About Henry Cowell
Henry Dixon Cowell (; March 11, 1897 – December 10, 1965) was an American composer, writer, pianist, publisher, and music teacher. Earning a reputation as an extremely controversial performer and eccentric composer, Cowell became a leading figure of American avant-garde music for the first half of the 20th century. His writings and music served as a great influence on composers such as Lou Harrison, George Antheil, and John Cage. He is considered one of the most important and influential composers from the United States. Cowell was mostly self-taught and developed a unique musical language, often blending folk melodies, dissonant counterpoint, unconventional orchestration, and influences from ancient Celtic religion. He was an early proponent and innovator of many modernist compositional techniques and sensibilities, including string piano, prepared piano, tone clusters, and graphic notation. The Tides of Manaunaun, originally a theatrical prelude, is the best-known and most widely-performed of Cowell's tone cluster pieces for piano. He was married to ethnomusicologist Sidney Robertson Cowell. It was in his first few years that Henry had his first exposures to music. Still a teenager, Cowell wrote the piano piece Dynamic Motion (1916), his first important work to explore the possibilities of the tone cluster ().
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