Henry Cowell for Masterwork Hour

Composer and pianist Henry Cowell in 1942.

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I'm here to introduce a program of American music and the program is going to start with a work of my own so I shall introduce it first as a matter of fact it two works that are going to be introduced at the same time these are my hymns and few being Tunes numbers two and five for a string orchestra perhaps I could tell you a little bit about the background of this because it is in a certain particularized style him we know of but these are a particular sorts of him there was in the late. Late part of the eighteenth century a movement that developed in Boston of him rioters writers absence and the composers were rather cut off from Europe and England and they developed ways of doing things of their own that didn't have much to do with the ordinary rules of musical composition and these things were at one time considered crude yet they had a tremendous strength and vitality and they were very singable indeed and they gave an archaic religious feeling of quite an extraordinary nature. And they were modal in style and modes were used before keys and they developed with the development of Christian religion in all of its earlier musical shapes and forms and what about a feel game to how is that different from a few Well it is a sort of a fuel because it means that certain voices out or along with a musical idea that these voices are chased by other biases but whereas in a few of the subject and the answer is the same melody put in a different key in the case of a fugue into and very often the melody itself which comes second and third and so forth may be different from the original melody although related and there is no particular spot that it has to be and so the feel being tune is in a measure rather freer than a few and it develops along a different style but this style was originally rather a puritanical style it was reserved and it was very severe it made use more of a power point than it did of harmony I asked myself the question I was always very much interested in this and enjoyed the very much indeed but I ask myself the question what would have happened if this sort of music which was built in America should become the base. For a serious sophisticated cultivated music and I tried to answer this question and this series of hymns and few being two and two of which you are now going to hear it isn't a question of imitating this earlier style it's a matter of trying to see how this style would have developed into modern times if we had chosen that instead of choosing the styles of Haydn Mozart and Beethoven who lived at about the same time and which had formed the basis for the general development of European style so now I'm going to introduce the my own him and fielding tune and my name is Henry Coll. Hymns and doing Tunes numbers two and five for a string orchestra. You have just heard him if you going to number two and number five by Henry Col now I'm going to have the pleasure of introducing to you a work by an old friend of mine the composer dayin rude you are rude yaar has been in the United States since the teen years and as a matter of fact I'm happy to say that I was his sponsor when he became an American citizen but he was originally a Frenchman and a close associate student of cold Debussy As a matter of fact your wrote the first book that was ever published on the subject of the composer Debussy and he was at an early age very much influenced by him. However Yarg grew along rather different lines he was still is as sort of a mistake he I don't know whether he would call him self at the are surprised but in any event he has been very much influenced by Oriental philosophies and mysticism. And to him music is a part of the whole general thought of the oriental philosophy and mysticism and he uses tones harmonically broadens clanging dissonance is what he himself said about the composition you are going to hear one day to me is that it should all sound like one great gong he says that he likes to play a toll on are not gong and to meditate on the different harmonic structure is that swirl around in the gong on the tones change as they do in different phases as the gong dies away so that all of these strange harmonic complexes that one might have in listening to the sound of a gong are a bell off are then displayed in the instruments of the Arcus for so that you have this interweaving of different tone all colors in a harmonic design and. It seems rather a strange thing that the instruments of a small Arcus grow should be used for this he sometimes uses pianos and other things other percussion instruments Nevertheless he feels that there is a sustained tone quality in all of these things that swirl around so the part you find in the simple and yet US which you are just about to hear will be a unification harmonically of all farts of different tones from all sorts of different directions using all of the tones in music and making it into a sort of a mystical unification as I'm sure he would do it you will then hear the Sinfonietta by day and Rudy are. You have just heard Sinfonietta by day and rude you are. I show up next introduce for you is like phone concerto by Henry brass. Henry brat was born in Canada but is now a citizen of the United States are a member seeing him when he was a buyer of eleven years old I had gone to montréal and this little fellow was brought to me as being a promising composer which he certainly was because he had developed even at this time a very good technique in writing rather conventional it but at length for violins later when he came to this country he became known for a very curious rather like a magination and human error in his instrument handling so that nearly always you will found that he knows everything there is to know about all of the unusual resources of each instrument that he writes for a so that he will not only write well for the saxophone he will find in the saxophone many tones colors if you probably never dreamed were there and he lives to have instrumental effects that are bizarre he would love to fool you so that you would say to yourself what instrument could this possibly be and then by and that it was some perfectly familiar instrument on which he had found some new way of producing a tone he has done a great many rather slick Broadway shows and he is noted for having all of these very special instrumental the facts sometimes as a matter of fact he does bring in unusual instruments. If necessary he may play them himself in some of these shows at one time he was thought of as being the world's best player on the ten whistle I was just going to say the greatest player but I'm not quite sure whether playing a ten of us all makes you great are enough in any case there is a humorous as well as a serious approach and all of these things that characterizes him at the present moment he is making a number of experiments in placing instruments of the arc astray in different parts of the hall sometimes each with its own conductor and separating the bodies of instruments so he may have all of the brass in one corner and all of the strings in another and so forth and the things may be coordinated by having several different conductors conduct under the leadership of someone that they can all see such experiments have followed a little bit after the pattern of some of the work of Charles Ives one time wrote for tools simultaneous Farkas for speech in a different key at the same time I don't know whether this or anything else will prepare you adequately but you are now going to listen to the saxophone concerto by Henry brat you have just heard saxophone concerto by Henry brat. You are now going to hear three Jimena paid it by Pegram Bill Hicks. Mr Bill Hicks was born in Australia and is an American citizen but she is a sort of a citizen of the world because she came first and studied in England and then she went to Vienna where she studied the Teutonic system of things and then she went to France where he studied the French school and perhaps she's more like French school than any other but she is her own inimitable self she believes in well tailored simplicity if in fact that sort of sophisticated simplicity in which you deliberately cut out things instead of being simple because if you are if you just naive and there is always a great deal of feminine charm as well as Master handling and a quiet way of her materials and the works of MS Bill Hicks and you will now here are three Jim the page if. You have just heard three German a play D. by Peggy Bill Hicks we now proceed to my own some. And I don't recall to my assumption a number eleven one which was written under commission for the Louisville Symphony Orchestra this symphony is seven shark movements and the movements are subtitled and. The general fault was that each one of the movements would reflect a use that is universal for music soul that if perhaps you could remember them the first movement belongs to a child it was originally called music for a child asleep the second movement is a work song The third movement is a love song and the fourth movement is for fun and play and the fifth movement is for of magic. The sixth Movement is a war adapts and the seventh movement is a love match the form of this is not a conventional symphonic form but in each one of these movements in the first movements there is a foreshadowing of some of the last ones in all of the movements beyond the middle there is a throwback to some of the thematic material that occurred in the beginning and I don't think perhaps that anything more need be down by way of introduction if you will here Symphony Number eleven by Henrik Col. You have just heard Symphony Number eleven Henry call. Your commentator at this moment Henry call.