Henry Cowell: A Man Made of Music by Joel Sachs (review)

The work of several scholars stands out in the voluminous tapestry of Cowell research published since 1988, the year in which Joel Sachs was authorized by Sidney Robertson Cowell to begin work on the biography of her late husband Henry (xv). David Nicholls examined Cowell’s compositional contributions to modernist music in the United States and in 1996 also published an updated edition of New Musical Resources informed by documents in the Cowell archive.¹ In contrast, having been denied access to such materials, Michael Hicks used California’s state archives to document the circumstances behind Cowell’s imprisonment and in another article appraised Cowell’s use of tone clusters.² Finally, in 2002 Hicks released the first biography of the composer, focusing primarily on the effects of his unconventional upbringing, although the limited resources available led to a one-sided characterization of Cowell as an undisciplined bohemian.³ Steven Johnson shed light on Cowell’s connections with John Varian and the Halcyon community and analyzed the various compositional techniques that characterize Cowell’s oeuvre.⁴ Articles by Leta Miller have explained Cowell’s use of elastic form and his interactions with John Cage.⁵

Sachs organizes sixty-one chapters into a chronological sequence comprising six main sections: “Child to Man,” “International Ultramodernist Virtuoso,” “The Frenetic Years,” “Four Endless Years,” “Life Resumes,” and “World Traveler.” A prologue explains the various efforts to chronicle Henry’s life, including the extant sources resulting from the endeavors of Clarissa Dixon Cowell (Henry’s mother), Olive Thompson Cowell (his second stepmother), and Sidney Robertson Cowell (his wife); Sachs alludes to some complications that arise from these accounts. Beyond consulting the voluminous documents in the Cowell archive at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the author’s research is bolstered by consultation with an impressive number of other collections, some of which include those housed at the Bartók Archive in Budapest, Carnegie Hall, Columbia University, the Composers’ Union Library and Glinka Library in Moscow, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Jewish National University and Archive in Jerusalem, the New School University Library, Paul Sacher Stiftung, Stanford University, Temple of the People in Halcyon, California, Wesleyan University, Yale University, and the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive.

After twenty-four years of unfettered access to the Cowell collection, Joel Sachs is to be commended for writing a meticulously detailed biography covering the composer’s full lifespan, informed by the source documents in the Cowell archive to which Hicks and others were denied access. Sachs traces Cowell’s multifaceted efforts as a performer, lecturer, scholar, composer, and promoter serving within various organizations. By expanding his focus beyond Cowell’s alleged bohemian upbringing, Sachs presents a more complex view of the musician. Rather than portraying Cowell as exclusively undisciplined, Sachs provides various examples of a more systematic musician. Chapter 4, for instance, includes evidence that experiences from Cowell’s youth supported and nurtured his systematic thinking; he was unusually well read and engaged in the classification of California plant life. Sachs pays careful attention to Cowell’s hectic performance career and life-long systematic study and advocacy of musics from non-European cultures and also appraises Cowell’s correspondence as revealing “sharp commercial instincts” (123). This offers a welcome alternative reading that differs from that of Hicks, in which some evidence is interpreted as proof that Cowell was a liar and thief of others’ ideas.

Sachs acknowledges his lack of analytical discussion of Cowell’s music, which alternatively abounds in Hicks’s biography: “the complexity of Henry Cowell’s life made it impossible to fit a ‘life and works’ into one volume” (xv). However, many composers have complicated lives, and yet biographers still manage to carefully select musical works for discussion at the expense of other information. Analyses of Cowell’s works influenced by non-European musical systems would be especially welcome given the modest discourse currently available. Sachs’s subtitle, “A Man...