Reading Lichtenwanger

I am reading William Lichtenwanger’s “Henry Cowell, Composer of Music.” The first couple of pages concerns itself with Cowell’s native intelligence. (Apparently, he might have been a botanist if he’d had a solid academic foundation.) The opening epigraph features a Copland quote wherein he states that Cowell “discovered” tone clusters. Preposterous. Every toddler that ever reached up and banged a pudgy fist on a keyboard invented clusters. From what I can tell, however, Cowell did have the courage of his convictions. He wrote New Musical Resources very early (apparently “borrowing” some ideas about metrics) and wrote music accordingly. What I want to know about Cowell is why he is so important to the American music that followed him. (Of course, the answer to that question cannot be confined solely to an investigation of Cowell himself or his music. We must look at the composers to whom Cowell was important.)

Lichtenwanger leads off by reminding us that Cowell was more interested in sound variety than great originality:

[Cowell] would have argued that his desire to ‘live in the whole world of music’ led him to create patterns of sound in which great musical originality was less important than a variety of sounds and interesting results.

This quote appears to be out of sync with the story Cowell tells about himself. When he was young, he practiced hearing music in his head, even multiple lines. He noticed over time that music would appear in his mind not of his own construction, but unbidden. With effort, he found he could force these moments. This does not appear however to support the idea that Cowell was satisfied with “interesting results.” Anyone who labors to invite such inspiration is more than tinkering. Cowell himself voices his disappointment at finally writing down and playing these ideas. “Could it be,” Cowell asks, “that this rather uninteresting collection of sounds was the same as the theme that sounded so glorious in my mind?”

The foregoing is perhaps just quibbling, but Lichtenwanger does do something that is significant to our understanding of Cowell. He uses psychologist Howard Gardner’s “seven frames of mind” to present a picture of Cowell that attempts to treat this unique intelligence in a holistic way, one which sees an individual’s “scientific” tendencies and artistic tendencies as members of a spectrum.