New Music: Piano Compositions by Henry Cowell

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Henry Cowell was an incredibly prolific, influential composer who helped to shape the musical landscape of twentieth century America and beyond. New Music: Piano Compositions by Henry Cowell is a live recording drawn from a three-day festival entitled, "Cowell and his Legacy", which took place at UC Berkeley in early 1997 to mark the centenary of his birth and to demonstrate some of the consequences of his pianistic innovations for his contemporaries, students and successors. And as Sarah Cahill notes in the liner, "The only trick was deciding what to leave out". Four front-rank musicians (Cahill is one) from Bay Area Pianists and Cal Performers play works here selected from the festival's three gargantuan concerts in which Cowell's piano music was programmed alongside that of Cage, Lou Harrison, Ruth Crawford, and more, with a sprinkling of newly commissioned works by Terry Riley and Meredith Monk to name but two. Pianist/composer/electro musician Chris Brown opens with the dissonant Dynamic Motion (1914), an early work beginning in a style familiar to those at home with Bartók, at least until Cowell's most famous (or infamous) contribution to extended piano technique, the forearm tone cluster, begins to roar, rumble and chime. Brown picks music from the composer's extreme youth - the pieces which earned Cowell the title, "The loudest pianist in the world" when he toured them in Europe in the early 1920s - the strident Amiable Conversation, the quirky Advertisement, Antimony (both with their alarmingly modern cascades of clusters). The Banshee (1925) dates from slightly later but is no less revolutionary - a "string piano" work in which the strings of the instrument are stroked and scraped to produce an uncanny howl that seems to be emanating from anywhere but the innards of a piano. Then follows the exhilarating Exultation, an exuberant "Irish walking tune" which has this reviewer irretrievably hooked. Renowned Cowell interpreter Sorrel Hays offers, amongst others, the seminal Tides of Manaunaun, another early work melding Irish folk tunes with growling low-register clusters, the delicate Aeolian Harp (1923, also for string piano), and Hero Sun, which along with Timetable, Nine Ings, Slow Jig and the two Color pieces is not included in Cowell's own recording on Smithsonian/Folkways SF 40801. Joseph Kubera gives a sympathetic reading of Nine Ings (1922); concise, descriptive miniatures, somewhat elusive, all finely detailed and a tranquil contrast to the surging cluster pieces. Sarah Cahill's Slow Jig is jaunty and enjoyably clumsy, offset by the mysterious Fairy Answer, and concluded with the soaring, synaesthetic I-Deep Color and II-High Color, at 7:41 and 5:46 respectively the longest works here. They get a justifiably boisterous reception from the audience, and from this listener. As a live recording, the performers' exertion is often palpable and the interpretations are more relaxed than Cowell's own (which verge on breakneck speeds in places), moving the emphasis away from the forward movement of the melodic lines towards the timbral effects of the clusters themselves. These emerge as features which serve all the better to impart the highly-charged atmosphere of the event to the listener, as does the inclusion of several spontaneous outbreaks of audience applause between tracks. The performances brim with enthusiasm and affection for Cowell's music, simultaneously communicating an immense joy in the physicality of playing the piano that it unleashes in a manner true to the spirit of its composer. This is a thrilling CD, a useful supplement to the composer's own definitive version and a superb introduction to the work of one of the twentieth century's key musical revolutionaries.