Fall 1998 Volume XXVIII, No. 1

Rethinking the Rhapsody by Richard Crawford New Music Notes by Carol J. Oja Time to Remember Zez Confrey by Artis Wodehouse Behind the Beat with Mark Tucker Widening the Lens II by Daniel Kingman Porgy and Bess–The Film The Maple Leaf Rag at 100 Reviews A Centenary Moment? by Stephen Banfield Gershwin on Disc by Edward A. Berlin Country and Gospel Notes by Charles Wolfe ISAM Home

New Music Notes by Carol J. Oja When opening a multiauthor book, I often cringe at the cacophony of voices–the unevenness of opinion, the piecemeal sense of it all. Not so with The Whole World of Music: A Henry Cowell Symposium, edited by David Nicholls (Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997; cloth $59, paper $24). A thoroughly coherent production, it delivers the first substantial survey of Cowell’s work. There is an excellent introductory chapter by Nicholls, which outlines Cowell’s achievements by way of posing the issues surrounding his legacy. Otherwise the book is not primarily biographical. Rather, it digs into Cowell’s vision, as revealed in prose and music. Steven Johnson covers Cowell’s compositional output in seventy-seven pages, which essentially make up a monograph on their own. He divides the music into six categories, four of which focus on works before 1936 (“The ‘Varian’ Pieces,” “The Virtuoso Pieces,” “The ‘Invention Mentality’,” and “Other Pieces of the 1920s and 1930s”). There is a section on the prison period, which was productive for Cowell, and a final one on works composed after 1940, especially the symphonies that emerged in the last decades of Cowell’s life. Johnson’s thoroughly readable overview is as suitable for the classroom as it is for the specialist, and it is musically probing. At the end, he turns to a theme that Nicholls raises independently in the introduction: that is, the incredible quantity of music produced by Cowell and the uneven quality that resulted. Calling many of Cowell’s ideas “pathbreaking,” Johnson judges “the actual music” as “often . . . undistinguished.” This is the core point that scholars will continue to face: how do you evaluate a composer who composed no “masterpieces” and didn’t give a hoot about doing so? Nicholls brings a different perspective to the same question: “No Artist creating works of Art here–just a musician, getting on with the job in hand as best he can.” He poses Cowell as representing a “norm”–an all-around, practical musician taking on multiple roles. Two other chapters about Cowell’s music broaden the perspective even further: “The Hymns and Fuguing Tunes,” written with love and erudition by Wayne D. Shirley, and “Henry Cowell, Composer of Music” by William Lichtenwanger. Shirley brings scholarly rigor to the whole series of Hymn and Fuguing Tunes, begun in 1943, meaningfully connecting them to the old American tradition from which they sprang. Musing more generally, Lichtenwanger returns to the question of just how good Cowell was as a composer, casting an affirmative vote for his achievement. Lou Harrison’s “Learning from Henry” provides warm personal memories of studying with Cowell in the Bay Area during the 1930s. Following this, the book concludes with a rigorous assessment by Kyle Gann of Cowell’s voluminous and influential writings. Gann begins by declaring that Cowell “is more important for his writings and ideas than for his music.” Then he throws his weight behind New Musical Resources, especially its sections on rhythm, providing an exceptionally cogent and insightful explication of its innovations. He also surveys Cowell’s journalistic output, intriguingly exploring how different it was before and after Cowell’s time in prison. He dismisses the early journalism as “of no lasting importance”; but I wonder about that, given the large quantity of prose that Cowell produced during the 1920s and the broad audience it reached. He concludes with a look at “The Nature of Melody,” written while Cowell was at San Quentin, which remains unpublished. By the end, readers have been guided over complex terrain, and they benefit from the diverse range of perspectives. They have also encountered over and over the figure who worked so hard after the composer’s death to circumscribe that vista–that is, his wife Sidney Robertson Cowell. Her influence on Cowell’s musical thinking pops up repeatedly, and her words surface in excerpts from an unpublished collection of her writings. (A final tip: it’s not easy to obtain this book in the United States. Contact the publisher directly through its web site: .)