Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
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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)
Henry Cowell and John Cage 67
L
a
s
t
t
i
m
e
t
o
C
o
d
a
, ,
,
/
,
;
;
;
;
; ;
;
;
;
; ;
[ ]
.
[ ]
7
10
14
Example 1 continued
68 Journal of the American Musicological Society
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.
Henry Cowell and John Cage 69
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.)
70 Journal of the American Musicological Society
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).
Henry Cowell and John Cage 71
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).
72 Journal of the American Musicological Society
Figure 3 Program for Cages third percussion concert at the Cornish School, Seattle,
9 December 1939
Henry Cowell and John Cage 73
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).
74 Journal of the American Musicological Society
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
Henry Cowell and John Cage 75
Example 2 continued
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;
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;
;
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_
_
_
_
_
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
76 Journal of the American Musicological Society
.
.
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.
.
.
;
.
.
,,
,,
,,
;
;
.
.
,,
.
.
;
;
.
.
_
_
_
_
_
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
Henry Cowell and John Cage 77
Example 2 continued
(b) Mm. 2433 (end of section A and beginning of section B)
.
.
.
.
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.
,,
,
/
,
_
_
_
_
_
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
78 Journal of the American Musicological Society
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
Henry Cowell and John Cage 79
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.
80 Journal of the American Musicological Society
,
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,
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,
;
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,
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,
;
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/
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,
= 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)
Henry Cowell and John Cage 81
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.
82 Journal of the American Musicological Society
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.
Henry Cowell and John Cage 83
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.
84 Journal of the American Musicological Society
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.
Henry Cowell and John Cage 85
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).
86 Journal of the American Musicological Society
Figure 5 Schematic diagram of the form of Cages Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939)
Henry Cowell and John Cage 87
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).
88 Journal of the American Musicological Society
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