A Long-Overdue Tribute to California Composer Cowell

BERKELEY —  In the late ‘60s, music students at the University of California here liked to talk about the Cowell effect. That was the curious sonic sensation one experienced on weekends. The sounds of hippie drummers beating away in Sproul Plaza would gradually fade into the distance as one walked up the hill to the music building. They could still be heard outside but not inside. Closing the door would literally close the door to California music.

Henry Cowell, California’s first great composer--and, after Charles Ives, America’s second--had just died (in 1965). He had invented the whole idea of West Coast music, a music that took delight in the musics of all cultures and was optimistic about new musical possibilities especially concerning percussion.

But the music department at Berkeley was not proud that Cowell had studied there shortly before World War I, and it felt, as did most other American musical institutions at the time, that his influence on the century’s music, particularly on experimental composers who studied with him, was regrettable.

The fact that the newly formed Grateful Dead took a strong interest in Cowell’s musical experiments only confirmed this.

Cowell was born 100 years ago, March 11, in Menlo Park, and last weekend, with a festival of three concerts titled “Cowell and His Legacy” in Hertz Hall at Berkeley, it made amends for the neglect. The festival, which was conceived by a young Bay Area pianist, Sarah Cahill, revolved around Cowell’s piano music and the influence it had and continues to have on composers interested in extending the possibilities of the keyboard.

Cowell is best known for two things--his innovations with tone clusters and playing inside the piano, and his 1936 arrest for homosexuality and corrupting minors, which led to a 15-year sentence in San Quentin.

Both unfairly haunted the composer. In 1940, Gov. Culbert Olson, who felt that the evidence against Cowell appeared contrived, paroled the composer and gave him a full pardon in 1942. But the arrest had been front-page news, and Cowell’s career in California was ruined--he spent most of the rest of his life in New York, on the musical margins.

The newspapers were just as harmful to Cowell by sensationalizing his banging of the keys with fist and forearm and his strumming on the strings inside the piano. What was ignored about these modernist experiments was that they were not employed to deconstruct music but to enhance Cowell’s most notable trait--an exuberant sense of melody that knew no bounds.

Of Irish heritage, Cowell loved nothing better than an Irish tune, and what better way to make it leap out than have it played with great crashing piano noises. Tone clusters were to Cowell what arpeggios were to Tchaikovsky.

A great deal of music (but only a fraction of Cowell’s 950 works for all media) was played in the three Berkeley concerts (programs that lasted between three and four hours, each) by 15 different pianists who did a superb job of capturing the sense of joy and of breathtaking beauty in the best of Cowell’s piano music.

One will not soon forget Cahill’s delicate performance of “The Fairy Answer”--one of Cowell’s mythic Irish pieces--in which she answered each tuneful phrase played on the keys with a ghostly echo plucked on the strings and looked the part with her flowing red hair and long white gown. Nor will one forget Chris Brown making the keyboard explode in “Exultation.”

There was even Tom Constanten, former keyboardist of the Grateful Dead, playing some surprising, romantic, unpublished Cowell pieces as well as a Sonatina, full of clusters, he had written in 1962 for the 22nd birthday of Dead bass player Phil Lesh.

The local organization Bay Area Pianists, which sponsored the festival, hoped to make a further mark by commissioning composers who have continued in Cowell’s spirit.

Those who imitated him the least were the most interesting. The striking premieres were Carl Stone’s “Sa Rit Gol,” in which a Yamaha Disklavier was played live by Cahill and computer-driven by Stone at the same time, and Meredith Monk’s haunting “Steppe Music,” played by New Yorker Nurit Tilles with an extraordinary ability to make the piano resonate like a voice.