March 20

Henry Cowell, jailed for gay sex acts

This month marks the 114th anniversary of the birth of American composer Henry Cowell (born Mar. 11, 1897, in Menlo Park, CA; died Dec. 10, 1965), who invented the first electronic drum machine, the Rhythmicon; one resides today in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Cowell hired a Russian inventor to fabricate the machine for him, principally because he wanted to be able to produce rhythms too intricate for humans to perform.

His career was interrupted when he was imprisoned in 1936 for committing immoral homosexual acts, subsequently serving four years in San Quentin. While incarcerated, he directed the prison band, gave inmates music lessons and composed sixty new musical works. In reality a bisexual, after his release he tried to appear conventional: he married, toned down his radical politics and gave up many of his avant-garde musical ideas.

He was a tireless experimenter with musical form and method, and he taught at Columbia University and Peabody Conservatory. Among his students were George Gershwin, John Cage and Lou Harrison. He wrote many works for solo keyboard, many requiring the piano’s strings to be brushed and plucked by the player’s hands.


Fabric (1922) piano solo HC307



In this short piano composition, three things are going on simultaneously. The thumb of the right hand plays the melody in 5/8 time, while the right hand fingers play filigree above the melody in 6/8 time; the left hand plays sixteenth notes in 2/4 time. Pity the pianist who has to fit this all together. And that’s the easy part. In eight measures scattered throughout, the left hand has a series of 9 notes to fill the measure (instead of 8). The piece is now in the public domain, so you can download the 2-page PDF file to follow along with the YouTube performance:
http://imslp.us/php/linkhandler.php?path=/scores/Cowell_Henry_1965/Cowell%20-%20Fabric.pdf