The Piano Musi Of Henry Cornell - Doris Hays

 

The Piano Music Of Henry Cowell

The Piano Music Of Henry Cowell

Doris Hays

Produced by Ilhan Mimaroglu

Cover Photography: Dave Whitten

Liner Photo of Doris Hays: David Gahr

Liner Photo of Henry Cowell: Courtesy of BMI Archives

Art Direction and Cover Design: Lynn Breslin

Recording Engineer: George Piros - Atlantic Recording Studios, New York, N.Y.

Finnadar Records SP 9016

Distributed  buy Atlantic Recording Corporation

A Warner Comminications Company

1977

From the back cover: The vitality of a musical culture is apparent from the way its traditions are investigated, tested, tinkered with and generally overhauled. Henry Cowell was one investigator who influenced countless composers and listeners through his compositions, his teaching and numerous concert tours around the world performing his piano music.

Henry Cowell was born in Menlo Park, California, in 1897. He began his experiments in sound production at the keyboard, using fists, forearms and palms to produce masses of adjacent seconds which he called tone clusters. His earliest-known piece using clusters is entitled Adventures in Harmony, completed when he was about fifteen. From that time into the thirties, Cowell wrote dozens of pieces using tone clusters in a surprising variety of ways. Sometimes the cluster is pictorially program- matic, as the ostinato bass clusters imaging the pulse of waves in The Tides of Manaunaun; or is used as accenting tone mass, in Advertisement; or, for special colorative effects, as in The Voice of Lir.

Cowell also explored possibilities provided by the strings of the grand piano: damping strings at various nodes for timbre and Bitch change (Sinister Resonance); scraping and rubbing the windings of bass strings (The Banshee); and strumming and plucking strings (Aeolian Harp).

Henry Cowell began concertizing outside of the U.S. in the twenties; he gave his first concert in Europe in 1923. It was after a successful visit to Russia in 1928 that the Russian government published Tiger and The Lilt of the Reel, a first in publishing for an American in Soviet Russia. In mid-1950s Cowell and his wife toured the Middle and Far East under State Department and The Rockefeller Foundation auspices. He composed symphonic works which carry the spirit of his impressions of oriental scales and rhythmic modes gathered during these trips and from childhood influences of Chinese and other cultures in California-Ongaku, the Madras Symphony, Persian Set, Concerto for Koto.

The relationship of dissonance to consonance and the functions of overtones in harmonic theory which Cowell had explored instinctively. in his early tone cluster pieces, he then organized into carefully formulated ideas, published in the twenties as New Musical Resources, which was reissued in 1969 by Something Else Press, In 1927 he began the New Music Edition, a quarterly that published compositions of many composers who are now considered among the finest of this century including Berg, Chavez, Copland, Vivian Fine Ives, Dane Rudhyar, Ruggles and Ruth Crawford Seeger. He taught at the New School for Social Research in New York City. His wide acquaintance among living composers made of him a continuing contact center and information exchange on several continents.

Henry Cowell died December 10, 1965, at his home in Shady, New York."

The Voice of Lir (ca. 1918): "Lir of the half tongue was the father of the gods, and of the universe. When he gave the orders for creation, the gods who executed his commands understood but half of what he said, owing to his having only half a tongue; with the result that for everything that has been created there is an unexpressed and concealed counterpart, which is the other half of Lir's plan of creation." John Varian*

One of the wittier pieces, Advertisement (1914, revised in 1959) is Cowell's representation of Times Square, its lights, car horns, crowds and general bustle. In the middle of the piece, two passages of fist clusters are repeated ad lib, as one might see the signs flashing above the busy streets.

Anger Dance (ca. 1917) contains several passages to be repeated a number of times as a rather repressed fury builds.

Amiable Conversation (ca. 1914)-an (un) amiable such in a Chinese laundry, with the three-level pitch intonation of the Cantonese speech common in San Francisco when Cowell was a child. Tone cluster repartee moves back and forth between right and left arm.

The Tides of Manaunaun (1912): "Manaunaun was the god of motion, and long before the creation, he sent forth tremendous tides, which swept to and fro through the universe, and rhythmically moved the particles and materials of which the gods were later to make the suns and worlds."-Varian.

"In Aeolian Harp (ca. 1923) chords are silently depressed by the left hand, the right hand fingers strum across that string area inside the piano and the chord tones sound without a percussive hammer stroke. Strings are also plucked, and by placing or strumming the strings both behind the dampers and in front of them nearer the string pins, different timbres are obtained. It's a fairly strong wind that blows over this lyre.

This is the first disc interpretation of The Hero Sun. It was published in 1922 as part of Three Irish Legends, along with The Tides of Manaunaun and The Voice of Lir. "The gods created all the suns and sent them out into space. But these suns instead of lighting the universe, congregated closely together, enjoying each others' society, and the universe was in darkness. Then one of the gods told the suns of a place where the people were living in misery on account of the lack of light, and a strong young sun rose and hurled himself out into the darkness, until he came to this place, which was our earth; and the Hero Sun who sacrificed the companionship of the other suns to light the earth is our Sun." – Varian.

In Tiger (ca. 1928) chords built on major sevenths and massive tone clusters are the basic sound elements. Many of the techniques of cluster sound are used: both forearms fully extended with the hand to play all keys within a four-octave span in passages marked ff-ffff; flat of hand, fists, silently depressed chords of sympathetic vibration following ferociously loud clusters.

The Six Ings (Copyright date, 1922) are among the most delicate pieces Cowell wrote, if Seething and Frisking and Scooting can be called delicate because of their framework which, like an eloquently simple setting of a polished stone, however unimportant the stone, allows it a certain preciousness.

Dynamic Motion (1914) is one of the more abstract sound structures Cowell built. Opening measures make use of sympathetic vibration with silent depression of a chord, then sharply detached and accented subsequent chords related to overtones of the first chord. The sound result is light pings of overtones released indirectly, as pungent odors momentarily wafted. At one extremely loud point where a cluster is repeated by the left hand palm sixteen times, the composer calls for the right fist to press down the left hand for each repetition, which lends a certain intensity to the sound.

The Harp of Life (ca. 1925): "In Irish mythology the God of Life, who was called the Dagna, possessed the Harp of Life, whose sound-post extended above the ridge of heaven, while the pedal-stool was beneath hell; and the strings were stretched across time and space, and into eternity; and with each tone the Dagna played upon this mighty instrument, something came to life in the universe."-Varian.

What's This? (ca. 1915), published as First Encore to Dynamic Motion, is almost as short as the question,

Sinister Resonance (ca. 1930) opens with the lowest strings of the piano finger-damped at various points to produce different pitches. By damping strings in various ranges of the piano at different points along their lengths, varying overtones are augmented or suppressed and the timbral character is changed.

Fabric (ca. 1917): Within each measure in 2/4 time, three contrapuntal lines weave a texture of contrasting rhythms, dividing the whole two beats into 6 parts along with 3 parts and 8 parts in the other voices; or other combinations such as 7 to 5 to 8 parts, or 6 to 4 to 9 parts. Cowell used his own notation (various note heads) which indicated these divisions by the part of a whole note they represent, not by the usual subdivisions by halves (i.e. whole, half, quarter, eighth) which becomes confusing when odd numbers such as half-note triplets are to be represented. Cowell proposed 2/3 notes, 4/5 notes, etc.

An antinomy is a contradiction between principles each taken to be true, says Webster's. In Antinomy (ca. 1914) it occurs between clashing forearm clusters in chromatic and tonal scale passages, polyharmonic passages between hands and among curiously contrasting passages in this cemented structure.

The Trumpet of Angus Og (ca. 1922) contains hand platches on the white keys, clusters outlining the interval of a fifth, much as a child first handles the keyboard. Cowell subtitled the piece The Spirit of Youth.

The Banshee (ca. 1923), Irish haunt, wails and moans at the coming of death. These sounds, believe it or not, come from the rubbing of finger tips, scraping of finger nails and strumming of fingers and flat of hand along the windings of the bass strings inside the piano, plus an occasional string pluck in the middle range. The damper pedal is being held throughout-here by Güngör Bozkurt.

Maestoso (1938, published 1940 in New Music Edition, recorded here for the first time) uses secundal harmony as an inner voice, played by the fingers between outer octaves in the treble. The piece is a seldom example of Cowell's use of small clusters with finger technique, and a pointer for the direction his music took in later years away from the mystical muddiness of broad piles of massed seconds.

The Lilt of the Reel (ca. 1928) uses forearm and palm clusters as fattened tonal chords. As in the Irish dance, the music hurries and slows at points, but reverts always to the steady whirling 6/8. – Notes by DORIS HAYS

*In the titling and publication of his compositions Henry Cowell sometimes used John Varian's fanciful images for those listeners who required a programmatic association for his sound structures. John Varian's descriptions are quoted here by the kind permission of Associated Music Publishers Inc.

Born in Memphis, Tennessee, Doris Hays lived in Chattanooga until she was 21. Her earliest serious music study was with Harold Cadek in Chattanooga. Other teachers included Friedrich Wührer, Hedwig Bilgram and Oskar Koebel at the Munich Hochschule für Musik where she studied from 1963 to 1966 on a fellowship from the Bavarian Ministry of Culture. She also studied with Paul Badura-Skoda at the University of Wisconsin as a Zella Armstrong Fellow for Advanced Music Study. She discovered Henry Cowell while looking through the library of Ellsworth Snyder in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1967, and has been playing Cowell's piano music in her concerts ever since.

In 1971 she won First Prize in the Inter- national Competition for Interpreters of, New Music at Rotterdam. She has given many concerts for broadcasting stations and festivals in Holland, Germany, Italy and Yugoslavia, including the Como Festival, the Gaudeamus Composers' Week, and the May Festival with the Residence Orchestra at The Hague. Her performances in the United States include concerts on a number of university campuses, and lecture-recitals about repertoire and playing techniques of contemporary piano music.

She taught at the University of Wisconsin, Cornell .College, and Queens College of CUNY. In the autumn of 1975, she was Artist in Residence with the Georgia Council for the Arts. Doris Hays is also active as a composer and in 1976 organized and co-directed a concert series at the New School for Social Research in New York, called "Meet the Woman Composer." Since 1969 she has made her home in New York City.

Side One

1. THE VOICE OF LIR (4:29) 

2. ADVERTISEMENT (1:35) 

3. ANGER DANCE (1:33)
4. AMIABLE CONVERSATION (0:49) 

5. THE TIDES OF MANAUNAUN (3:00) 

6. AEOLIAN HARP (2:20) 

7. THE HERO SUN (3:40)
8. TIGER (3:14)
9. SIX INGS (8:05) a. Floating
   b. Frisking c. Fleeting d. Scooting
   e. Wafting
   f. Seething

Side Two

1. DYNAMIC MOTION (3:30) 

2. THE HARP OF LIFE (5:20) 

3. WHAT'S THIS? (0:51)
4. SINISTER RESONANCE (2:55) 

5. FABRIC (1:18)
6. ANTINOMY (3:20)
7. THE TRUMPET OF ANGUS OG (3:40)
8. THE BANSHEE (3:20)
9. MAESTOSO (3:32)
10. THE LILT OF THE REEL (1:55)