no. 1 (Nov. 1931): 1. On the evolution of
this organization into the New York Musicological Society (1931) and then into the founding of
the AMS (1934), see Richard Crawford, The American Musicological Society, 19341984: An
Anniversary Essay (Philadelphia: American Musicological Society, 1984), 89. On 5 March 1931
Cowell read a paper at the meeting of the New York Musicological Society that dealt with his
rhythmicon.
24. For a list of papers read at the New York Musicological Society, see Nancy Yunhwa Rao,
American Compositional Theory in the 1930s: Scale and Exoticism in The Nature of Melody
by Henry Cowell, Musical Quarterly 85 (2001): 59899. More details are found in the Bulletin
of the New York Musicological Society. On 10 January 1932, Cowell read a paper, Some Aspects
of Comparative Musicology, in which he discussed his study of Javanese music in Germany. On
9 January 1933 he presented a paper entitled Evidence against Some Axioms of Musical
Theory, in which he illustrated, with thirty-three examples, the present divergence of theory
and practice. On 26 November 1933 he spoke on Hybrid Forms in Comparative Musicology,
in which he reviewed the importance . . . of the mixed styles resulting from the meeting of
diverse musics (Bulletin of the New York Musicological Society, nos. 2 and 3 [Nov. 1932 and Nov.
193334]).
25. For a history of the archive, see the notes accompanying the recording The Demonstra-
tion Collection of E. M. von Hornbostel and the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv (Ethnic Folkways
Library FE 4175).
26. Letter, Henry Cowell to Olive Cowell, 27 October 1931 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box
17, folder 519).
27. Letter, Henry Cowell to Olive Cowell, 7 November 1931 (NYPL Cowell Collection,
box 18, folder 520).
really unbelievably attractive! It is based on a set of pipes tuned to the har-
monic series from the 4th to the 14th . . . , and they play two or three part
harmony, often very dissonant, and complex rhythms, often an apparent osti-
nato, but each measure of the repeat changed in rhythm.
28
By the end of the
month, Cowell had moved on to New Guinea,
29
and in early December he
wrote to his parents that he was studying every day, for two hours, with
Raden Mas Jodjana, Javanese music. . . . I also am studying the Balinese point
of view with A. F. Roemahlaiselan, the wonderful young Balinese dancer and
musician here. . . . Outside of this, I have been working on records of the mu-
sic of Colombian and middle Brazilian Indians, Carolina Islands, and
Greenland esquimos.
30
In the same letter, Cowell reported that he had man-
aged to obtain $100 from the New School to purchase a copy of the Berlin
archives 120-cylinder demonstration collection. (In 1959 this collection
was transferred to Indiana University. Along with a second set of cylinders, it
formed the basis for an LP recording of excerpts from the collection, present-
ing music recorded between about 1900 and 1913.)
31
The following year,
when Cowell returned to Germany to continue his studies and perform con-
certs, he happened on an exceptional opportunity to buy discs of unique
recordings of world musics for one mark each. He bought 300 for the New
School, another 300 for himself, and an additional set for Chvez.
32
The cylinders were extremely fragile and they deteriorated with each play-
ing. So upon returning to the U.S., Cowell began investigating ways of
copying them. In January 1933 he reported to his parents that he had rented
a machine with which he could rerecord rare records and transfer old cylinders
to discs. To Ives, Cowell wrote that he had found a machine not only to copy
old recordings, but also to make our own records [that] . . . can be dupli-
28. Letter, Cowell to Charles Ives, 14 November 1931 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 18,
folder 520).
29. Letter, Henry Cowell to Olive Cowell, 21 November 1931 (NYPL Cowell Collection,
30. Letter, Henry Cowell to Harry and Olive Cowell, 11 December 1931 (NYPL Cowell
Collection, box 18, folder 521). Cowell wrote a similar letter to Ives on the same day.
31. The Demonstration Collection of E. M. von Hornbostel.
32. On 14 December 1988 Sidney Robertson Cowell wrote an annotation on a letter from
Henry Cowell to Carlos Chvez from 11 September 1932 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 18,
folder 528): Henry Cowell had discovered in Berlin a treasure trove consisting of hundreds of
single copies of recordings made in remote parts of the world where a German concern (Odeon?)
that made playback equipment had sent its salesmen, only to nd that nobody wanted it unless
they could hear their own music on it. The salesmen then made small editions of local perfor-
mances in order to sell their machines, and they sent the head ofce in Berlin a single copy of each
such recording as evidence of diligencelargely before World War I. The music was often unadul-
terated and extraordinary, and the records were being sold for one mark each in 1932about
5 cents. Henry bought 300 for the New School, 300 for himself and this letter has to do with an
offer to do as much for Carlos Chavez collection of music in Mexico. Chvez replied expressing
strong interest.
cated perfectly.
33
Thus began the New Music Recordings scheme, with the
ever-generous Ives funding the purchase of the machine and the ever-
resourceful Cowell arranging and supervising the recording sessions. On
22 November 1933 Cowell reported to Slonimsky that the rst session had
been held yesterday, during which the musicians recorded the Andante
(third movement) of Ruth Crawfords String Quartet (her ground-breaking
study in dynamic counterpoint) and Adolph Weisss Three Songs for voice and
string quartet.
34
The New Music Recordings project was at the center of Cowells attention
throughout 1934, as he drummed up subscribers. So when Cage studied with
Cowell in New York that fall, among the skills he learned was how to run the
recorder, as Cowell recalled four years later.
35
Thus Cage learned a mechani-
cal skill that would have far-reaching consequences both for his own composi-
tional development and for the new music community in general. When he
moved to Seattle in 1938, Cage had access to a broadcasting studio in which
he not only recorded his percussion ensemble but also explored recorded
sounds as a compositional resource.
A second concern of Cowells in 193334 was percussion music. In March
1933 he published William Russells Fugue for Eight Percussion Instruments in
his New Music Orchestra series,
36
and followed up the next spring with
Varses Ionisation. Even before publishing Varses inuential work, however,
Cowell took a leading role in facilitating its premiere (6 March 1933) at a Pan
American Association concert in New York. Nicolas Slonimsky conducted and
Cowell played the piano.
37
As the concert approached, Cowell and Slonimsky
33. Letters, Henry Cowell to Harry and Olive Cowell, 8 January 1933; and Cowell to Ives,
10 January 1933 (both in NYPL Cowell Collection, box 18, folder 531).
34. Postcard, Cowell to Slonimsky, 22 November 1933 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 18,
folder 537): I had made yesterday the rst records for the new series of recordings which I will
issue beginning Jan. 1st. $5.00 per year for four 12 in. records. Will you subscribe? Do help me
with this! The records are standard and of the best quality. The rst, of Crawford quartet and
Weiss quartet with voice, are wonderful! An undated letter to Ives appears to stem from the pre-
vious day: I hoped to see you at the recording place this morning, but suppose you were kept
busy. I will not know how my record sounds for a week or so, but from some of the tests they
played back to me, I think it should give some idea of the composition, anyway. I hope you will
really start practising [sic] your pieces, and make records of them soon. . . . The recording com-
pany gives you a chance to practise [sic] over your things and get warmed up, and will make al-
most an indenite number of attempts at a record if the rst are no good . . . (NYPL Cowell
Collection, box 21, folder 647). Rita Mead, citing an invoice from 7 December 1933, writes that
the rst recording . . . was made at the Capitol Sound Studios on December 1, 1933 (Henry
Cowells New Music, 263). Perhaps she is referring to the actual pressing of the record. See also
Judith Tick, Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composers Search for American Music (New York and
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 18586.
35. Letter, Henry Cowell to Sidney Robertson (Cowell), 8 August 1938 (NYPL Cowell
Collection, box 97).
36. On determining the month of the publication, see Mead, Henry Cowells New Music, 226.
37. Mead (ibid., 436n153), lists the composers who volunteered as performers (which she
derived from liner notes to the recording Nicolas Slonimsky: History Making Premieres; Orion
exchanged a number of letters regarding the needed instruments and how to
gather them. (A bongo is an Antillian drum, such as I have here in my of-
ce, Cowell explained in a letter of 14 February. A Tarole is a special sort of
at, small snare drum. I am going tomorrow to Fishers to nd out about all
the instruments. . . . Yours strikingly but non-percussively. . . .)
38
Slonimsky
repeated Ionisation at the Hollywood Bowl four months later (16 July); and
on this occasion Cage was in the audience.
39
The following year (28 May
1934) Cowell himself directed a performance of the work on a New Music
Society concert in San Francisco for which he included dancers from Betty
Horsts concert dance group.
40
In early 1934 Cowell began composing his own percussion ensemble
work, Ostinato Pianissimo, stimulated by a request from Slonimsky in anticipa-
tion of another Pan-American Association concert on 15 April. Cowell wrote
on 23 January: I forget if I wrote you that I will be delighted to work on a
percussion work, specially for your concert, and will start next week.
41
In
March, he told Ives that he was just nishing a piece for Nicolas for percus-
sion and Slonimsky told Cowell that he was all a-twitter about it, noting
that performances of percussion music were much easier to arrange than or-
chestral concerts.
42
However, when all was said and done, the piece was not
included on the April program, and in the fallwhile Cage was studying in
New YorkCowell and Slonimsky were still corresponding about how and
where to present it.
43
Whether Cowell showed Cage the score for Ostinato Pianissimo cannot be
determined, but his preoccupation with arranging for the works premiere
during the time Cage was studying with him suggests that the topic of percus-
sion ensemble music would likely have surfaced. Despite their best efforts,
7150). A second performance of Ionisation took place on 15 April 1934; Cowell was in California
at the time. Howard Thompson wrote in a New York Times review that Ionisation suggested
possibilities, but in itself it could hardly be called music (New Music Given by Pan-Americans,
New York Times, 16 April 1934).
38. Letter, Cowell to Slonimsky, 14 February 1933 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 18,
folder 532).
39. Cage mentions hearing the concert in For the Birds, 73, but remembers the year as 1935.
The concert actually took place at 5:15 p.m. on Sunday, 16 July 1933 (Los Angeles Times, display
ad on 16 July and article by Isabel Morse Jones, Father Finn Accomplishes Hardest Tasks with
Smile: Dinner Party, Choir Rehearsals Both Reveal Pleasant Adroitness; Bowl Programs for This
Week Discussed, on the same day).
40. A copy of the program is reproduced in Mead, Henry Cowells New Music, 285.
41. Letter, Cowell to Slonimsky, 23 January 1934 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 18, folder
538). For an analysis of this piece, see H. Wiley Hitchcock, Henry Cowells Ostinato Pianis-
simo, Musical Quarterly 70 (1984): 2344.
42. Letters, Cowell to Ives, 14 March 1934 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 18, folder 538);
and Slonimsky to Cowell, 7 March 1934 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 13, folder 387).
43. The percussion concert is difcult to arrange, but I am trying, Slonimsky wrote to
Cowell on 14 October 1934 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 13, folder 387).
Cowell and Slonimsky were unsuccessful in arranging a performance of
Ostinato Pianissimo in 1934, and it remained for Cage himself to pick up the
ball, presenting the works premiere nine years later in a highly publicized
concert at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The performance,
sponsored by the League of Composers and given full-court press in Life, took
place on 7 February 1943.
44
After his 1934 study in New York, Cage returned to California, where he
began to compose his own works for percussion ensemble. He often cited as
the immediate stimulus for his rst piece, Quartet (ca. 1936),
45
a remark by
lmmaker Oskar Fischinger (19001967) that the spirit which is inside each
of the objects of this world could be liberated by its sound.
46
Though
Fischinger may have served as the immediate catalyst, however, it is hard to
believe that Cage was oblivious to the musical inuences around him: notably
Varses Ionisation, Cowells publications of percussion works in New Music
(which Cage later used in his own concerts in Seattle), and even, perhaps,
Ostinato Pianissimo.
47
Cowells percussion works were frequently associated with dance, just as
those of Cage and other composers would be in the ensuing years. In January
1934, for example, Cowell began teaching a rhythm course at Ann
Mundstocks dance studio in San Francisco.
48
By 1935 he was working in a
similar capacity for Hanya Holm, founder of the Wigman School in New
York,
49
as well as for Tina Flade, another Wigman student who was teaching
at Mills College in Oakland. (Flade was originally trained as a concert pianist.)
Mary Wigman (18861973), who opened her rst school of dance in
44. Percussion Concert: Band Bangs Things to Make Music, Life, 15 March 1943, 42
and 44.
45. Quartet is dated 1935 in the Henmar Press catalog of Cages works (John Cage, 1962)
and on the published score, but this date appears to be too early. (The date on the manuscript
seems to have been entered long after the composition was completed.) Evidence points to the
piece having been composed in 1936 or even early 1937. I would like to thank Andrs Wilheim
and Christopher Shultis for calling my attention to the possible dating error of this work.
46. Cage, For the Birds, 73. See also Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 8; Cage, Composers
Confessions, 9; and Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors: The Heretical Courtship in
Modern Art (New York: Viking Press, 1965), 86.
47. David Nicholls suggests that Ionisation might have been a less important stimulus for
Ostinato Pianissimo than William Russells Fugue and the non-European musics Cowell had been
studying. He cites as evidence the repeating ostinato patterns that form the underlying structure
of Cowells work (Nicholls, American Experimental Music, 168 and 189). Cage was strongly in-
uenced by Russell, whose ideas he characterized as always musical and exciting (Cage, letter to
Peter Yates, 24 December 1940 [Yates Papers, Mandeville Special Collections Library, University
of California, San Diego]).
48. In a letter of 4 October 1933 Cowell told his parents that he had accepted to give a
rhythm course for Ann Mundstocks school beginning in January 1934 (NYPL Cowell Collec-
tion, box 18, folder 536).
49. Holm opened this school in 1931. After 1936 it became the Hanya Holm School of
Dance.
Dresden in 1920, often performed with percussion accompaniment, and her
course of study included training in percussion instruments. Her powerful
war-memorial Das Totenmal (Requiem), set to poetry by Albert Talhoff, fea-
tured a percussion orchestra.
50
By the end of the fall semester 1934, Cage had become so friendly with
Cowell that he rode from New York back to California in Cowells car.
51
During the long trip they would have had ample time to discuss Cowells pri-
mary interests at the time: recording technology, world musics, the relation of
music and dance, and percussion. The two were in California by 30 Decem-
ber, when Cowell wrote to his stepmother: Am in L. A. Will stay over a day
or sosee Schnbergam organizing N. M. [New Music] Society here
thru John Cage.
52
The changed relationship between Cage and Cowell is
clear from a letter of March 1935. No longer addressing his teacher as
Mr. Cowell, Cage opened: Dear Henry, Your card and you are too good
to me. I cannot describe how much I feel towards you of warmth and love.
53
Cage described his recent job in scientic research, his French horn lessons,
and his anticipation of studying with Schoenberg. I will also have a little
money to begin operations and I shall begin more immediately the work for
the [New Music] society, he promised. This work consisted of arranging a
house concert in Hollywood on 13 April 1935 by the shakuhachi player
Kitaro Nyohyo Tamada, a orist Cowell had met in Mountain View, Cali-
50. For a statement by Wigman about the role of percussion in this dance, see Katherine M.
Brown, The Work of Mary Wigman (MS thesis, University of Utah, 1955), 52. The role of
percussion in the Wigman School is also discussed in Leta E. Miller and Fredric Lieberman, Lou
Harrison (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006, forthcoming), 37.
51. In a letter to his stepmother on 1 December 1934, Cowell said he would probably drive
west with Cage and Mary Weiss (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 18, folder 540). In another letter,
dated 15 December (without a year, but related to this trip), Cowell said: Start back this
ThursdayJohn Cage and Don St. Paul will be with me (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 21,
folder 640). Don St. Paul is Don Sample, an artist Cage met in Paris in 1930 who returned to
the U.S. with him; the two men lived together for several years. See Christopher Shultis, Cage
and Europe, in The Cambridge Companion to John Cage, ed. David Nicholls (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press), 2224; and Thomas S. Hines, Then Not Yet Cage : The Los
Angeles Years, in John Cage: Composed in America, ed. Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junkerman
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 8486 and esp. 97n37. For more on
the relationship of Don Sample, John Cage, and Harry Hay, see Stuart Timmons, The Trouble
with Harry Hay: Founder of the Modern Gay Movement (Boston: Alyson, 1990), which contains
some dating errors; and (more reliably) Catherine Parsons Smith, Athena at the Manuscript
Club: John Cage and Mary Carr Moore, Musical Quarterly 79 (1995): 35658. On the cross-
country car trip, see also Cages interview with William George in Goerge, Adolph Weiss, 48.
52. Postcard, Henry Cowell to Olive Cowell, 30 December 1934 (NYPL Cowell Collection,
53. Letter, Cage to Cowell (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 2, folder 44). The letter is un-
dated but can be placed near the end of March 1935 from internal evidence. Cage refers to an up-
coming concert by the Abas String Quartet, sponsored by Pro Musica and featuring Schoenbergs
third quartet, which took place at the home of Mrs. H. A. Everett in Pasadena on 26 March 1935
(Reception Set by Pro-Musica, Los Angeles Times, 26 March 1935, A7).
fornia, a year earlier. Tamada performed Buddhist Temple music ranging
from about 700 to 1785 A.D., according to a preview article in the Los
Angeles Times.
54
(Tamada also presented a New Music Society members-only
concert in San Francisco at the Cowell house two weeks before the Los
Angeles performance.)
55
Cage described the venue for the Los Angeles concertthe famously
avant-garde Kings Road house of Rudolph Schindleras having a Japanese
quality because of its warm and quiet beauty and luxuriant bamboo.
56
He had announcements printed on Japanese paper, which he mailed to those
whom Cowell recommended. Cowell accompanied Tamada to Los Angeles
for the performance.
By the end of 1935, Cowell had begun to develop a regular pattern of
classroom teaching and dance studio accompanying on the West Coast to bal-
ance his work each fall in the East. His courses at the New School in New York
(which began with individual lectures in 1928 and regular classes in 1930) had
expanded to include an array of offerings in theory and harmony, the theory
and practice of rhythm, the creation of music, and world musics.
57
To this
54. Isabel Morse Jones, Words and Music, Los Angeles Times, 7 April 1935, A10. The as-
sumption that Tamada operated a vegetable stand, which comes from an interview utist Rachel
Rudich conducted with Sidney Cowell in 1994, appears to be incorrect (liner notes to the record-
ing The Universal Flute [Music and Arts CD-1012]). In a letter of 14 March 1934, Tamada in-
vited Cowell to come to my ower shop and then to dinner the following week (NYPL Cowell
Collection, box 14, folder 411). Cowell composed The Universal Flute for shakuhachi solo in
1946 and dedicated it to Tamada; see William Lichtenwanger, The Music of Henry Cowell: A
Descriptive Catalog (New York: Institute for Studies in American Music, 1986), no. 699.
55. See Mead, Henry Cowells New Music, 31617 and 582; she includes a facsimile of the
invitation to this 1 April 1935 event. The Cowell house was the home of Cowells father Harry
and stepmother Olive. Lou Harrison, who was present for the concert, recalled that it included an
ensemble of koto, shamisen, shakuhachi, and singer (Harrison, interview with Leta E. Miller and
Fredric Lieberman, 31 March 1994). A copy of the announcement for this concert is found in the
NYPL Cowell Collection, box 143. That collection also contains an announcement for a program
on 26 February [1935] at the International House in Berkeley, featuring Tamada on shakuhachi
and Cowell playing his own piano works.
56. The quotations come from an interview Thomas Hines conducted with Cage in 1992
(Hines, Then Not Yet Cage, 65); and a letter from Cage to Cowell in 1935 (NYPL Cowell
Collection, box 2, folder 45, undated but dealing with this concert). Cage wrote to Cowell: The
concert, April 13th at 8:30 p.m., 835 N. Kings Rd., Hollywood. That is Saturday. And the house
. . . is very beautiful and has been built by R. M. Schindler. Although the architecture is modern, it
has a very warm and quiet beauty; there is a quality about it which is Japanese and Japanese peo-
ple, when they have seen it, have loved it. There is, for instance, a great deal of luxuriant bamboo
and the house opens completely into the outside, so that the bamboo will actually be there. I am
having Ward Ritchie print some announcements on Japanese paper. . . . Cage and Don Sample
occupied a guest apartment at the Schindler house for a short period. Hines ( Then Not Yet
Cage, 8184) describes the house in detail and includes a photo of the apartment. The
Schindler House is still used as a concert venue for new music (http://www.MAKcenter.org
[accessed 15 June 2005]).
57. In an unpublished interview with Louis Vaczek on his work at the New School, Cowell
said, I was invited rst in 1928 to give single lectures. One was on the music of Russia before we
had any diplomatic relations (18 June 1962, transcript in NYPL Cowell Collection, box 72).
Catalogs for the New School are in the NYPL Cowell Collection.
58. The most thorough discussion of Cowells arrest and imprisonment is Michael Hicks,
The Imprisonment of Henry Cowell, this Journal 44 (1991): 92119. Hicks also discusses the
matter in Henry Cowell, Bohemian (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 134
43, the most complete and carefully researched source on Cowells early life, where he takes a
somewhat harsher view of Cowells criminal culpability.
59. The warrant was dated 21 May but not served until 22 May, when Cowell returned from
a night out in San Francisco. The letter from Strang is dated 26 May (NYPL Cowell Collection,
box 96).
60. Letter, Cage to Cowell, 18 June 1936 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 95).
demanding schedule Cowell added rhythm classes at the New York Wigman
School. In California, he arranged for courses in rhythm and the history of
music for the dance at both Mills and Stanford, and he taught his world music
survey at the University of California Extension in San Francisco. But Cowells
prospects of steady employment were suddenly cut short in May 1936 by his
arrest on a morals charge.
Interactions in 193637: Percussion Music and Elastic Form
This article is not the place to review the details of Cowells imprisonment
from 1936 to 1940, which have been discussed extensively in recent litera-
ture.
58
But highly signicant to our purposes is his interaction with Cage dur-
ing the years of his incarceration. Four days after Cowell was taken to the
Redwood City Jail by the San Mateo County Juvenile Ofcer,
59
Gerald Strang
wrote to Olive Cowell from Los Angeles: All [Cowells] friends down here
have been calling me to offer their assistanceSchnberg, Weiss, Cage,
Buhlig, Kuhnle. . . . On 18 June Cage wrote to Cowell directly, apparently in
response to a card he had received. His distress is apparent even through his
valiant attempt to be encouraging:
Receiving your card was very ne, and it put me directly into what might be
called another world that I have been living in for you,sometimes uncon-
sciously, because I know that you are all right. I refuse to be downhearted. It is
only those who do not know you who will suffer. Maybe I am evading some-
thing. Maybe I dont understand. But I cannot but believe that you are as you
always are. Perhaps I shouldnt say anything. But I want to say something that
you may know that I am stronger than ever your friend.
60
Prison rules severely restricted the number of letters Cowell was allowed to
send, but he nevertheless managed to keep up a lively correspondence with
many in the new-music world. On 23 March 1937 he sent a long letter to
Cage, lled with advice that helped focus the direction of Cages work over
the next several years (see Appendix B). I was pleased to hear that you are
interested in percussion developments, Cowell wrote. I was just on the
point of trying to form a sort of symphonic percussion ensemble in SF and an-
other in NY before my arrest. . . .
61
Cowell offered to lend Cage his percus-
sion instruments, housed at Mills, Stanford, or with his parents in San
Francisco. Most importantly, however, Cowell predicted that the future of
music lay in the perfection of percussion and sliding tones, a statement sub-
sequently quoted by Cage on two concert programs (as described at the be-
ginning of this article). The rst step, Cowell explained, was for Cage to locate
a shop that could build percussion instruments; he advised Cage to develop
new and practical instruments and arrange them so that a single player could
control several at once: Try making a water drumshaped like tympani, a
little water in lower kettle part. . . . Circle water gently for glissandi. It is one of
[Indias] more effective instruments. Cowell also advised Cage to collaborate
with dancers (all dance studios want [drums]), and he recommended Cage
to Mundstock for dance studio work. Although Cage didnt build a water
drum or go to work for Mundstock, he began collaborating with dancers in
Los Angeles and later Seattle, and he developed new instruments, among
them the water gong (through a commission to write music for synchronized
swimmers).
62
When lowered into the water, the vibrating gong created sliding
tones.
Three months previously, in January 1937, the Dance Observer had pub-
lished Cowells article Relating Music and Concert Dance. For a number of
years, Cowell had been struggling to develop methods by which music and
dance could meet on an equal footing, rather than having one art act in a sub-
servient capacity to the other. At rst he attempted to create a contrapuntal
relationship between music and dance in the work Synchrony (1930), written
for Martha Graham and premiered in a concert version by Slonimsky.
63
In
his 1937 article, however, Cowell proposed an entirely differentand quite
revolutionarysolution: writing music in an elastic form that would allow the
composition to be expanded, contracted, or rearranged to suit the choreogra-
phy. While the dance errs on the side of too great a tendency to possess vague
structure, and to be improvised in creation, Cowell wrote, music today
undoubtedly errs in the opposite direction of being too rigid. He proposed
61. Letter, Cowell to Cage, 23 March 1937 (the original is in the NYPL Cowell Collection,
box 115, folder 3 of 3; there is a copy in box 97).
62. John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press,
1961), 86.
63. Synchrony was never performed with dance, but Slonimsky presented the concert
version in Paris in June 1931. Stokowski conducted the American premiere in Philadelphia on
1 and 2 April 1932. Critical reception was very cool. For more on this work, see Leta E. Miller,
Henry Cowell and Modern Dance: The Genesis of Elastic Form, American Music 20 (2002):
34. Synchrony was issued on an LP recording in 1967 (CRI 217) and remastered on CD for
Citadel CTD 88122 (1997). A short-score manuscript of the original version is at the Library of
Congress.
instead a middle ground between the typical xed musical work and one
that was so freely improvised as to be vague and purposeless, wandering
formlessly.
64
Cowells aim was both pragmatic and artistic. His previous method of
working with dance entailed watching the choreography, taking down the
counts, and then writing music to t. Cage (and many other composers)
worked in the same manner.
65
However, this compositional method proved
unsatisfactory for a number of reasons. Not only did the music function as a
servant to the dance, but the choreography itself was rarely nalized when the
composer began to write; as the dance evolved, its rhythmic structure might
change, requiring musical alterations. Even if those issues could be solved,
Cowell was clearly in no position to visit dance studios and observe choreogra-
phies in 1937. Yet dancers wanted him to compose for them, even from his
cell in San Quentin. Elastic form solved all of these issues: music and dance re-
tained independence while the score allowed for adaptability; and the com-
poser had no need to observe the dancers physical motions.
Though the stimulus for Cowell to develop elastic forms arose from these
practicaland idiosyncraticcircumstances, the concept also held a fascina-
tion for him on purely aesthetic grounds, and the precedents he cited for it
crossed historical and generic boundaries. There is much evidence that the
troubadours and minnesingers never sang their products twice exactly alike,
he wrote. . . . It was the differences in each performance that interested the
auditors. . . . Folk-music develops in the same way.
66
At the end of 1937
Cowell wrote to Percy Grainger:
Do you think there might be a greater amount of minstrel-like freedom intro-
duced into musical composition? Lately it would seem that modern music has
gone in the direction of more and more exact writing down of notated details,
making the performer more than ever a reproducer of each minute factor as di-
rected by the composer. I seem to react strongly against this, and wish to com-
pose works so exable [sic] in form that a ne performer can legitimately
contract or expand the form. . . . I am working to make such an apparently fan-
ciful idea practical. Bardish freedom about a central theme, so presented as to
be practical for modern musical situations is the aim. The advantage is in not
freezing the work into a set gure, and in giving the performer as creative a job
as the originator (both are composers). The performer would have to be bold
64. Cowell, Relating Music and Concert Dance, Dance Observer 4, no. 1 (January 1937):
78.
65. See, for example, Cage, Composers Confessions, 10. Lou Harrison noted that al-
most always, in working with dancers, I have composed music after the dance has been com-
pleted, which has led to some problems, but also has been a pleasure in a way, because you know
whats to do. . . . However, Harrison also cited instances in which he composed music to t the
dancers counts only to nd that the music didnt t because the dance had changed in the in-
terim (interview with Leta E. Miller and Fredric Lieberman, 29 December 1993).
66. Cowell, Relating Music and Concert Dance, 8.
enough to take the challenge, and perhaps this would be a very good ideait
would eliminate the musically impotent!
67
The key to writing a successful elastic composition was devising an organi-
zational principle that would admit exibility, yet retain structure. If the work
follows the guidelines in Cowells 1937 article, it will, in any of its ways of
presentation, have form; but it may be easily adapted to the changes and free-
doms so essential to the dancers creation.
68
The trick was to create a musical
composition that maintained coherence under whatever manipulation it
might undergo in service to the dance. Cowell composed a piece to illustrate
this idea, and, though it was not printed in the Dance Observer, it survives in
manuscript along with six pages of detailed performance instructions. Sound
Form No. 1 (1936) is characterized by a rhythm theme (> > o ) that oc-
curs as given, inverted (o o > ), or in retrograde ( o > >) on three met-
ric levels: quarter notes, measures, and four-measure units (see Ex. 1). As
Cowell noted in his instructions, the larger sections follow the same plan of
accents and dynamics as will be found within smaller divisions.
69
(Cowells
instructions provide no explanation for the three symbols. On the beat level
they clearly indicate accentuation, but on the larger metric levels, they appar-
ently represent relative dynamics: strong [>], moderate [], and soft [o].) A
similar layering of accent/dynamic patterns is found in his United Quartet,
dating from the same year as Sound Form No. 1. The > > > accent pat-
tern appearing on the beat level at the beginning of the quartet is mirrored
dynamically and in other ways on the measure level, the organization of the
rst movement, and even the structure of the entire ve-movement quartet.
70
Cowell explained that in Sound Form No. 1 major sections, four-measure
units, or individual measures could be repeated, extended, shortened, or omit-
ted, and yet the unity of form is preserved by the repetition of the dynamic
pattern on multiple metrical levels.
In the spring of 1937 Cowell wrote a second dance piece in elastic form for
Martha Graham, who visited him in San Quentin.
71
He composed for her a
Sarabande to accompany a dance about the Spanish Civil War entitled
Immediate Tragedy. (The premiere took place on 21 July 1937.) Cowells
music, which is lost, consisted of two basic phrases for oboe and clarinet, each
67. Letter, Cowell to Grainger, 3 December 1937 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 97).
68. Cowell, Relating Music and Concert Dance, 9.
69. From Cowells handwritten notes accompanying the manuscript of Sound Form No. 1
(Cowell Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress).
70. See David Nicholls, American Experimental Music, 16971, and Henry Cowells
United Quartet. A typed copy of Cowells own analysis of the piece (included with the rst pub-
lished score) is found in the NYPL Cowell Collection, JPB 01-63.
71. On 20 March 1937 Graham wrote to Olive Cowell, asking if she could set up a visit to
San Quentin the following month when she would be in San Francisco (letter, Martha Graham to
Olive Cowell [NYPL Cowell Collection, box 95]).

,

,

,

,
.
.
.
.
.
,
,
//
//
//
.
,
//
.
,
.
,
.
,
; ;
;
;
; ;

A B C
Tempo Comodo
A (these letters indicate main divisions)
4
* These accents apply to all parts, and show the rhythmic form of individual measures and notes.
++ These accents apply to all parts, and show the form of four measure groups.
Rhythm theme:
Form, AABC, compounded from rhythm of single measures every four and sixteen measures
inversion: retrograde:
(ground-tone)
*
*
++
I
II
III
[Percussion] I
[Percussion] II
Example 1 Cowell, Sound Form No. 1 (1937), section A (Reprinted by permission of the David
and Sylvia Teitelbaum Fund, as successors to Henry and Sidney Cowell)
L
a
s
t
t
i
m
e
t
o
C
o
d
a
, ,
,
/
,
;
;
;
;
; ;
;
;
;
; ;

[ ]

.
[ ]
7
10
14
Example 1 continued
in two-measure, three-measure, and ve-measure versions; these phrases could
be arranged as needed to suit the dance.
72
That Cage knew about Cowells elastic forms before he moved to Seattle in
the Fall of 1938 is conrmed by a letter from Sidney Robertson to Cowell,
sent from San Francisco on 19 September 1938. She wrote:
Speaking of amazing ideas, I had dinner with the Cages, and John told me
about your elastic composition notion for the dance, and I really think thats
one of the most exciting things Ive heard in a long time. Its as completely
original an idea as if it were a pure revelation. . . . It seems to me a very good
idea . . . regardless of its convenience under the special circumstance [i.e.,
Cowells imprisonment]: Its high time the dancer had a greater share in
the composition of his musicyou may have freed the dancer as well as the
musician.
73
How did Cage learn about elastic form? Cowell made no reference to it in
his March 1937 letter, despite his article in the Dance Observer three months
earlier, which Cage might well have read. But Cages description of the
process to Sidney Robertson nineteen months after this article appeared
suggests that the issue was fresh in his mind, pointing to the likelihood of ad-
ditional correspondence with Cowell in the interim. Cowell, in fact, had
facilitated the meeting of Cage and Robertson (Cowells future wife). On
8 August 1938 he wrote to Robertson, recommending Cage as an assistant
for an unidentied project (probably the California Folk Music Project she
supervised for the University of California under the auspices of the WPA and
in coordination with the Library of Congress).
74
Other indications also suggest that Cage and Cowell corresponded be-
tween March 1937 and Cages move to Seattle a year and a half later. In late
spring or early summer 1938 Cage left Los Angeles for northern California.
72. Information about this piece comes from Norman Lloyd, who, along with Louis Horst,
arranged Cowells music for Grahams performance. See Lloyd, Sound-Companion for Dance,
Dance Scope 2, no. 2 (1966): 1112. The Graham company is still performing this work, but with
different music. In addition to Sound Form No. 1 and the Sarabande, Cowell composed these
elastic-form pieces for dance: Ritournelle, 1939, for Bonnie Birds Marriage at the Eiffel Tower
(discussed below); Ritual of Wonder, 1939, for Marian Van Tuyl (score assembled by Lou
Harrison); and Chaconne, 193940, also for Van Tuyl.
73. Letter, Sidney Robertson to Henry Cowell, 19 September 1938 (NYPL Cowell Collec-
tion, box 95).
74. Letter, Cowell to Robertson, 8 August 1938 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 97): Per-
haps John Cage would be a good onedo you know him? He is in the middle twenties, married,
and lives at 545 Swarthmore, Pacic Palisades, Cal. He is a composer, very intelligent, studied
with me in NY (and learned to run the recorder) and knows something of the interests in native
music, has studied with Schoenberg for some time, and then broke away. (It was in response to
this letter that Sidney wrote on 19 September about having dined with the Cages and learned
about elastic form.) On the WPA project, see Cornelius Canon, The Federal Music Project of
the Works Progress Administration: Music in a Democracy, PhD diss., University of Minnesota,
1963, 16162.
When he arrived in San Francisco he showed up unannounced at Lou
Harrisons apartment on Francisco Street. Harrison recalls opening the door
to a stranger, who said, Im John Cage. Henry Cowell sent me.
75
Though
the date of this meeting is not documented, it certainly took place before
10 July, since Harrison introduced Cage to dancer Bonnie Bird, who was in
California for only two weeks beginning 26 June. (Bird, a Graham protge,
had come to California from Seattles Cornish School to teach at the Mills
College summer dance program.) Bird offered Cage a position in Seattle,
which he accepted; he moved to the Northwest with his wife Xenia that fall,
soon after his dinner with Sidney Robertson. Cage was in Seattle by 7 October
at the latest, when he accompanied Bird in a public demonstration.
76
Whatever the source through which Cage learned about elastic form, the
idea ultimately had a profound effect on his musical development, though its
impact was not manifest until the 1950s. In 1959 Cage acknowledged that
Cowells ideas on elasticity presaged compositions indeterminate in terms of
performance.
Henry Cowell . . . was not attached . . . to what seemed to so many to be the
important question: Whether to follow Schoenberg or Stravinsky. His early
works for piano, long before Varses Ionization [sic] (which by the way, was
published by Cowell), by their tone clusters and use of the piano strings,
pointed towards noise and a continuum of timbre. Other works of his are inde-
terminate in ways analogous to those currently in use by Boulez and Stock-
hausen. For example: Cowells Mosaic Quartet, where the performers, in any
way they choose, produce a continuity from composed blocks provided by
him. Or his Elastic Musics, the time lengths of which can be short or long
through the use or omission of measures provided by him. These actions by
Cowell are very close to current experimental compositions which have parts
but no scores, and which are therefore not objects but processes providing ex-
perience not burdened by psychological intentions on the part of the composer.
77
Although Cage thus positions Cowells musical elasticity as a harbinger of
the indeterminate works of the 1950s (and beyond), his reference to the 1935
Mosaic Quartet is not quite accurate. Cowell authorizes the ve short move-
ments of this work to be played in any order and/or repeated at will; other-
wise, however, the quartet is not assembled from composed blocks. Cage
may have confused or conated this quartet with other compositions by
Cowell, namely the Sarabande for Martha Graham cited above, oreven
75. Lou Harrison, personal communication to the author, 1994.
76. The school term at Cornish began on 12 September after a registration period of 110
September. On Cages work in Seattle, see Leta E. Miller, Cultural Intersections: John Cage
in Seattle (193840), in John Cage: Music, Philosophy, and Intention, 19331950, ed. David
Patterson, 4782 (New York and London: Routledge, 2002).
77. Cage, History of Experimental Music in the United States, in Silence: Lectures and
Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 71. (The essay was originally pub-
lished in German in the 1959 issue of Darmstdter Beitrge.)
more likelyRitual of Wonder (1939), which was composed in precisely the
manner Cage describes. Cowell wrote Ritual of Wonder in prison for dancer/
choreographer Marian Van Tuyl. He provided thirty-seven cells (mostly one
measure in length) to be used to construct most of the work. Cowell then en-
trusted Lou Harrison with the task of developing a full-scale composition that
would meet the demands of the choreography.
78
Although there is no conclu-
sive evidence that Cage saw the completed score of Ritual of Wonder, the
work was performed at Mills College on 10 January 1941 along with Cages
own Fads and Fancies in the Academy and other pieces. Cage played the piano
during this performance. Since he collaborated closely with both Harrison and
Van Tuyl in 194041, Cage most likely heard about the compositional
process of Ritual of Wonder from them.
In regard to indeterminacyas in other areasCowell provided but one
model for an approach that later became a hallmark of Cages work. Begin-
ning in the 1950s, Cage would increasingly explore the possibilities of indeter-
minate performance and composition processes, the inuences for which are
manifold: his interactions with Merce Cunningham on the linkage of music
and dance, the ideas and works of New York composers Christian Wolff,
Morton Feldman, and Earle Brown, and the impact of visual artists such as
Michel Duchamp, to name but a few.
79
In this context Cowells elastic works,
written more than a decade earlier, began to take on new relevance in Cages
evolving aesthetic, which increasingly aimed at the subordination of his own
intentions to external compositional determinants or the input of numerous
collaborators. Typically, then, Cowell toyed with a compositional idea that he
did not pursue (he stopped writing elastic works after his release from prison),
but which provided an early model for Cage and others to develop in ways
Cowell may not have anticipated.
Cages Years in Seattle, 193840
Cages rst project after moving to Seattle in 1938 was to form precisely the
type of symphonic percussion ensemble Cowell had described in his letter
the previous year. Cages group presented three public concerts at the Cornish
School and two at Mills in 193840; the Cage Percussion Players also
toured in Idaho, Montana, and Oregon.
80
For their initial performance on
78. I present a detailed discussion of Ritual of Wonder, with examples of Cowells cells and
Harrisons use of them, in Henry Cowell and Modern Dance, 1216.
79. In a 1967 letter to Peter Yates, Brown complained about not getting enough credit for
pioneering works indeterminate in terms of performance (letter, Earle Brown to Yates, 20 January
1967 [Yates Papers, Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego]).
80. Cages Seattle percussion ensemble is discussed in detail in my articles The Art of Noise:
John Cage, Lou Harrison, and the West Coast Percussion Ensemble, in Perspectives on Ameri-
can Music, 19001950, ed. Michael Safe, 21563 (New York and London: Garland, 2000); and
Cultural Intersections: John Cage in Seattle (193840).
9 December 1938, which Cage later proclaimed to be the rst concert of
music for percussion instruments alone,
81
he drew on Cowells New Music
Orchestra Series volume 18 (1936) for the entire program, with the exception
of his own Trio and Quartet, which he had composed before leaving Los
Angeles. On the third Cornish program (9 December 1939), Cage featured
the quotation from Cowell on the future of musicwith attribution but
without permissionextracted word-for-word from Cowells 1937 letter (see
Fig. 3).
Micro-macrocosmic forms
The two major percussion works Cage wrote in Seattle (Constructions 1 and
2), as well as a number of later works (for example, the third Construction,
Double Music, the Sonatas and Interludes, and others), are based on a micro-
macrocosmic system that also reects ideas previously explored by Cowell. In
Cages highly developed system, the organization of small sections mirrors
that of larger unitsstrikingly similar to Cowells unication principle in
Sound Form No. 1 and the United Quartet.
82
There is no direct evidence that
Cage knew Sound Form No. 1, but he may have received a copy of the quartet
from Gerald Strang. On 26 September 1937 Cowell wrote to his stepmother
that the United Quartet was nally out in print (in a special edition of New
Music) and that he hoped that Strang would send copies to everyone who
might use one. He has a list to send them to. . . .
83
Parts of the quartet
such as the rst movement, which consists of ve sections of twenty-ve mea-
sures eachbear similarities to Cages forms.
A more direct link between Cowells formal structures and Cages micro-
macrocosmic system is Pulse, a percussion quintet Cowell wrote at Cages in-
stigation. Cage knew this work intimately, since he presented its premiere
in Seattle on 19 May 1939. Prior to this concert, he wrote to numerous com-
posers around the country requesting percussion music. In response, Cowell
sent Pulse and, later in the year, the sextet Return.
Cowell, of course, might have suggested that Cage program Ostinato
Pianissimo, which had still not been performed, but this workrequiring
eight playerswas probably too unmanageable for Cages ensemble. Cage
had only seven performers on his concert, and among them were some non-
musicians, including his wife Xenia. Cages group repeated Pulse on their third
concert (9 December 1939), along with Return (see Fig. 3).
81. Cage, Composers Confessions, 10. Cage made a similar comment in a 1942 press re-
lease, a copy of which is found among the documents in the Cage Collection at the Northwestern
University Music Library.
82. David Bernstein suggests that works such as the United Quartet might have been inu-
enced by Charles Seegers discussion of verse form. See Bernstein, Music I, 69; and Seeger,
Studies in Musicology II, 196.
83. Letter, Henry Cowell to Olive Cowell, 26 September 1937 (NYPL Cowell Collection,
box 97).
Figure 3 Program for Cages third percussion concert at the Cornish School, Seattle,
9 December 1939
Cowell nished composing Pulse at the end of March 1939, when he re-
ported on his progress in letters to Slonimsky and Blanche Walton.
84
As
shown in Figure 4, the works form bears strong similarities to the micro-
macrocosmic system Cage would use in his own percussion pieces beginning
later that same year.
85
Pulse is built around the number ve. Written for ve players, it contains
ve large sections and a coda, with extra, non-thematic measures at the begin-
ning, end of section B, and end of the piece. Furthermore, four of the ve
sections (A, B, B, and C) contain ve subsections and every subsection con-
tains ve measures. Divisions between one subsection and the next are marked
by changes in instrumentation, as shown in Example 2. In section A, for
Figure 4 Schematic diagram of the form of Cowells Pulse (1939)
84. On 19 March 1939 Cowell wrote to Blanche Walton that he had just put the nishing
touches on the work. On 26 March 1939, he wrote to Slonimsky that he had just nished the
piece (both letters are in the NYPL Cowell Collection, box 97). The title of the work is not given
in Cowells letters, but it is clear that he is referring to Pulse. Cowell wrote to Walton, I have just
now nished putting the nishing touches onto a larger work (twenty pages of score) for percus-
sion instruments, for performance in an all-percussion concert to be given in Seattle in May. On
29 May he wrote to Slonimsky about the works premiere (Cowell to Slonimsky, NYPL Cowell
Collection, box 97). In the 26 March letter, Cowell described the work as requiring six players.
The published score calls for ve, but periodically Cowell species the need for an extra player
who dampens instruments and takes doubled parts. It is not clear when Cowell wrote Return.
Although Lichtenwanger (The Music of Henry Cowell, 169) states that Return was performed on
19 May 1939, it actually was not played until the third concert at Cornish on 9 December.
85. David Nicholls also points out the relationship between Pulse and Cages Constructions,
though I arrived at my conclusions independently (see Nicholls, American Experimental Music,
17374, 208).
Example 2 Cowell, Pulse (Pulse 55-72072; Copyright 1971 Music For Percussion, Inc.;
copyright 2001 Transferred to Colla Voce Music, Inc., www.collavoce.com. Reprinted by
permission)
(a) Mm. 113 (beginning of section A)
:
s
:
s
:
s
:
s
:
s
:
s
:
s
:
s
:
s
:
s
//
//
//
//
,
;
,,
,,

,,
,,
;
;
,,

.
.
;
;
_
_
_
_
_
N. B. use extra player
to take doubled parts as indicated
Rather rapid pulse
1
2
3
4
5
E7238
(damped)
5 mm. (dragons mouths,
3 Korean
Dragons Mouths
high
medium
low
3 Rectangular
Woodblocks
high
medium
low
3 Chinese Tom-toms
high
medium
low
3 Different Sized
Drums
(no snares)
small
medium
large
3 Rice Bowls
(small metal or
hardwood sticks)
high
medium
low
3 Japanese
Temple Gongs
(or 3 Bells)
high
medium
low
3 Suspended Cymbals
(with padded stick)
small
medium
large
3 Gongs
(open-suspended)
small
medium
large
3 Pipe-lengths
(on saw-horses
or cradles)
high
medium
low
3 Brake-drums
(open-suspended)
high
medium
low
Example 2 continued
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

.
.
;
;
.
.
.
.
;
;
.
.
_
_
_
_
_
7
4
(*) extra player may damp two cymbals, by hand; the third cymbal stopped by regular player
tom-toms, gongs, pipes)
Wd. blks.
3 Drums
3 Brake Drums
5 mm. (woodblocks, drums,
(stopped-dry *)
3 Cymbals
1
2
3
4
5
.
.
.
.
.
.
;
.
.
,,

,,
,,
;
;
.
.
,,
.
.
;
;
.
.
_
_
_
_
_
9
cymbals, brake drums)
3 Drums
Cymbals
Br. drs.
3 Dragons Mouths
Gongs
Pipe-lengths (damped)
3 Ch. Tom-toms
5 mm. (dragons mouths, tom-toms, gongs, pipes)

1
2
3
4
5
Example 2 continued
Example 2 continued
(b) Mm. 2433 (end of section A and beginning of section B)
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
,,
,
/

,

_
_
_
_
_
B section
27
24
end of A section
Drums stopped
(place hand or nger on membrane)
Rice Bowls
Temple gongs
(extra player)
5 mm. (drums, rice bowls,
1
2
3
4
5
instance, the rst subsection features dragons mouths, tom-toms, gongs, and
pipe lengths, while the second features woodblocks, drums, cymbals, and
brake drums. Section B (Ex. 2b) introduces a steady eighth-note theme
played rst on rice bowls, then on temple gongs. Cowell deliberately added a
structural irregularity to his scheme, however, by omitting one of the expected
subsections in A The procedure bears notable similarities to his ideas on elas-
tic form: one section of Pulse is shortened by ve measures, but the composi-
tion retains coherence by the repetition of the pattern of ves within each
subsection. (Sidney Cowell noted that her husband always liked the Indian
,,

,,

_
_
_
_
_
32
29
(*) Bowls are placed close together and stick vibrated between them
temple gongs) 5 mm. (tom-toms, etc.)
Ch. Tom-toms
(*)
Cymbals open
1
2
3
4
5
Example 2 continued
idea that perfection was not something a man could decently aspire to; it was a
kind of presumption or pretentiousness. He mentioned that while Indians
wove or decorated silver with repetitive patterns they saw to it that there was
always somewhere an irregularity which made the required decent imperfec-
tion in the work.)
86
In Cages micro-macrocosmic works, subsections similarly parallel the pat-
tern of the larger units. The First Construction (in Metal), premiered nearly
seven months after Cage performed Pulse, contains sixteen sections, each with
sixteen measures, plus a nine-measure coda. The sixteen sections are orga-
nized into a large-scale pattern of 4, 3, 2, 3, 4, and each sixteen-measure sec-
tion is subdivided in exactly the same way.
87
The Second Construction (rst
performed in February 1940 at Reed College in Portland) also contains six-
teen sections of sixteen measures, in this case subdivided into units of 4, 3, 4,
and 5. Cowell delineated his subsections by timbre changes; Cage emphasized
his by contrasts in rhythmic structure as well. As Example 3 shows, each
phrase is unied by a cohesive rhythmic character.
Though Cage may have been inspired by Cowells works in which larger
sections reect the structure of smaller units, he (characteristically) developed
this idea into an overarching system that, in its dependency on rhythm as the
primary organizational principle, provided a viable alternative to the pitch- or
harmony-based systems he had previously found limiting. His frustration with
twelve-tone serial composition on these grounds has often been cited. He
wrote in 1948: I was convinced . . . that although 12-tone music was excel-
lent theoretically, in making use of the instruments which had been developed
for tonal music, it had continually to be written negatively rather than straight-
forwardly: it had always to avoid the harmonic relationships which were nat-
ural to the tonal instruments. . . ; I was convinced that for atonal music
instruments proper to it were required.
88
In the 1930s those instruments for Cage were percussion, a term he used
in a loose sense to refer to sound inclusive of noise as opposed to musical or
accepted tones. In writing for such instruments, structural rhythm sup-
planted pitch and harmony as the organizing principle. In contrast to a struc-
ture based on the frequency aspect of sound, tonality, Cage explained, this
rhythmic structure was as hospitable to non-musical sounds, noises, as it was
to those of the conventional scales and instruments.
89
86. Hitchcock, Henry Cowells Ostinato Pianissimo, 41n16.
87. First Construction (in Metal) has been analyzed by numerous writers. See, for example,
Nicholls, American Experimental Music, 2069; Bernstein, Music I, 7174; James Pritchett,
The Music of John Cage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1617; and Heather
Leslie Sloan, Percussion Music Is Revolution: The Treatment of Structure and Themes in John
Cages Three Constructions (MA thesis, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1992).
88. Cage, Composers Confessions, 9.
89. Quotations in this paragraph from ibid., 910; and John Cage, Composition as Pro-
cess, in Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 19.
,
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

,

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
,
;

.
,
.
,
;

.
/
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
,
= 128132
5
10
1
2
3
4
4
1
center
3
3 4
1
3
5
edge
Sleigh
Bells
Wind
Glass
Indian
Rattle
Small
Maracas
Snare
Drum
Tom-toms
Temple
Gongs
Small
Maracas
Large
Maracas
Tam-tam
Muted
Gongs
Water
Gongs
Thunder
Sheet
String
Piano
Sleigh
Bells
Tam-tam
Sleigh
Bells
Tam-tam
Example 3 Cage, Second Construction, mm. 116 (Copyright 1960 Henmar Press, Inc. All
rights reserved. Reprinted by permission)
The prepared piano
Among the instruments Cage specied in Constructions 1 and 2 is the string
piano, a term Cowell coined to indicate performance on the strings of a
grand piano. In the First Construction Cage used some extended techniques
pioneered by Cowell, such as having the pianist sweep the lower strings with a
gong beater or play on the keys with one hand while muting the strings with
the other.
90
In the Second Construction the pianist mutes the strings of two
low notes with the ngers of the left hand, which ngers slide along the
strings of the piano. . . , while the keys indicated are played by the right hand
on the keyboard. (In The Banshee [1925] Cowell also has the performer slide
along the strings of the piano, although no notes are played on the keyboard.)
In addition, a series of notes encompassing a tritone in the middle range of the
piano are muted by a piece of cardboard, and in one section, Cage asks the pi-
anist to trill on the keyboard while sliding a metal cylinder along the strings,
producing a siren-like sound. (Cowell had the pianist use a at metal ob-
ject on the strings in the third movement of A Composition for String Piano
with Ensemble [1925].)
91
Most importantly, however, Cage used a technique
in the Second Construction that he employed often in later works and that
would prove highly inuential in the new music world: he instructs the player
to insert a screw between the strings of the note middle C.
Typically, Cage may have used Cowells terminology and techniques in the
two Constructions, but he then extended his model in a revolutionary new di-
rection. For Bacchanale, performed two months after the premiere of the
Second Construction, Cage devised a prepared piano to meet a practical need:
the Repertory Playhouse in Seattle, venue for Syvilla Forts dance recital on
28 April 1940, was too small to accommodate his percussion ensemble. On
the other hand, Cage did have access to a piano at one side in front of the
stage.
92
Though the requirements of the dance concert might have provided
90. Cowell used similar techniques in a number of works. For example, the pianist sweeps
the strings with the ngers in The Banshee (1925). In Sinister Resonance (1930), Cowell instructs
that certain notes be muted by pressing on the strings while the same notes are played on the
keyboard.
91. Nicholls draws a link between this piece and Cages prepared piano (American Experi-
mental Music, 164).
92. Cage, How the Piano Came to Be Prepared, 7. This story is told by numerous writers,
but the venue is often cited incorrectly as the Cornish Schools theater, stemming from Cages
own erroneous recollection in the 1970s. Though Cage recounts that the need for him to use a
piano instead of a percussion ensemble for Forts recital led to home experiments in which he put
various objects inside the piano, Bonnie Bird recalled an additional stimulus: during one of her
dance classes at the Cornish School a rod rolled onto the piano strings. Birds daughter, Heidi
Smith, repeatedly heard this story from her mother and told it to the author in a private conversa-
tion in 1998. Bird herself related the tale to William Fetterman, who quotes a 1991 interview
with her in John Cages Theatre Pieces: Notations and Performances (Amsterdam, Netherlands:
Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996), 8. The accounts by Cage and Bird are not necessarily con-
tradictory, since the rod falling into the piano may have also stimulated the home experiments
Cage described.
the immediate catalyst, Cowells work was at the forefront of Cages mind. As
he told Stephen Montague in 1982: I remembered how the piano sounded
when Henry Cowell strummed the strings or plucked them, ran darning nee-
dles over them, and so forth. I went to the kitchen and got a pie plate and put
it and a book on the strings. . . .
93
Many years later Cowell reected that
Cage got an idea of writing for prepared piano by knowing my own things
for the strings of the piano very well.
94
Although Cage had inserted a screw between the piano strings in the
Second Construction, the instrument functioned in that work as one member
of a quartet. In Bacchanale, on the other hand, he created the sound of an in-
strumental group controlled by a single player at the keyboard: by placing vari-
ous objects at different locations within the instrument, Cage created a
colorful palette of timbres. He later reected that the prepared piano was a
percussion orchestra of an original sound and the decibel range of a harpsi-
chord directly under the control of a pianists ngertips.
95
Cowell, in his
1937 letter, had advised Cage to arrange percussion instruments so that one
player could control several at once. Cage did even better: he created a single
instrument that could evoke the sound of an ensemble.
Sliding tones
At Seattles Cornish School, Cage was also able to conduct ground-breaking
experiments with recording technology. Nellie Cornish, founder and director
of the institution, began a radio school in May 1936 for which she built a stu-
dio that Cage used when he arrived there two years later.
96
Cage discovered
that by varying the speed of the studios turntables between 33
1
/
3
and 78 rpm
he could create electronic sliding tones. While Cowell had looked upon
recording technology as a means for preserving rare musics and for capturing
and distributing new music, Cage began to apply the technology to the
process of composition itself, incorporating electronically generated sounds
into new works.
Cowell had been using vocal and instrumental sliding tones as expressive
devices since the 1920s. Though inspired in part by Asian musics (for instance,
93. Stephen Montague, John Cage at Seventy: An Interview, American Music 3 (1985):
20910. Cage does not mention the experience in Birds class during this interview. Other refer-
ences by Cage in the Montague interview are somewhat confused. For example, he says that
when Lou Harrison came over and heard it, he said, Oh dammit! I wish Id thought of that!
But Harrison was never in Seattle during this period and could have heard the prepared piano
only months later, after Cage left Seattle and returned to the San Francisco Bay Area.
94. Cowell, interview by Beate Gordon (1962, transcript in NYPL Cowell Collection, box
72).
95. Cage, Composers Confessions, 11.
96. On the opening of the radio school, see Nellie C. Cornish, Miss Aunt Nellie: The Auto-
biography of Nellie C. Cornish (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964), 24549.
the Chinese opera productions he attended in San Francisco), he did not use
slides to evoke concrete images of the Orient. At the same time, slides occa-
sionally served programmatic ends, as in Atlantis (ca. 1926, which Cage could
not have heard since it was rst performed after his death),
97
or The Banshee
(which Cage knew very well). In these early works the slides project a wailing
effectthe weeping moon goddess Astarte and the drawing of the Feminine
Soul into the ocean in Atlantis, and the cries of the legendary Irish spirit
in The Banshee (though Cowell told Slonimsky that The Banshees title was an
afterthought).
98
Cowell also used sliding tones in non-programmatic works. He wrote in
New Musical Resources [1930]:
Natural sounds such as the wind playing through trees or grasses, or whistling
in the chimney, or the sound of the sea, or thunder, all make use of sliding
tones. It is not impossible that such tones may be made the foundation of an
art of composition by some composer who would reverse the programmatic
concept. . . . Instead of trying to imitate the sounds of nature by using musical
scales, which are based on steady pitches hardly to be found in nature, such a
composer would build perhaps abstract music out of sounds of the same cate-
gory as natural soundthat is, sliding pitchesnot with the idea of trying to
imitate nature, but as a new tonal foundation.
99
Cowell not only called for slides in instrumental works (for example, A
Composition for String Piano and Ensemble [1925], the third movement of
the Mosaic Quartet [1935], and later works such as the Symphony No. 11
[1953]), but he also proposed a comprehensive system of classifying and
notating them in The Nature of Melody, an extensive treatise he completed
in prison but never published.
100
In this theoretical work Cowell categorized
97. The score of Atlantis is unpublished, but the work is recorded on the CD Dancing with
Henry: New Discoveries in the Music of Henry Cowell (Mode Records 101, 2001). The sliding g-
ures occur in both the voice parts and the string parts and are featured primarily in movements 1
(Introduction), 3 (The Weeping of the Arsete of the Moon), and 7 (Withdrawal of the Sea
Soul to the Sea).
98. The quotation is from Hicks, Henry Cowell, 115. On the title as an afterthought, see
Nancy Rao, Cowells Sliding Tone and the American Ultramodernist Tradition, American
Music 23 (2005): 295.
99. Cowell, New Musical Resources, 20.
100. Cowell treated sliding tones in the section on the theory of scales. For a detailed discus-
sion and examples, see Rao, American Compositional Theory. Rao also discusses Cowells slid-
ing tones in relation to Chinese opera and analyzes several instrumental works in Henry Cowell
and His Chinese Music Heritage: Theory of Sliding Tone and His Orchestral Work of 1953
1965, in Locating East Asia in Western Art Music, ed. Yayoi Uno Everett and Frederick Lau,
11945 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004). Although Rao does not discuss The
Banshee in this article, she does talk about the slides in that work in Cowells Sliding Tone, 292
96. (In The Banshee, sliding the nger lengthwise along the string creates a pitch slide; crosswise
sweeps of the strings create resonant clusters.) For an analysis of A Composition for String Piano
and Ensemble, see Nicholls, American Experimental Music, 15964.
various types of sliding tones that function as passing tones, appoggiaturas,
and auxiliary notes; he also proposed a manner of notating a slides duration,
pitch, boundaries, and angles. In New Musical Resources Cowell related pitch
slides to tempo and dynamic slides as well.
101
He also mentioned a sliding
scale of tempo and dynamics in his unpublished Rhythm Book, written in
San Quentin. Cage later read the Rhythm Book and copied out its musical
examples with a summary of part of the text, probably in New York during the
1940s.
102
Several authors have pointed to connections between Cowells
tempo slides and some of Cages early New York works (for example,
Imaginary Landscape No. 4 and Music of Changes [1951]).
103
Cages exploration of sliding tones dates back to the water gong he devel-
oped in Los Angeles and later used in the rst and second Constructions. In
his early use of slides, Cage was most likely stimulated not only by Cowells
advocacy of them as a major force in the future of music, but also by Varses
sirens in Ionisation and other works.
104
In Seattle, however, Cage extended
the concept in a novel direction: for Imaginary Landscapes No. 1 (1939) and
No. 2 (1940), written to accompany dances by Bonnie Bird, he created elec-
tronic glissandos that could be controlled precisely in terms of frequency and
time. (Imaginary Landscape No. 2 was eventually withdrawn, after which
Cage used the same title for an entirely different composition.)
105
Both of the
Imaginary Landscapes composed in Seattle call for four performers, two of
whom play test-tone recordings on turntables. The players are instructed
to change the machines speed with a clutch at precisely designated places.
Assistants manipulating microphones control amplitude changes. The avail-
ability of a radio studio was essential for the composition and realization of the
Imaginary Landscapes: 33
1
/
3
rpm was not available for home use in this era,
but radio stations needed the long-play speed to record full programs for
delayed broadcast.
101. Cowell, New Musical Resources, 83 and 9496.
102. The Rhythm Book cannot be dated denitively, but Cowell noted in letters from
prison that he was planning to write it after completing his melody book. Cages copies of the
examples from the Rhythm Book are in the NYPL Cowell Collection, box 115, folder 3 of 3.
Cowells letter of 23 March 1937 is attached to the copy of the examples. Rao concludes, from
the placement of this letter, that Cage copied the material in 193637, when [he] was a student
of Cowells in a course at the New School of Social Research (Rao, Cowells Sliding Tone,
317n15). Since Cowell was actually in San Quentin in this period, however, I think it more likely
that Cage copied out the examples after he moved to New York in 1942.
103. See, for example, Rao, Cowells Sliding Tone, 31012, and Kyle Gann, Subversive
Prophet: Henry Cowell as Theorist and Critic, in The Whole World of Music: A Henry Cowell
Symposium, ed. David Nicholls (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Harwood Academic Publishers,
1997), 187.
104. Varse also used sirens in other works, such as Amriques and Hyperprism, but the
strongest inuence on Cage was Ionisation, which he cited frequently.
105. A facsimile of Cages manuscript, showing the beginning of the rejected Imaginary
Landscape No. 2, is reproduced in Miller, Cultural Intersections, 67.
The inuences that led Cage to develop electronic sliding tones by adjust-
ments in turntable speed are numerous and intertwined. In addition to the
compositions and writings of Cowell and Varse, the vision of a radio school
by Nellie Cornish, and the inspiration of Birds choreographies, Cage was
inuenced by prior compositional experiments with electronic sounds. For
example, he attended a concert in Berlin on 18 June 1930 (part of the Neue
Musik Berlin festival) that concluded with works by Paul Hindemith and
Ernest Toch specically for phonograph records. Hindemiths two Trick-
aufnahmen (trick recordings) in his Grammophonplatten-eigene Stcke in-
cluded phrases transposed by the octave, an effect created by changes in the
turntable speed; Hindemith also seems to have made use of what would later
be called overdubbing. Tochs Gesprochene Musik included three pieces,
among them the Fuge aus der Geographie. In this original version of his now-
famous Geographical Fugue, Toch recorded spoken voices and then manipu-
lated their speed electronically.
106
While Cowell used sliding tones for their affective qualities or to create a
more nature-based scale that avoided the division of the octave into discrete
pitches, Cage used them in addition to help dene and delineate elements of
form, as shown by a detailed look at Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (premiered
on 24 and 25 March 1939).
107
A schematic diagram of the work is shown in
Figure 5. The piece is divided into four large sections, each containing three
ve-measure subsections. The main sections are followed by interludes of
increasing length (rst one measure, then two, then three) and the entire
work is concluded by a four-measure coda (thus continuing the expanding
measure-length pattern of the interludes). Player 1 uses two constant-
frequency records, one for sections 1, 2, and 4 and the other for section 3.
Record 1 varies between 433 cycles per second (cps) at 33
1
/
3
rpm and ca.
106. In a letter to Peter Yates, 24 December 1940, Cage refers to Hindemith and Toch, as
well as to works by Antheil and Lopatnikoff in conjunction with his own Imaginary Landscape
No. 1. (I would like to thank Michael Hicks for alerting me to this interesting document. In the
article Organized Sound: Notes in the History of a New Disagreement; Between Sound and
Tone, California Arts and Architecture [March 1941]: 18, 42, Yates paraphrased much of
Cages letter and quoted part of it.) For one discussion of the Berlin performance, see Mark Katz,
Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London:
University of California Press, 2004), 99104 and 113. Cage told Tochs grandson that he had
been captivated by the Berlin performance (Lawrence Weschler, My Grandfathers Tale,
Atlantic Monthly 278, no. 6 [December 1996]: 96). Cage also referred to Tochs Gesprochene
Musik in a letter to Cowell in January 1941, noting his desire to mount a concert of music im-
possible without records. Have two scores for such music already: my Imaginary Landscape . . .
and Tochs Gesprochene Musik for 4 groups of speaking voices, to be recorded 9 times as fast as
performed (letter, Cage to Cowell, 8 January 1941 [NYPL Cowell Collection, box 2, folder 45]).
107. Like the First Construction, Cages Imaginary Landscape No. 1 has been treated by a
number of authors: see, for example, Pritchett, The Music of John Cage, 1415; Nicholls,
American Experimental Music, 2046; and Susan Key, John Cages Imaginary Landscape No. 1:
Through the Looking Glass, in John Cage: Music, Philosophy, and Intention, 19331950, ed.
David Patterson, 10533 (New York: Routledge, 2002).
Figure 5 Schematic diagram of the form of Cages Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939)
1000 cps at 78 rpm (approximately ac).
108
Record 2 is much lower, rang-
ing from approximately C at 33
1
/
3
rpm to about e
at 78 rpm.
109
For Player 2,
Cage identies the record only by number (Victor Frequency Record 84522
A) without providing any description of its sound. In fact, this record is of
continuously variable frequency, sounding a slow slide that begins at 10,000
cps and takes ve and a half minutes to reach 30 cps.
110
Thus Player 2s actions
using a multiple-speed turntable to alter the rpm of a variable-frequency
recordcreated electronic slides whose overall range descended as the pitch
changed on the original recording.
Cage employed two different forms of notation for the two turntable play-
ers. As shown in Example 4, Player 1s part is notated on various lines of the
staff, the lower line indicating the slower speed and the higher line the faster
one. (The lower-pitched record is indicated using the bottom two lines of the
staff. Eighth notes interspersed with rests are played by lifting and replacing
the tone arm.) Player 2s part, on the other hand, is indicated on a single line;
an x marks a change of turntable speed.
Although the performance procedure seems clear from Cages published
instructions, neither the exact sounds nor the reason for the two forms of no-
tation can be deduced from his score.
111
However, a recording Cage made of
this piece before he left Seattle in 1940 claries both issues.
112
This recording
reveals that all upward slides in the work are gradual (those of Player 1 span
about two seconds), whereas the downward slides are always abrupt. Both ef-
fects result from the inherent properties of the turntable motor. The slow up-
ward slides are analagous to shifting a car from third gear to fourth, then
stepping on the gas (acceleration is gradual due to limited engine torque),
whereas downshifting from fourth gear to third slows the vehicle rapidly
through engine braking.
108. Cages published score reads 435 cps, but his manuscript and the record label specify
433.
109. Cages instructions designate this records frequency as 84 cps at 33
1
/
3
rpm and 84+
at 78 rpm, but the actual pitch on the recording is about a major third lowercloser to 64 cps.
110. Information on exact cps readings is taken from the records label. The Library of
Congress owns a copy of this record in its Rigler and Deutsch Collection, reel 252, frames
21382141. I am very grateful to Sam Brylawski, Bryan Cornell, Peter Elsea, Janet McKee, and
Gordon Mumma for their help in this part of the project.
111. The published score (dating from 1960) does not differ in any substantive way from the
original manuscript, which is housed at the New York Public Library.
112. The disc is recorded in the center-to-edge format, a process that was supplanted by the
edge-to-center format by the late 1940s. Cage gave the record to Gordon Mumma in the early
1970s. Mumma eventually donated it to the Stanford Archive of Recorded Sound. I am ex-
tremely grateful to Gordon Mumma; Laura Kuhn of the John Cage Trust; Jerry McBride, head
of the Stanford Music Library; and Aurora Perez of the Archive for Recorded Sound. This record-
ing was played at a 1958 Town Hall concert in New York and can be heard on the CD set The 25-
Year Retrospective Concert of the Music of John Cage (1994, Wergo WER 6247-2).
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Section 1 5
x x x x x
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Interlude 1
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Player 1
Player 2
Player 3
Player 4
Example 4 Cage, Imaginary Landscape No 1, section 1 and interlude 1 (Copyright 1960

Henmar Press, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission)
Furthermore, for Player 2, the recording diverges considerably from the
sounds suggested by the notation.
113
Cage instructs Player 2 to begin at
33
1
/
3
, changing the turntable speed at the x indications, which always appear
on downbeatsthus implying a regular alternation between the low and high
pitches of each slide at the beginning of every measure (see Ex. 4). From the
recording, however, it becomes apparent that the x actually represents a
stressed point of arrival on the low pitch at the conclusion of each ascent-
descent cycle. Furthermore, the player begins at 78, rather than 33
1
/
3
, and
creates slides far more frequently than indicated in the score. The effect of the
rapid downward slide is a strong accent, which occurs occasionally on down-
beats, but more often on intermediary beats or even between the beats.
The essential revelation from the early recording is that the two turntable
players create distinctive and contrasting sounds. Player 1 produces drones
and occasional repeated notes interspersed with rests, periodically changing
from a low to a high pitch. Player 2, on the other hand, produces wavelike
oscillating gures with strong accents on the low note of the wave every three
to ve beats.
When we return to the diagram in Figure 4, it becomes clear that these
contrasting electronic sounds help dene the form of the work. Sections 1 and
2 are nearly identical; the only variants are the piano guration and the place-
ment of the cymbal rolls. Section 4 contains many elements of sections 1 and
2, but rearranged. (These correspondences are indicated by the letters x and y
in the gure.) Section 3 stands out as a contrast: Player 1 changes to the
lower-frequency record, Player 2 performs slides without interruption, and
Player 3 is silent.
Imaginary Landscape No. 1 was composed to accompany a choreography
in which arms, legs, and heads were separated from bodiesan effect Bonnie
Bird created by hiding the dancers bodies behind large boxes of various
shapes.
114
(Interestingly, in view of Cowells comments in New Musical
Resources about the ubiquity of slides in nature, the choreography for the sec-
ond Imaginary Landscape was a humorous interpretation of Trees.)
115
Although Cage may have intended the music of Imaginary Landscape No. 1
to capture the surreal aspect of the Birds dismembered limbs, it does not
portray the dances subject in the programmatic manner in which Cowell
projected weeping and wailing in Atlantis or The Banshee. Why, then, did
113. Although the score corresponds quite accurately to Cages early recording for Players 1,
3, and 4, there are minor exceptions. For example, in the rst measure of letter D, Player 1 starts
the record at 78 and then drops to 33
1
/
3
in the second measure. In the rst measure of letter H,
Player 1 creates a rapid up-and-down wailing sound. Sounds on the recording that are not present
in the score are indicated by parentheses in Figure 5.
114. A photo from the original production is reproduced in Miller, Cultural Intersections,
65.
115. Virginia Boren, Cornish Dance Group Gives Refreshing Concert, Seattle Times,
8 May 1940.
Cage choose to use sliding tones? On a general aesthetic level, slides held an
inherent intellectual appeal for him since they blur the pitch distinctions be-
tween individual tones, thereby providing another alternative to what he saw
as the constrictions of the twelve-note division of the octave. But electronic
sliding tones offered an additional attraction, for they could be controlled pre-
cisely in terms of rhythm and pitch, thus making them ideal as form-dening
elements. Although Imaginary Landscape No. 1 does not employ the micro-
macrocosmic form of the Constructions, Cage used electronic slides to dene
rhythmic motives and phrase lengths in order to elucidate a coherent musical
structure.
Other interactions during Cowells prison years
Within a few months of moving to Seattle, Cage involved Cowell in projects
at the Cornish School. Bonnie Bird had decided to mount a production of
Jean Cocteaus Marriage at the Eiffel Tower (in English translation) with mod-
ern dance; Cage, her accompanist, was charged with writing new music.
116
He
chose to imitate the collaborative procedure of the famous 1921 Paris perfor-
mance by having a team of composers provide the score, in this case Cage,
George McKay from the University of Washington, and Cowell. Cowell wrote
to his parents on 26 December 1938: John Cage has made a success of
things in Seattle, and he and Prof. George McKay, head of music at Washing-
ton University [recte: the University of Washington], have founded a New
Music Society; he wishes me to write for them. . . .
117
By the end of January
1939 Cowell had completed four works for pianoHilarious Curtain
Opener and three Ritournellesas well as a Train Finale for six percus-
sionists, all in anticipation of the production on 24 and 25 March.
118
Cowell
was particularly proud of the nale, a conventional musical imitation of the
starting of a train, but with a new dodge.
I have made an echoI have often noticed in large city R.R. stations, when the
train starts that the puffs are echoed from the far corners of the station. This has
never, as far as I know, been put into one of these programmatic imitations in
music before. All of the music, of course, is very different from anything I ever
attempted before, being saucy, amusing, and deliberately shallow in the best
Cocteau tradition.
119
116. Incidental music for Cocteaus Les maris de la tour Eiffel was famously supplied by ve
of the composers in the group that came to be known as Les Six (Auric, Honegger, Milhaud,
Poulenc, and Tailleferre; Durey declined to participate).
117. Letter, Henry Cowell to Olive and Harry Cowell, 26 December 1938 (NYPL Cowell
Collection, box 97).
118. The performance was originally scheduled for 10 March but had to be postponed (let-
ter from Henry Cowell to Olive Cowell, 4 March 1939 [NYPL Cowell Collection, box 97]).
119. Letter, Henry Cowell to Harry Cowell, 1 February 1939 (NYPL Cowell Collection,
box 97). A facsimile of the manuscript for the Train Finale is printed in Cages Notations (New
Although Bird liked the opening and closing numbers, she rejected the
Ritournelles (one of which was elastic) as too metrically regular for her chore-
ography. Cowell later countered that it was often effective to have the music
ow along regularly while the dancer did irregular things.
120
In response to all this activity, Cowell promoted Cages work to others in
the new-music community, as he had done for numerous other avant-garde
composers (most notably Ives). In March 1939 Cowell reported on Cages
Seattle activities to both Slonimsky and John Becker. He urged Becker to send
a percussion work to Cage for the May concert.
I am now doing a work for percussion for John Cagedid you ever meet him?
He worked with Schoenberg for quite a while and then reacted against his
pedantry, and now he and his wife have gone up to Seattle, where he heads
music for the dance at the Cornish School, and he is organizing a New Music
Society and is particularly interested in percussion music. He has a group of
percussionists, four good players, and three others who can take easy parts. He
has three each (different sizes) of tom-toms, gongs, woodblocks, dragons
mouths, brake drums, small high gongs, besides the usual drums. I was won-
dering whether you would be interested to send him your percussion work. I
am sure he would be interested, and you could tell him, if you wish, that I sug-
gested it. . . . Their concerts are given well, and get good attention there. . . .
121
On 27 July 1939 Cage and colleagues presented a program of modern
American percussion music at Mills College in Oakland. Cage told Cowell
that the performance had come about through Cowells suggestion. (Once
again, however, there was more than one inuence: Lou Harrison claimed
that he was the one to have recommended Cages program to the College.)
122
Whatever the stimulus, the performance was successful enough that Cage was
invited back the following year. The 1939 concert contained no works by
York: Something Else Press, 1969). The Hilarious Curtain Opener and the Ritournelle in
elastic form were published in New Music 19, no. 1 (October 1945). The three Ritournelles are
recorded by Josephine Gandol on the CD Dancing with Henry.
120. Letter, Cowell to Bonnie Bird, 2 April 1939 (private collection). Bird and her husband
Ralph Gundlach visited Cowell in San Quentin in August 1939 and told him of plans to continue
with percussion events in Seattle (letter, Cowell to his parents, 29 August 1939 [NYPL Cowell
Collection, box 97]).
121. Letter, Cowell to Becker, 14 March 1939 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 97). In a
letter of 26 March 1939, Cowell told Slonimsky about Cages work (NYPL Cowell Collection,
box 97).
122. In a letter to his stepmother Cowell wrote: Cage is giving a percussion concert at Mills,
he writes that it came about thru my suggestion, but that he has been unable to get together
enough players to give my Pulse which he presented in Seattle (Henry Cowell to Olive Cowell,
27 July 1939 [NYPL Cowell Collection, box 97]). Apparently Cowells parents attended the
performance, as evidenced from later correspondence. Lou Harrisons claim of inuence (per-
sonal communication to the author, 1994) does not necessarily contradict Cages words to
Cowell: Cowell and Harrison might both have encouraged Mills to support the performance.
Cowell, but Pulse was performed on 18 July 1940, at which time Cage re-
peated Cowells future of music statement on the printed program (as
discussed above; see Fig. 1).
123
The Future of Music; Contacts after 1940
Cowells statement may well have inspired the title of Cages own Future of
Music proclamation, which dates from the same year as the second Mills
concert (not 1937, as printed in Silence).
124
This inuential and oft-quoted es-
say originated as a lecture delivered at a meeting of the Seattle Artists League
on 18 February 1940, near the end of Cages Seattle residency. (The erro-
neous 1937 date stemmed from a casual conversation between Cage and
George Avakian, as I have shown previously.)
125
Inuences on Cages procla-
mation are numerous; in addition to Cowells prediction, the most prominent
stimuli are Luigi Russolos Larte dei rumori (The Art of Noises [1913]),
Carlos Chvezs Toward a New Music (1937), and the writings of Edgard
Varse.
126
123. This concert, staged in conjunction with visiting faculty from the Chicago School of
Design, was reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle, Time, Modern Music, and the Dance
Observer.
124. Cage, The Future of Music: Credo, in Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 36.
125. The lecture could not have taken place in 1937. Cage did not move to Seattle until the
autumn of 1938 and the Seattle Artists League met for the rst time on 11 December of that
same year. Cage spoke at the league twice, on 11 December 1938 and 18 February 1940. A man-
uscript of the lectures basic text at Northwestern University bears the notation 1940, thus
situating it at the second meeting. For details, see Miller, Cultural Intersections, 5456. The er-
roneous date rst appeared (along with Cages essay) in the program booklet for a 25-year retro-
spective concert of Cages music at Town Hall, New York, on 15 May 1958. The program
booklet is contained in the LP recording The 25-year Retrospective Concert of the Music of John
Cage (New York: Distributed by George Avakian, 1959, matrix no. K08Y 14991504). In a letter
to me dated 23 July 1997, George Avakian conrmed that the 1937 date arose in conversation.
126. David Nicholls presents a direct comparison between Cages essay and the writings of
Russolo and Chvez in American Experimental Music, 18991, and in Cage and the Ultra-
Modernists. The published version of Cages proclamation (The Future of Music) contains a
basic text in capital letters interspersed with commentary in normal type. It is likely that at least
parts of the commentary may have undergone revision after Cage left Seattle. (The manuscript
copy of the text at Northwestern University, which dates Cages lecture to 1940, contains only
the portions of the published text in capitals.) Several authors have pointed to Cages use of the
terms organization of sound and organizer of sound in the commentary, which seem to stem
from Varses inuential article Organized Sound for the Sound Film (published in The
Commonweal on 13 December 1940). Varses article strongly impressed Cage. He even typed it
out word for word (the document is included in the Cage Collection at the Northwestern
University Music Library). However, it was not published until ten months after Cages lecture to
the Seattle Artists League and several months after Cage had left Seattle and returned to San
Francisco. Nicholls suggests that Varses term might have been transmitted to Cage by Cowell
prior to its publication (American Experimental Music, 191). Varse was in San Francisco in
Some less obvious stimulants are revealed by program notes Cage wrote for
a percussion concert at Reed College in Portland, which took place four days
before his lecture to the Seattle Artists League.
127
This little-known docu-
ment is transcribed in full in Appendix C. Although the language of the notes
differs from that in The Future of Music, many of the concepts are (not
surprisingly) similar. For example, Cages advocacy of efforts to master and
subjugate noise, leading our ears to become sensitive to its beauties is
very similar to his statement in The Future of Music that what we hear is
mostly noise. . . . When we listen to it, we nd it fascinating. . . . We want to
capture and control these sounds, to use them not as sound effects but as
musical instruments. Similarly, his statement in the Reed College program
that the sounds which have been accepted as musical are surprisingly few is
similar to his reection in the The Future of Music that the composer of
percussion music . . . explores the academically forbidden non-musical eld
of sound. . . . Particularly interesting in the present context are correspon-
dences concerning electronic instruments and rhythm. The Future of
Music contains two independent statements, one linking electrical instru-
ments with overtones, the other dealing with the eld of time:
The special function of electrical instruments will be to provide complete con-
trol of the overtone structure of tones (as opposed to noises) and to make these
tones available in any frequency, amplitude, and duration. (Silence, p. 4)
The composer (organizer of sound) will be faced not only with the entire eld
of sound but also with the entire eld of time. . . . No rhythm will be beyond
the composers reach. (Silence, p. 5)
In the Reed College notes, Cage linked these topics:
Perhaps, in the near future, we will have electrical instruments which, when di-
als are turned, buttons pushed, etc., will give us everything we want: free access
to sound. Machines will be invented which will play rhythms which human be-
ings could not. Experiments in this direction have resulted in Henry Cowells
Rhythmicon and Baetzs Rhythm Rotor, instruments capable of playing
complicated cross rhythms.
128
193738 and Los Angeles in 1938 and visited Cowell in San Quentin (letter, Cowell to John
Becker, 31 January 1938 [NYPL Cowell Collection, box 97]). In January 1940 Cage used a sim-
ilar term, organized noise, to refer to percussion music during his ensembles concert at the
University of Montana (Tuesdays Concert Arouses Amusement, Slight Hysteria, unidentied
newspaper from Missoula, MT, 11 January 1940; clipping in Cages mothers scrapbook [Cage
collection, Northwestern University Music Library]).
127. A copy of the Reed College program is found in the Cage Collection at the
Northwestern University Music Library.
128. The Baetz rhythm rotor was a mechanical rhythmic device used by William Russell in
his percussion work Made in America (1937). For a discussion of Russells work and program
notes for various pieces, see http://www.essentialmusic.com/russell/russell.html (accessed
11 August 2005).
Cowells rhythmicon, developed in the early 1930s, not only played com-
plex cross-rhythms, but also linked these rhythms directly to pitches in the
overtone series (as implied in the rst excerpt quoted above from Cages
Future of Music). The instrumentbuilt by Theremin, funded by Ives, and
praised by Slonimsky, who owned one of the two prototypessounded the
overtones of a particular note in rhythmic proportion to the fundamental.
Slonimsky wrote:
The rhythmicon can play triplets against quintuplets, or any other combina-
tions up to sixteen notes in a group. The metrical index is associated . . . with
the corresponding frequence [sic] of vibrations. . . . Quintuplets are . . .
sounded on the fth harmonic, nonuplets on the ninth harmonic, and so forth.
A complete chord of sixteen notes presents sixteen rhythmical gures in sixteen
harmonics within the range of four octaves. All sixteen notes coincide, with the
beginning of each period, thus producing a synthetic harmonic series of
tones.
129
Cowell described the instruments purpose and capabilities, as well as his
own role in its conception and development, in a letter to his stepmother on 1
June 1932:
My part in its invention was to invent the idea that such a rhythmic instrument
was a necessity to further rhythmic development, which had reached a limit,
more or less, on performance by hand, and needed the application of mechani-
cal aid. [Cowell had explored extraordinarily difcult cross-rhythms in his own
works, notably Fabric for piano (1920) and the Quartet Romantic (1917).]
That which the instrument was to accomplish, what rhythms it should do, and
the pitch it should have, and the relation between the pitch and rhythm, are my
ideas. I also conceived that the principle of broken up light playing on a photo-
electric cell would be the best means of making it practical. With this idea, I
went to Theremin, who did the resthe invented the method by which the
light could be cut, did the electrical calculations, and built the instrument.
The purpose of the instrument is two fold: to enable the productions of
rhythm and related tone beyond a point where they have been able to have
been produced by any known means before now, to be used (1) for making
rhythmical melody and harmony for use in musical composition, and (2) for
the carrying on of numerous rhythmical physical and psychological scientic
experiments.
130
129. Nicolas Slonimsky, Henry Cowell, in American Composers on American Music: A
Symposium, ed. Henry Cowell (New York: Ungar, 1962; original edition published by the
trustees of Stanford University, 1933), 60. Seeger claimed credit for introducing Cowell to the
principle of the rhythmicon by scratching clicks in various proportions into a phonograph disc.
(See Nicholls, American Experimental Music, 141.) Lou Harrison said he learned how to play
Cowells Fabric using a similar technique. Though Harrison never mentioned the source of his
idea, Cowell may well have suggested it based on his studies with Seeger.
130. Letter, Henry Cowell to Olive Cowell, 1 June 1932 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 18,
folder 527).
Cowell, who wrote Rhythmicana (for rhythmicon and orchestra) in 1931,
had told Cage about the device three years before the Future of Music lec-
ture, and urged him to explore the instruments possibilities: My rhythmicon
(uses direct current and is rather in pieces but can be put together) is at
Stanford Psychology dept., Cowell wrote in 1937, and could be borrowed.
. . . It is very clumsy, about a yard square (one of the three pieces) and weighs
about 150 pounds.
131
Cage did not follow up on Cowells offer; but appar-
ently he already knew about the instruments capabilities, since Cowell did not
describe them in this letter.
Cage ended his Future of Music essay by advocating the establishment of
centers of experimental music, where oscillators, turntables, generators,
means for amplifying small sounds, lm phonographs, would be available to
composers. He wrote to Cowell in August and September 1940 that if he
were successful in establishing such a center, he would track down the rhyth-
micon and use it there.
132
In the following years Cage wrote dozens of
letters in an effort to bring this visionary project to realization. Cowell did
his best to connect Cage with interested sponsors, but ultimately Cage was
unable to secure the necessary nancial support.
133
131. Letter, Cowell to Cage, 23 March 1937. Cowell completed Rhythmicana in November
1931. Although the rhythmicon was demonstrated at the New School in 1932, the concerto was
never performed during Cowells lifetime. A reconstructed performance via computer took place
at Stanford University in 1971. See Lichtenwanger, Music of Henry Cowell, 13233.
132. Letter, Cage to Cowell, 8 August 1940: If support for the project is obtained, would it
be possible for me to use the Rhythmicon which you mentioned is at Stanford?; and Cage to
Cowell, 27 September 1940: Just got your card about the Rhythmicon. I havent found support
for the center yet; when I do I shall take advantage of your offer and use the Rhythmicon. Both
letters are in the NYPL Cowell Collection, box 2, folder 44.
133. For example, the following letters from Cage to Cowell in the Cowell Collection, New
York Public Library (dating from August to December 1940) document Cages efforts:
(1) 16 August 1940: Cage thanks Cowell for his suggestions and notes that he has contacted
(or will contact) the Conn instrument company, Mills College, Lucille Rosen, Varse, the Carne-
gie Corporation, General Electric, and the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Whitney Foundations;
(2) 23 August 1940: Cage mentions plans to contact Stokowski and Bender;
(3) 12 September 1940: Cage expects to talk to Disney, has had positive response from Conn
(Dr. Robert Young);
(4) 27 September 1940: Diego Rivera may be able to muster support;
(5) 3 October 1940: Rivera referred Cage to Chaplin, Edsel Ford, and Stokowski; Cage has
spoken to or will contact Bender, Mrs. Henry Swift, an executive engineer at GE, Alfred
Frankenstein, Ashley Pettis, Mrs. Charles Felton, and Carl Seashore at the University of Iowa;
(6) 28 October 1940: Stokowski and Ernest Toch are enthusiastic; Cage is optimistic about
possibilities at the University of Iowa: will Cowell send a supportive letter?
In addition to the correspondence at the New York Public Library, documents related to
Cages attempt to set up his Center for Experimental Music can be found among the materials
in the Cage Collection at the Northwestern University Music Library. Among these materials are:
(1) a proposal for an experimental music center at Mills; (2) excerpts from a Guggenheim applica-
tion; (3) a letter to the Whitney Foundation; (4) additional correspondence.
In November 1940 Cowell praised Cages work with percussion in the arti-
cle Drums along the Pacic, published in Modern Music. The extraordinary
development of percussion orchestras during the 1930s stemmed chiey from
the work of Cage and Harrison, wrote Cowell; the two West Coast composers
formed and directed such ensembles, concocted innumerable creations
for these instruments, and . . . induced others like Ray Green. . . , Gerald
Strang. . . , and J. M. Beyer . . . to write for them.
134
Cowell also traced the
background of the percussion ensemble to the Italian Futurists, Varse, Percy
Grainger, and Afro-Cuban inuences. He added, Our newest Pacic coast
groupCage, Green, Harrison and Stranghave also developed their inter-
est naturally as composers for the modern concert dance.
Although the article provided Cage with favorable public exposure on a na-
tional level, he reacted to it negatively. He wrote to Cowell in January 1941:
I didnt write to you about the article in Modern Music, Drums along the
Pacic, because my point of view is different than the one you expressed.
135
As the Future of Music and (even more directly) the Reed College program
notes demonstrate, Cage objected to Cowells separation of percussion music
from other explorations of new sounds. He was also bothered by the heavy
emphasis on dance. Percussion music is like an arrow pointing to the whole
unexplored eld of sound, Cage had written in the program notes. He now
expressed a similar view directly to Cowell:
I think of percussion as a beginning of exploration of the whole eld of sound,
with the goal being the use of electricity and lm, which will make the whole
eld available for use. . . . Most of the work Lou and I have done has been
done in spite of dancers. . . . I would like to see an article which shows the con-
nection between percussion and other experiments with new materials and the
organized sound mentioned in Vareses article [Organized Sound for the
Sound Film]. . . . I didnt ever really want to write about what I felt about
your article, because I was disappointed in it.
136
Cowells reaction to this frank criticism was typically thick-skinned, and re-
lations between the two seem not to have suffered. After Cage and his wife
Xenia moved to New York in 1942, interaction with Cowell became frequent.
When Sidney Robertson traveled to California to secure a pardon for Cowell
from the governor that December, for example, Cowell used Cage as a phone
contact.
137
Two months later, Cage premiered Ostinato Pianissimo at the
Museum of Modern Art.
134. Henry Cowell, Drums along the Pacic, Modern Music 18, no. 1 (Nov./Dec. 1940):
47.
135. Letter, Cage to Cowell, 8 January 1941.
136. Ibid.
137. Letter, Henry Cowell to Sidney Robertson Cowell, 7 December [1942] (NYPL Cowell
Collection, box 21, folder 640): I still havent made up my mind where to go, but Ill keep in
touch by phoning at least daily to Ted, and also, in case of a night call, Ill be in touch with John
Cage, 550 Hudson St, phone Watkins 9-6235.
Thus the tables began to turn. Cage, increasingly independent, helped pro-
mote the work of his former teacher. Years later he acknowledged Cowells in-
uence. In his essay History of Experimental Music in the United States,
Cage wrote that Henry Cowell was for many years the open sesame for new
music in America. . . . From him, as from an efcient information booth, you
could always get not only the address and telephone number of anyone work-
ing in a lively way in music, but you could also get an unbiased introduction
from him as to what that anyone was doing.
138
In addition to introducing
Cage to people, however, we have seen that Cowell introduced him to skills
and concepts that had a profound effect on Cages development. From teach-
ing Cage to run the recorder and instructing him in ethnic musics in which
rhythm and melody assumed greater importance than harmony
139
to advocat-
ing and classifying sliding tones, promoting percussion music, developing
forms in which small units mirrored the macrostructure, and providing a
model for indeterminate performance, Cowell not only helped direct Cages
work in the 1930s, but also laid the foundation for many ideas that would be-
come crucial to Cage in future years.
Conclusion
Let us return now to the complex questions of inuence raised at the begin-
ning of this article, for, as we have seen, the antecedents of Cages develop-
ment have been tracedby himself or by commentators and criticsto
numerous composers (as well as painters, writers, and philosophers): Varse,
Russolo, Chvez, Russell, Seeger, Satie, Toch, Boulez, Feldman, Schoenberg,
and many others in addition to Cowell. Cage cited some of these inuences
repeatedly; others he mentioned only rarely. Determining direct lineage for
Cages work (or that of any other composer, for that matter) is not only com-
plicated, but probably impossible; and it is particularly complex given the
rapid, multidirectional dissemination of ideas among the ultramodernists in
the mid-twentieth century. Cages own comments, of course, are crucial; but
they are by no means the only source we should consider. Memory is selective
at best, unreliable at worst. (As Nicholls, Patterson, and others have shown,
Cages memorylike that of many othershas proven inaccurate in many
details.)
138. Cage, History of Experimental Music in the United States, 71.
139. For example, in The Nature of Melody, Cowell writes: Harmony is a less fundamen-
tal element than rhythm and melody are. Rhythm and melody were employed for no one knows
how many years. . . before anything that could be called harmony became a part of musical art;
and even today, all the music of the world employs melody and rhythm, whereas harmony as an
art is used only in the music of the European system (quoted in Gann, Subversive Prophet,
203). Harrison often noted that Cowell emphasized this point in his courses.
Furthermore, the repeated retelling of personal history often generates
mythologies. Cage, who was extremely articulate, told and retold the same
stories in his many interviewsa valuable medium to be sure, but one that
tends to elicit concrete, uncomplicated answers, and favor the colorful over
the prosaic. (The story of Fischinger and the spirit of objects being released by
their sounds is a good example; it forms a much more compelling tale than re-
calling a performance of Ionisation or citing Cowells publications of percus-
sion music.) Mythologies about Cage have proliferated and been embellished
over the years until they now form a body of accepted and oft-repeated lore.
That is not to say that we should dismiss Cages citations of inuence, of
courseonly that we must look beyond them.
140
Such selective attributions by Cage (like Cowells failure to acknowledge
Seeger in some cases) do not reect an attempt to disguise conceptual models;
rather, they suggest a line of transmission so complex and intertwined that the
ideas origin has become unclear. In addition, we should not nd it surprising
that Cage focused attention on composers whose aesthetic aims correlated
closely with his own. As a case in point, he noted in a 1940 letter to Peter
Yates that the work of Russolo and Varse was more consistent with his own
aims in the area of percussion music than the goals of composers interested in
folk and primitive and oriental music, such as Bartok, Chavez, and perhaps
others. Eicheim. Maybe Cowell. (He characterized the philosophy of this lat-
ter group as getting back to the earth business.) The only commonality
among the percussion composers, Cage concluded, was a desire to organize
results of an exploration of sound and rhythm made through the use of per-
cussion, mechanical, electrical and lm means. . . . [Otherwise] their aesthetic
points of view differ.
141
Indeed, the aesthetic points of view of Cage and Cowell were often at
odds. Cowell valued recording equipment for its ability to preserve deteriorat-
ing eld recordings and document new works. Cage turned the recorder into
a musical instrument. Cowell taught about sliding tones in Asian musics, used
them in compositions for instruments and voices, and developed ways to de-
ne and classify them.
142
Cage combined the ideal of sliding tones with elec-
140. My own biography of Lou Harrison (with Fredric Lieberman) provides a similar exam-
ple. Originating as an oral history, my coauthor and I heardas with Cagethe same stories of
historical development again and again. It was only through talking with nearly fty other associ-
ates that a full picture of Harrisons work emerged.
141. Citations in this paragraph from the letter of Cage to Yates, 24 December 1940.
142. For Asian inuences on Cage, see various writings by David Patterson, for example:
Appraising the Catchwords, c. 19421959: John Cages Asian-Derived Rhetoric and the His-
torical Reference of Black Mountain College (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1996); and his
essays Cage and Asia: History and Sources, in The Cambridge Companion to John Cage, ed.
David Nicholls, 4159 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and The Picture That
Is Not in the Colors, in John Cage: Music, Philosophy, and Intention, ed. Patterson, 177215
(New York and London: Routledge, 2002). See also Pritchett, The Music of John Cage, esp. 36
38 and 7478.
tronically generated sounds, using them to dene rhythm- and motive-based
forms. Cowell developed the concept of having smaller structural units reect
the pattern of larger ones to create coherence in compositions with options
for expansion or contraction. Cage built this multi-level organizational princi-
ple into a micro-macrocosmic precompositional system, which he worked out
in increasingly exquisite detail in larger and larger works over the following
decade. Perhaps most importantly, Cowell developed elastic forms for the
practical purpose of writing music suitable for the dance; Cage, building on
this model, recognized the potential of creating works whose inherent princi-
ple was their unpredictability, works that changed from one performance to
the next.
For Cowell, elastic forms and micro-macrocosmic structures were inti-
mately linked, the latter providing the logic that made the former coherent.
For Cage these two concepts became separated. Micro-macrostructure was
simply one type of formal organization, depending on rhythm as a primary
dening principle. Using such structures, Cage could at once maintain a con-
nection with the past (cited in the last paragraph of his Future of Music
essay) and yet move away from pitch- or harmony-based systems. Elasticity in
form, on the other hand, did not manifest itself in Cages work until later,
when he began to adopt an open-arms model, inviting others to share in the
compositional process, as Cowell had in the 1930s. In Cowells case, the col-
laborator was a choreographer, performer, or composer authorized to alter a
works length or build a piece out of cells he provided. Despite the collabora-
tion, the resulting compositions reected Cowells voice, though their length
and form might be determined by others and governed by extramusical fac-
tors such as the needs of the dance. Cage, on the other hand, took the notion
of collaborative composition in a direction Cowell had not envisioned, using it
to serve a radical goal: the subjugation of his own intentionality. By welcom-
ing the input of a greater and greater number of cocomposersand permit-
ting the sounds themselves to be determined by factors out of his control
Cage attempted to undermine his own preferences. To cite but one of
many examples: in Variations V (1965) three assisting composers played tapes
and radios while Cage and David Tudor worked the dials on a fty-channel
mixer; but ultimately none of these ve composer-performers had any control
over the audible sound, which reached the loudspeakers through the interac-
tion of Cunninghams dancers with a set of capacitance antennas and photo-
cells on the stage.
143
On a conceptual plane, Cowell, along with Varse, opened Cages mind to
the idea of a limitless tonal universe, Cage acknowledged in the 1970s.
144
143. For more on this topic, see Leta E. Miller, Cage, Cunningham, and Collaborators:
The Odyssey of Variations V, Musical Quarterly 85 (2001): 54567; and idem, Cages Col-
laborations, in The Cambridge Companion to John Cage, ed. David Nicholls, 15168 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
144. Cage, For the Birds, 74.
Cages objective, as he told Daniel Charles, was sounds, quite simply.
Sounds, pure and simple. Whether it was tone clusters and other extended
piano techniques, which pointed towards noise and a continuum of
timbre,
145
or the musics of peoples outside the Western art-music tradition,
Cowells passionate advocacy of unacceptable sounds legitimized the
explorations of many younger composers, among them Cage. In 1931 he
wrote: The most important single musical activity is creation. All there is to
say has not been said in musical composition. . . . There is a great deal of new
beauty to be found in the expression of every phase of contemporary life and
activity, exquisite exhilaration in the discovery of new musical materials and
nding their uses in musical expression through the building of new music
structures.
146
Cowells second major conceptual contribution to Cages development
was his advocacy of hybriditythe creation of novel works based on combin-
ing the sounds of various sources or cultures.
147
But creating successful hy-
brids also required training and skill. He wrote to Aaron Copland in 1937: I
think we are in entire agreement as to trends toward simplicity, but a simplicity
in which all of our best training and ability is preserved. Thats the real rub.
Its a matter requiring the greatest technique and ability to do this. I nd best
for me the idea of attaining simplicity by unifying seemingly complex ele-
ments, and using them so that they seem simple. . . .
148
Cage brought his prodigious skills and imagination to bear on combining
the various inuences he encountered: be it percussion, sliding tones, elec-
tronic sounds, rhythmic structures, Asian musics, extended instrumental tech-
niques, or ideas of elasticity. While his aesthetic goals may have differed in
fundamental ways from those of Cowell, Cage inherited from his teacher an
open-mindedness, an adventurousness, a thirst for new sounds, and the
authorization to combine them in novel ways that led him to question and
ultimately redene our conception of the very idea of music.
145. Cage, History of Experimental Music in the United States, 71.
146. Cowell, Creation and Imitation: A Dissertation on New Music, Fortnightly 1, no. 6
(20 Nov. 1931): 5.
147. See, for example, Oriental Inuence on Western Music (published in MusicEast
and West, Executive Committee for the 1961 Tokyo East-West Music Encounter, 1961), a paper
Cowell read in Tokyo in 1961. I want to make a plea also for preserving that sort of hybrid music
coming into being, he told the conference delegates.
148. Letter, Cowell to Copland, 17 September 1937 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 97).
Appendix A Main Events Cited in This Article
1930
18 June Neue Musik Berlin festival concert with music for records;
Cage is in the audience.
1931
Oct.Dec. Cowell in Berlin; buys copy of the Berlin archives 120-
cylinder demonstration collection for the New School in
New York.
1932
Sept.Dec. Cowell in Berlin; buys records of world musics for the
New School, Chvez, and himself.
1933
Jan. Cowell rents a machine to copy cylinder recordings onto
discs.
10 Jan. Letter, Cowell to Ives: Cowell proposes making records of
new music.
Mar. Cowell publishes Russells percussion octet in New Music.
6 Mar. Premiere of Varses Ionisation, New York (Cowell plays
piano, Slonimsky conducts).
between mid- New Music Society Workshop, San Francisco; Cage
April and mid- demonstrates his Sonata for Clarinet.
July
14 July Cages name and phone number are written in Cowells
calendar.
16 July Slonimsky conducts Ionisation at the Hollywood Bowl;
Cage is in the audience.
26 Oct. Letter, Cage to Cowell: Cage requests career advice.
22 Nov. Postcard, Cowell to Slonimsky: First record for New
Music Recording series made yesterday.
1934
Jan. Cowell teaches percussion course at the Mundstock dance
studio, San Francisco.
Mar. Letter, Cage to Weiss: request for composition lessons.
Mar. Cowell nishes writing Ostinato Pianissimo.
28 May Cowell directs Ionisation in San Francisco.
Fall Cage moves to New York to study with Weiss.
1 Oct. Cowells Primitive and Folk Origins of Music course
begins; Cowell teaches Cage to run the recorder.
15 Dec. and ff. Cage rides with Cowell from New York to California.
30 Dec. Letter, Cowell to Olive Cowell: Im setting up New Music
Society in Los Angeles with Cage.
1935
Mar. Letter, Cage to Cowell: expresses warmth and thanks.
13 Apr. House concert, Los Angeles, arranged by Cage:
shakuhachi music by Kitaro Tamada.
Oct. Cowell begins teaching percussion for dancer Hanya
Holm at Wigman School, New York
1936
Cowell publishes percussion ensemble works inNew Music.
May Cornish School begins its radio school program.
21 May Arrest warrant brought to Cowells home in Menlo Park.
18 June Letter, Cage to Cowell: distress over Cowells arrest.
1937
Jan. Cowells article on elastic form published in the Dance
Observer
23 Mar. Letter, Cowell to Cage: advice on percussion, future of
music.
1938
26 June10 July Cage meets dancer/choreographer Bonnie Bird through
Lou Harrison.
19 Sept. Letter, Sidney Robertson to Cowell: Cage describes elastic
form to her.
Fall Cage moves to Seattle.
(before 7 Oct.)
9 Dec. Cages rst percussion concert at the Cornish School,
Seattle; he programs works from Cowells 1936 collection
as well as his own Quartet and Trio.
1939
Jan. Cowell completes music for Birds Marriage at the Eiffel
Tower.
Mar. Letters, Cowell to Becker and Cowell to Slonimsky prais-
ing Cages work.
1926 Mar. Cowell completes composition of Pulse.
24 and 25 Mar. Marriage at the Eiffel Tower and Imaginary Landscape
No. 1 performed in Seattle.
19 May Cages second percussion concert, Cornish School (in-
cludes Cowells Pulse).
27 July Cages concert of modern American percussion music,
Mills College, Oakland.
9 Dec. Cages third percussion concert, Cornish School (includes
Cowells Pulse and Return); Cage quotes Cowell on the
future of music.
1940
14 Feb. Concert of percussion ensemble music, Reed College,
Portland.
18 Feb. Cage delivers Future of Music lecture at the Seattle
Artists League.
26 June Cowell paroled and released from prison; moves to New
York.
18 July Cages second percussion concert at Mills College; future
of music quotation repeated.
Nov.Dec. Cowells Drums along the Pacic published in Modern
Music.
1941
9 Jan. Letter, Cage to Cowell: expresses disappointment with
Drums along the Pacic
1943
7 Feb. Cage conducts premiere of Ostinato Pianissimo in New
York.
Appendix B Letter from Henry Cowell to John Cage, 23 March
1937 (NYPL Cowell Collection, box 97 [copy] and box 115
[original])
Dear John,
I am very glad indeed to hear from you, and wish that you would write more
often; I would like to keep close track of what you are writing, and the direc-
tion it takes, and could do this to a certain extent if you tell me about it. Do
not try to send me any of your manuscripts, however, as I cannot receive such
things. Too bad. I will have to wait until sometime when I am out to see
them. We cant know how long that will be until August. Yes, I was pleased to
hear that you are interested in percussion developments. I was just on the
point of trying to form a sort of symphonic percussion ensemble in SF and an-
other in NY before my arrest, and so of course heartily approve of your move
in the direction in LA. I am so glad you have some rehearsers. That is the main
thing. I am sure that the value of study with Schoenberg is now past for you.
It has a great valueI know the whole business well, having been in his Berlin
class. He would never, never, permit you to create, ever. Now is high time for
you to do so. But of course, in your own chosen eld of creation, principles of
ne-wrought construction must also apply, and while not necessarily adopting
those of S., the way of building up such things is shown through contact with
him. I know how natural it is to react against the retrogrades, etc. of poly-
phonic form-devices; but the best is to remain balanced, not prejudiced
against them because they were too vigorously crammed down your throat!
I think very well of your new percussion center plan, and wish you would
push ahead with it. If I can help, I will. Of course, Strang knows everyone that
I would, down there, who might be interested. I have lost contact with the
South, except for a few people. I suppose you know Still, Antheil? If not, in-
troduce yourself, saying I said so. I dont know any to rehearse. I would be
glad to lend you instruments, if someone wanted to bring them down, and
someone (you perhaps) would be responsible for getting them back to me
eventually. They are at my fathers. I dont know just what is there. Flade has
some of them at Mills that could be used. It is not a very dazzling array. I hon-
estly believe, and formally predict, that the immediate future of music lies in
the bringing of percussion on [the] one hand, and sliding tones on the other,
to as great a state of perfection in construction of composition and exibility
of handling on instruments as older elements are now. This means that one
thing to do rst is to contact a shop where instruments can be made. Work on
the constructing of new percussion instruments, and arrange so that many can
be controlled by one player. I am sure that with limited nances, grand and
astonishing percussion instruments can be developed. I think a craft shop for
drum-making would be a commercial success, also. All dance studios want
them. It is impossible to write at enough length to give an idea of Hindu
rhythm; Fox-Strangways book on Music of Hindustan has it in rather in-
volved terms. Visit me someday and I will explain it to you. I think it is needed
to put the theory in clear form. I will try to do it when my melody book is
done. That is for beginners, but has some good ideas. It is an introduction to
the new and experimental work that might be done. My rhythmicon (uses di-
rect current and is rather in pieces but can be put together) is at Stanford
Psychology dept. could be borrowed, for any grand spread of this idea. It is
very clumsy, about a yard square (one of the three pieces) and weighs about
150 pounds. I have two Indian (East) drums in NY at Lahiris. Try making a
water drumshaped like tympani, a little water in lower kettle part, either
tone is struck, circle water gently for glissandi. It is one of their more effective
instruments. Vareses address is 188 Sullivan St. NYC. You could get a score of
Ionization from Dene Denny in Carmel by writing.
James and Ann Mundstock of 535 Sacramento St. SF want a percussion
musician for this summer. They asked Strang, but couldnt afford to meet his
guarantee. I told them of you. Perhaps you could confer with them and him
and might like to come up.
Give my warmest regards to Pauline, Buhlig, Galka and any other friends
you may see.
Warm greetings to you
As ever
Henry
Appendix C Program Notes by Cage for a Percussion Ensemble
Concert at Reed College, Portland, Oregon, 14 February 1940
The principal purpose of percussion music is to explore the materials of music:
sound and rhythm. The search is directed principally towards those elds of
sound which have, in our classical music, been considered not musical.
The sounds which have been accepted as musical are surprisingly few. Many
variations of sound quality, amplitude, pitch and duration are yet to be found
and used. In the realm of pitch, for example, we have yet to explore the possi-
bilities of sliding tones. Some composers of percussion music have made use of
sirens, slide whistles, gongs struck while being lowered into the water, and the
glissandi available on pedal timpani. Perhaps, in the near future, we will have
electrical instruments which, when dials are turned, buttons pushed, etc., will
give us everything we want: free access to sound. Machines will be invented
which will play rhythms which human beings could not. Experiments in this
direction have resulted in Henry Cowells Rhythmicon and Baetzs Rhythm
Rotor, instruments capable of playing complicated cross rhythms.
Percussion music is like an arrow pointing to the whole unexplored eld of
sound. It will be thought of in the future as a transition from the limited music
of the Nineteenth century to the unlimited freedom of electronic music.
The present percussion orchestra includes a vast assortment of instruments
ranging from the conventional Chinese gongs and tom-toms, through folk in-
struments of Cuba and our own Indians, to unconventional instruments such
as the washboard, automobile parts and RCA test records of constant and
variable frequency. [Note: turntables and test records were not used in any
works on the Reed College program. The only compositions by Cage on the
program were the Second Construction and the early Quartet.]
Many modern American composers are writing in this new medium:
Edgard Varese, Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison, Franziska Boas, Ray Green,
J. M. Beyer, William Russell, as well as others.
Listening to the music of these composers is quite different from listening
to the music, say, of Beethoven. In the latter case, we are temporarily pro-
tected or transported from the noises of every-day [sic] life. In the case of per-
cussion music, however, we nd that we have mastered and subjugated noise.
We become triumphant over it and our ears become sensitive to its beauties.
Works Cited
Interviews, Correspondence, and Other Manuscript Materials
Announcement for concert at the International House, Berkeley, on 26 February
[1935]. NYPL Cowell Collection, box 143.
Announcement for New Music Society members-only concert on 1 April 1935. New
York Public Library [NYPL] Cowell Collection, box 143.
Avakian, George. Letter to the author, 23 July 1997.
Brown, Earle. Letter to Peter Yates, 20 Jan. 1967. Yates Papers, Mandeville Special
Collections Library, University of California, San Diego.
Cage, John. The Future of Music. Manuscript of preliminary version in the John
Cage Collection, Northwestern University Music Library, Evanston, IL.
. Letters to Cowell, 26 October 1933; undated (end of March 1935); undated
(April 1935); 18 June 1936, 8 August 1940, 16 August 1940, 23 August 1940,
12 September 1940, 27 September 1940, 3 October 1940, 28 October 1940, and
8 January 1941. NYPL Cowell Collection, box 2, folders 44 and 45; and box 95.
. Letter to Adolph Weiss, undated, but probably March 1934. Transcribed in
William George, Adolph Weiss, PhD diss., University of Iowa, 1971.
. Letter to Peter Yates, 24 December 1940. Yates Papers, Mandeville Special
Collections Library, University of California, San Diego.
Cowell, Henry. Enrollment sheet for his course Primitive and Folk Origins of Music
(New School, New York). NYPL Cowell Collection, box 146, folder 91.
. Interview by Beate Gordon, 1962. Transcript in NYPL Cowell Collection,
box 72.
. Interview by Louis Vaczek, 18 June 1962. Transcript in NYPL Cowell Col-
lection, box 72.
. Letter(s) and postcard(s) to:
Bla Bartk, undated. NYPL Cowell Collection, box 16, folder 497.
John Becker, 31 January 1938 and 14 March 1939. NYPL Cowell Collection,
box 97.
Bonnie Bird, 2 April 1939. Private collection.
John Cage, 23 March 1937. NYPL Cowell Collection, box 97 (copy) and box
115 (original).
Carlos Chvez, 11 September 1932. NYPL Cowell Collection, box 18, folder
528.
Aaron Copland, 17 September 1937. NYPL Cowell Collection, box 97.
Harry Cowell, 1 February 1939. NYPL Cowell Collection, box 97.
Harry and Olive Cowell, 11 December 1931, 8 January 1933, 4 October 1933,
26 December 1938, and 29 August 1939. NYPL Cowell Collection, box
18, folders 521, 531, and 536; and box 97.
Olive Cowell, 27 October, 7 November, and 21 November 1931; also 1 June
1932, 1 December 1934, 15 December [1934], 30 December 1934,
26 September 1937, 4 March 1939, and 27 July 1939. NYPL Cowell
Collection, box 17, folder 519; box 18, folders 520, 527, 540, and 640; and
box 97.
Sidney Robertson (Cowell), 8 August 1938 and 7 December [1942]. NYPL
Cowell Collection, box 97 and box 21, folder 640.
Percy Grainger, 3 December 1937. NYPL Cowell Collection, box 97.
Charles Ives, 14 November 1931, 10 January 1933, 14 March 1934, and
2 October 1934. NYPL Cowell Collection, box 18, folders 520, 531, 538,
and 539. Also: undated letter to Ives in box 21, folder 647.
Nicolas Slonimsky, 14 February 1933, 22 November 1933 (postcard),
23 January 1934, 26 March 1939, and 29 May 1939. NYPL Cowell
Collection, box 18, folders 532, 537, 538; and box 97.
Blanche Walton, 19 March 1939. NYPL Cowell Collection, box 97.
Adolph Weiss, 7 March 1934. NYPL Cowell Collection, box 18, folder 538.
. Miscellaneous calendars. NYPL Cowell Collection, box 72.
. The Nature of Melody. Unpublished treatise, ca. 193637. Manuscript
materials are in the NYPL Cowell Collection, box 126.
. Rhythm Book. Unpublished treatise, ca. 193738. Manuscript materials are
in the NYPL Cowell Collection, box 115.
. Sound Form No. 1. Manuscript score and six pages of performance instruc-
tions. Cowell Collection. Music Division, Library of Congress.
. Synchrony. Manuscript short score of the original version. Cowell Collection.
Music Division, Library of Congress.
. United Quartet, composers analysis. NYPL Cowell Collection, JPB 0163.
Cowell, Sidney Robertson. Annotation (14 December 1988) on a letter of 11 Septem-
ber 1932 from Henry Cowell to Carlos Chvez. NYPL Cowell Collection, box 18,
folder 528.
. Letter to Henry Cowell, 19September 1938. NYPL Cowell Collection, box 95.
Graham, Martha. Letter to Olive Cowell, 20 March 1937. NYPL Cowell Collection,
box 95.
Harrison, Lou. Interviews by Leta E. Miller and Fredric Lieberman, 29 December
1993 and 31 March 1994.
Slonimsky, Nicolas. Letters to Cowell, 7 March 1934 and 14 October 1934. NYPL
Cowell Collection, box 13, folder 387.
Strang, Gerald. Letter to Olive Cowell, 26 May 1936. NYPL Cowell Collection, box
96.
Tamada, Kitaro Nyohyo. Letter to Henry Cowell, 14 March 1934. NYPL Cowell
Collection, box 14, folder 411.
Weiss, Adolph. Letter to Cowell, 18 March 1934. NYPL Cowell Collection, box 16,
folder 460.
Published Works, Dissertations, and Theses
Bernstein, David. Music I: To the Late 1940s. In The Cambridge Companion to John
Cage, edited by David Nicholls, 6384. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002.
Boren, Virginia. Cornish Dance Group Gives Refreshing Concert, Seattle Times,
8 May 1940.
Brown, Katherine M. The Work of Mary Wigman. MS thesis, University of Utah,
1955.
Bulletin of the New York Musicological Society. 193134.
Cage, John. A Composers Confessions. Address at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie,
New York, 28 February 1948. Published in Musicworks 52 (Spring 1992): 615;
reprinted in John Cage, Writer: Previously Uncollected Pieces, edited by Richard
Kostelanetz. New York: Limelight Editions, 1993, 2744.
. Composition as Process. In Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press, 1961, 1834.
. For the Birds: John Cage in Conversation with Daniel Charles. Boston and
London: Marion Boyars, 1981.
. The Future of Music: Credo. In Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961, 36. Manuscript versions of original 1940
lecture in the John Cage Collection, Music Library, Northwestern University.
. History of Experimental Music in the United States. In Silence: Lectures and
Writings. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961, 6775.
. How the Piano Came to Be Prepared. In Empty Words: Writings 7378.
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1979, 79.
. John Cage, Writer: Previously Uncollected Pieces. Selected and introduced by
Richard Kostelanetz. New York: Limelight Editions, 1993.
. Notations. New York: Something Else Press, 1969.
. Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press,
1961.
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Music in a Democracy. PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 1963.
Cornish, Nellie C. Miss Aunt Nellie: The Autobiography of Nellie C. Cornish. Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 1964.
Cowell, Henry. Creation and Imitation: A Dissertation on New Music, Fortnightly
1, no. 6 (20 Nov. 1931): 56.
. Current Chronicle: NewYork,Musical Quarterly 38 (January 1952): 12336.
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Library Albums FE 45044508. LP recording, 195155.
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1930.
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1937): 1, 79.
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Fisher, Marjory. New Projects Promise Aid to Composers. San Francisco News,
18 Feb. 1933.
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(Missoula, MT), 11 Jan. 1940.
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ber 1940): 2045.
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(December 1996): 86106.
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Recordings
The 25-Year Retrospective Concert of the Music of John Cage. New York: Distributed by
George Avakian. Matrix no. K08Y 14991504. 3 LP discs, 1959. Remastered on 3
compact discs, 1994, Wergo WER 6247-2.
Cowell, Henry. Synchrony. CRI 217. LP recording, 1967. Remastered on compact
disc, 1997, Citadel CTD 88122.
Dancing with Henry: New Discoveries in the Music of Henry Cowell. Mode Records
101, Compact disc, 2001.
Demonstration Collection of E. M. Hornbostel and the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv.
Ethnic Folkways Library FE 4175. LP recording, 1963.
Abstract
This article explores, through examination of correspondence and other pri-
mary sources, the close interaction between Henry Cowell and John Cage
from 1933 to 1941 in the areas of percussion music, dance, world musics, the
prepared piano, electronic sounds, micro-macrocosmic forms, sliding tones,
and elastic composition. Several works are examined in detail, among them
Cowells Pulse (which anticipated Cages micro-macrocosmic forms in the
Constructions) and Cages Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (whose electronic
slides addressed Cowells prediction that the future of music lay in the per-
fection of percussion and sliding tones). A previously unavailable recording
of Imaginary Landscape No. 1 by Cages ensemble reveals an unexpected in-
terpretation of the score. Appendices present a chronology of events, a 1937
letter from Cowell to Cage, and a little-known set of Cages program notes
from 1940.

Henry Cowell An D John Cage. Intersections and Influences, 1933-1941

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