Charles Ives in the Mirror: American Histories of an Iconic Composer

2. Songs of Our Fathers The Advocacy of Henry Cowell and the Appeal of the American Past, 1927–1947

2 Songs of Our Fathers The Advocacy of Henry Cowell and the Appeal of the American Past, 1927–1947 Contemporary photographs show a young man dressed in an oversized tailcoat and pinstripe pants, his hair slightly longer than fashionable, earnestly pounding away at a grand piano with his fists and forearms or clawing with equal aplomb at the instrument’s innards. This was Henry Cowell at the zenith of his musical celebrity during the 1920s (Figure 2.1). Throughout the decade and into the early thirties, Cowell conducted a highly visible career as a concert pianist who performed his own works,attracting headlines around the world for the unusual way—brutal, in the estimation of some critics—in which he coaxed sounds from the piano.Undoubtedly,there was an element of the Barnumesque to his tours,but Cowell was also motivated by an insatiable curiosity about sound, a desire, as he later memorably put it, to live “in the whole world of music.”1 That world was brilliantly populous, where the Asian musics Cowell heard as a child in the Bay Area coexisted with the Amerindian music he discovered on scratchy field recordings as a university student; where the folk-infused idiom of Béla Bartók coexisted with the howl of a banshee,created by sliding a fingernail along a piano string; where the distant roar of an old Irish god resounded in the thunder of low-register tone clusters. Cowell was the most ecumenical of modernists .However,he did tend to view his world of music through lenses colored by American nationalism, a tincture that infused his activities as an impresario and critic much more than his performances or compositions. Ultimately, this proved to be more important than the flamboyant pianism that garnered him so much attention at the time; one of his most lasting legacies would be the advocacy work he did on behalf of Ives. Cowell’sideasaboutIveswerenotstatic,thoughtheyareconvenientlygrouped into two periods: those produced prior to the sentence he served at San Quentin Paul_Text.indd 37 3/1/13 10:06 AM 38 . Chapter 2 State Prison for a 1936 conviction on a morals charge, and those produced after his release in 1940.It is the writings of the earlier period that are my first concern in this chapter. They are animated by the belief that the distinctiveness of Ives’s music, the quality that made it definitively American, arose from a fealty to the idiosyncratic practices of amateur,small-town musicians.Ives,for Cowell,was a music ethnographer,and his greatest innovations sprang directly from his childhood experience of music in postbellum Danbury. Bythelatethirties,whenCowell’simprisonmenttemporarilysilencedhisvoice, the culture of places like Danbury was attracting attention from a large subset of American artists and intellectuals.The Concord writers of the nineteenth century, who had not fared so well in the early days of the American modernist movement, became the subject of a new vogue, and studies of Emerson, Thoreau, and their associates multiplied. This phenomenon is my second concern, for it provided the context in which Ives’s views on the transcendentalists, expressed in Essays Before a Sonata,found receptive ears at last,and a new strain of Ivesian criticism emerged that placed the “Concord” Sonata at the center of his oeuvre. Figure 2.1. Henry Cowell poses for reporters in 1924. Courtesy Musical America Archives. Paul_Text.indd 38 3/1/13 10:06 AM Songs of Our Fathers · 39 New England Gets Its Musical Due: Ives as Ethnographer Cowell first became aware of Ives after the 1925 Pro Musica concerts featuring Three Quarter-Tone Pieces caused a minor stir in New York.2 At that time, however, Cowell’s interest was not sufficiently piqued to prompt him to seek personal contact. The two men became acquainted in 1927, when Cowell sent out a prospectus to members of the musical community seeking subscribers for a journal devoted to the publication of scores by American composers. When the first issue of New Music Quarterly arrived featuring Carl Ruggles’s Men and Mountains, nearly half of the subscriptions were canceled; Ives, who had originally purchased two, bought twenty-five more.3 This gesture spurred a grateful Cowell to meet his benefactor face to face in late February of 1928.That summer, Cowell published an article entitled “Four Little Known Modern Composers” in an obscure, short-lived arts magazine. Ives was among the quartet of “littleknowns ,” and the...