Henry Cowell at the New York Public Library: A Whole World of Music

On 20 June 2000, the Henry Cowell Collection was opened to the public. Access, since Cowell's death thirty-five years ago, had been restricted by the composer's widow, Sidney Robertson Cowell. No one was permitted to see these materials except for those whose work was sanctioned by Mrs. Cowell. Through the years, though she handpicked several individuals to write the definitive biography of her husband, no such work appeared. The most recent of the chosen biographers is Joel Sachs, who took on the task in the late 1980s, and his biography of Cowell (to be published by Oxford University Press) is well underway.

The Cowell Collection safeguards an extraordinary story, one that is important not only to music scholarship but to a variety of related fields as well. This article will shed some light on the overall content of the collection and explore the reasons behind the restrictions imposed by Mrs. Cowell that have kept her husband's papers from the light of scrutiny. From an early age, Cowell was perceived by those around him as someone with special qualities. These qualities would touch many lives, even in the context of almost unbelievable circumstances and events. He would ultimately change the course of American music history, and those closest to him (his mother, his step-mother, and his wife), in chronicling that course, set a tone that would determine the nature of the collection we have before us. It is rich but complex, overlaid with layers of information and interpretation that make sorting, arranging, and evaluating the life of Henry Cowell a formidable task.

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We live in San Francisco, 2517 Castro St. Henry remembers our country house near Stanford University where he was born . . . [in 1897] when I was 45 years of age. . . . He was beautiful beyond the ordinary, with an indescribable, spiritual quality of loveliness impossible to convey in verse or to be caught in a photograph. When he was about 6 years of age I was told that he had been pronounced, by a member of the Sketch Club, the most beautiful child in San Francisco. He was photographed by 4 different art-photographers. One, especially, had him in many poses and fairly covered her walls with reproductions. I believe they were all lost in the great fire following the earthquake. . . . When he was 8 years old we lived in our cabin in Santa Clara Valley, 2 miles from Menlo Park, 1-3/4 miles from Stanford University. . . . A few weeks after the great earthquake we left our Santa Clara Valley home [and went first to a sister in Kansas, then to Des Moines, and then to New York City. After three years returning to Kansas for one year]. . . . We came home [to the Santa Clara Valley cabin] in September of 1910, when Henry was 13 years of age. . . . At this time Henry almost daily--even hourly--improvised little melodies. He tried to write some of them down. I am very sorry, now, that none of them were saved. ¹

From the very beginning, Henry Cowell was seen as someone unusual, someone special. His mother, Clarissa Dixon Cowell, his stepmother, Olive Thompson Cowell, and, later, his wife, Sidney Robertson Cowell, all felt compelled to document the life and activities of this remarkable individual and to insure that his ideas and his music attained a permanent place in music history. With her notes entitled "Material for Biography," which were completed in 1916, Clarissa Dixon began the detailed commentary and documentation of Cowell's activities that were subsequently taken up by his stepmother and his wife. All three women saved everything having to do with his varied career. This documentation includes not only programs, clippings, and bus and concert tickets, but also the lock of hair, bridge scorecards (used in games with John Cage), risqué pamphlets, and the famous "Cowell suitcase," which his wife referred to as his portable desk. The Cowell...