Adolph Deutsch (1897-1980) - Music Drama

Adolph Deutsch (1897-1980)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upX5deBgroM

The Maltese Falcon (1941)



Some Like It Hot (1959)

Adolph Deutsch (October 20, 1897 - January 1, 1980) was an Academy Award-winning composer, conductor and arranger.

In 1914, Deutsch was "a Buffalo movie house musician," accompanying silent films.

Deutsch began his composing career on Broadway in the 1920's and 1930's before working for Hollywood films beginning in the late 1930's. For Broadway, he orchestrated Irving Berlin's As Thousands Cheer and George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin's Pardon My English.

In addition to his music for westerns and his conducting of the scores for musicals, Deutsch composed for films noir, including The Mask of Dimitrios (1944), The Maltese Falcon (1941), and Nobody Lives Forever (1946),

He won Oscars for conducting the music for Annie Get Your Gun (1950) and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954),and for his background music for Richard Rodgers's Oklahoma! (1955),

The London, England-born Deutsch was also nominated for the 1951 film version of Show Boat, for which he conducted the orchestra, and The Band Wagon (1953). For Broadway and Hollywood, he conducted, composed and arranged music, but did not write songs. In addition to his music for westerns and his conducting of the scores for musicals,

He also composed for the Billy Wilder comedies Some Like It Hot (1959) and The Apartment (1960).

He retired in 1961.

***


Bertolt Brecht (b. Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht, February 10, 1898 - August 14, 1956) was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director. An influential theatre practitioner of the 20th Century, Brecht made equally significant contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production, the latter particularly through the impact of the tours undertaken by the Berliner Ensemble -- a post-war theatre company operated by Brecht and his wife and long-time collaborator, the actress Helene Weigel -- with its internationally acclaimed productions.

From his late 20's Brecht remained a life-long committed Marxist who, in developing the combined theory and practice of his "epic theatre," synthesized and extended the experiments of Erwin Piscator and Vsevolod Meyerhold to explore the theatre as a forum for political ideas and the creation of a critical aesthetics of dialectical materialism. Brecht's modernist concern with drama-as-a-medium led to his refinement of the 'epic form' of the drama. This dramatic form is related to similar modernist innovations in other arts, including the strategy of divergent chapters in James Joyce's novel Ulysses, Sergei Eisenstein's evolution of a constructivist 'montage' in the cinema, and Picasso's introduction of cubist "collage" in the visual arts.

In contrast to many other avant-garde approaches, however, Brecht had no desire to destroy art as an institution; rather, he hoped to "re-function" the theatre to a new social use. In this regard he was a vital participant in the aesthetic debates of his era -- particularly over the "high art/popular culture" dichotomy -- vying with the likes of Adorno, Lukács, Bloch, and developing a close friendship with Benjamin. Brechtian theatre articulated popular themes and forms with avant-garde formal experimentation to create a modernist realism that stood in sharp contrast both to its psychological and socialist varieties. "Brecht's work is the most important and original in European drama since Ibsen and Strindberg," Raymond Williams argues, while Peter Bürger dubs him "the most important materialist writer of our time."

Collective and collaborative working methods were inherent to Brecht's approach, as Fredric Jameson (among others) stresses. Jameson describes the creator of the work not as Brecht the individual, but rather as "Brecht": a collective subject that "certainly seemed to have a distinctive style (the one we now call 'Brechtian') but was no longer personal in the bourgeois or individualistic sense." During the course of his career, Brecht sustained many long-lasting creative relationships with other writers, composers, scenographers, theatre directors, dramaturgs and actors; the list includes: Elisabeth Hauptmann, Margarete Steffin, Ruth Berlau, Slatan Dudow, Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, Paul Dessau, Caspar Neher, Teo Otto, Karl von Appen, Ernst Busch, Lotte Lenya, Peter Lorre, Therese Giehse, Angelika Hurwicz, Carola Neher, and Helene Weigel herself. This is "theatre as collective experiment [...] as something radically different from theatre as expression or as experience."

There are few areas of modern theatrical culture that have not felt the impact or influence of Brecht's ideas and practices; dramatists and directors in whom one may trace a clear Brechtian legacy include Dario Fo, Augusto Boal, Joan Littlewood, Peter Brook, Peter Weiss, Heiner Müller, Pina Bausch, Tony Kushner, Robert Bolt and Caryl Churchill. In addition to the theatre, Brechtian theories and techniques have exerted considerable sway over certain strands of film theory and cinematic practice; Brecht's influence may be detected in the films of Jean-Luc Godard, Lindsay Anderson, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Joseph Losey, Nagisa Oshima, Ritwik Ghatak, Lars von Trier, Jan Bucquoy and Hal Hartley.

Brecht was born in Augsburg, Bavaria (about 50 miles north-west of Munich) to a conventionally-devout Protestant mother and a Catholic father (who had been persuaded to have a Protestant wedding). His father worked for a paper mill, becoming its managing director in 1914.

Thanks to his mother's influence, Brecht knew his Bible, a familiarity that would impact on his writing throughout his life. From her, too, came the "dangerous image of the self-denying woman" that recurs in his drama.

Brecht's home life was comfortably middle class, despite what his occasional attempt to claim peasant origins implied.

At school in Augsburg he met Caspar Neher, with whom he formed a life-long creative partnership, Neher designing many of the sets for Brecht's dramas and helping to forge the distinctive visual iconography of their epic theatre.

When he was sixteen, the first World War broke out; initially enthusiastic, Brecht soon changed his mind on seeing his classmates "swallowed by the army."

On his father's recommendation, Brecht sought a loophole by registering for an additional medical course at Munich University, where he enrolled in 1917.

There he studied drama with Arthur Kutscher, who inspired in the young Brecht an admiration for the iconoclastic dramatist and cabaret-star Wedekind.

From July 1916, Brecht's newspaper articles began appearing under the new name "Bert Brecht" (his first theatre criticism for the Augsburger Volkswille appeared in October 1919).

Brecht was drafted into military service in the autumn of 1918, only to be posted back to Augsburg as a medical orderly in a military Sexual health clinic; the war ended a month later.

In July 1919, Brecht and Paula Banholzer (who had begun a relationship in 1917) had a son, Frank. In 1920 Brecht's mother died.

Karl Valentin as the barber in Mysteries of a Barbershop (1923).

Some time in either 1920 or 1921, Brecht took a small part in the political cabaret of the Munich comedian Karl Valentin.

Brecht's diaries for the next few years record numerous visits to see Valentin perform.

Brecht compared Valentin to Chaplin, for his "virtually complete rejection of mimicry and cheap psychology" Writing in his Messingkauf Dialogues years later, Brecht identified Valentin, along with Wedekind and Büchner, as his "chief influences" at that time:

"But the man he [Brecht writes of himself in the third person] learnt most from was the clown Valentin, who performed in a beer-hall. He did short sketches in which he played refractory employees, orchestral musicians or photographers, who hated their employer and made him look ridiculous. The employer was played by his partner, a popular woman comedian who used to pad herself out and speak in a deep bass voice."

Brecht's first full-length play, Baal (written 1918), arose in response to an argument in one of Kutscher's drama seminars, initiating a trend that persisted throughout his career of creative activity that was generated by a desire to counter another work (both others' and his own, as his many adaptations and re-writes attest). "Anyone can be creative", he quipped, "it's rewriting other people that's a challenge."

Brecht completed his second major play, Drums in the Night, in February 1919.

In 1922 while still living in Munich, Brecht came to the attention of an influential Berlin critic, Herbert Ihering: "At 24 the writer Bert Brecht has changed Germany's literary complexion overnight" -- he enthused in his review of Brecht's first play to be produced, Drums in the Night--"[he] has given our time a new tone, a new melody, a new vision. [...] It is a language you can feel on your tongue, in your gums, your ear, your spinal column."

In November it was announced that Brecht had been awarded the prestigious Kleist Prize (intended for unestablished writers and probably Germany's most significant literary award, until it was abolished in 1932) for his first three plays (Baal, Drums in the Night, and In the Jungle, although at that point only Drums had been produced).

The citation for the award insisted that:

"[Brecht's] language is vivid without being deliberately poetic, symbolical without being over literary. Brecht is a dramatist because his language is felt physically and in the round."

That year he married the Vienna opera-singer Marianne Zoff. Their daughter -- Hanne Hiob (1923–2009) -- was a successful German actress.

In 1923, Brecht wrote a scenario for what was to become a short slapstick film, Mysteries of a Barbershop, directed by Erich Engel and starring Karl Valentin.

Despite a lack of success at the time, its experimental inventiveness and the subsequent success of many of its contributors have meant that it is now considered one of the most important films in German film history.

In May of that year, Brecht's In the Jungle premiered in Munich, also directed by Engel. Opening night proved to be a "scandal" -- a phenomenon that would characterize many of his later productions during the Weimar Republic -- in which Nazis blew whistles and threw stink bombs at the actors on the stage.

In 1924 Brecht worked with the novelist and playwright Lion Feuchtwanger (whom he had met in 1919) on an adaptation of Christopher Marlowe's Edward II that proved to be a milestone in Brecht's early theatrical and dramaturgical development.

Brecht's Edward II constituted his first attempt at collaborative writing and was the first of many classic texts he was to adapt. As his first solo directorial début, he later credited it as the germ of his conception of "epic theatre." That September, a job as assistant dramaturg at Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater -- at the time one of the leading three or four theatres in the world -- brought him to Berlin.

1927 saw the first collaboration between Brecht and Kurt Weill.

Together they began to develop Brecht's Mahagonny project, along thematic lines of the biblical Cities of the Plain but rendered in terms of the Neue Sachlichkeit's Amerikanismus, which had informed Brecht's previous work.

They produced The Little Mahagonny for a music festival in July, as what Weill called a "stylistic exercise" in preparation for the large-scale piece. From that point on Caspar Neher became an integral part of the collaborative effort, with words, music and visuals conceived in relation to one another from the start.

The model for their mutual articulation lay in Brecht's newly-formulated principle of the "separation of the elements," which he first outlined in The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre (1930). The principle, a variety of montage, proposed by-passing the "great struggle for supremacy between words, music and production" as Brecht put it, by showing each as self-contained, independent works of art that adopt attitudes towards one another.

In 1930 Brecht married Helene Weigel; their daughter Barbara Brecht was born soon after the wedding. She also became an actress and currently holds the copyrights to all of Brecht's work.
Brecht formed a writing collective which became prolific and very influential. Elisabeth Hauptmann, Margarete Steffin, Emil Burri, Ruth Berlau and others worked with Brecht and produced the multiple teaching plays, which attempted to create a new dramaturgy for participants rather than passive audiences. These addressed themselves to the massive worker arts organisation that existed in Germany and Austria in the 1920s. So did Brecht's first great play, Saint Joan of the Stockyards, which attempted to portray the drama in financial transactions.

This collective adapted John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, with Brecht's lyrics set to music by Kurt Weill. Retitled The Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper) it was the biggest hit in Berlin of the 1920s and a renewing influence on the musical worldwide. One of its most famous lines underscored the hypocrisy of conventional morality imposed by the Church, working in conjunction with the established order, in the face of working-class hunger and deprivation:

Erst kommt das Fressen
Dann kommt die Moral.

First the grub ("eating like animals, gorging")
Then the morality.

The success of The Threepenny Opera was followed by the quickly thrown-together Happy End. It was a personal and a commercial failure. At the time the book was purported to be by the mysterious Dorothy Lane (now known to be Elisabeth Hauptmann, Brecht's secretary and close collaborator). Brecht only claimed authorship of the song texts. Brecht would later use elements of Happy End as the germ for his Saint Joan of the Stockyards, a play that would never see the stage in Brecht's lifetime. Happy End's score by Weill produced many Brecht/Weill hits like "Der Bilbao-Song" and "Surabaya-Jonny."

Another masterpiece of the Brecht/Weill collaborations, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny), caused an uproar when it premiered in 1930 in Leipzig, with Nazis in the audience protesting. The Mahagonny opera would premier later in Berlin in 1931 as a triumphant sensation.

Brecht spent his last years in the Weimar-era Berlin (1930-1933) working with his "collective" on the Lehrstücke. These were a group of plays driven by morals, music and Brecht's budding epic theatre. The Lehrstücke often aimed at educating workers on Socialist issues. The Measures Taken (Die Massnahme) was scored by Hanns Eisler. In addition, Brecht worked on a script for a semi-documentary feature film about the human impact of mass unemployment, Kuhle Wampe (1932), which was directed by Slatan Dudow. This striking film is notable for its subversive humour, outstanding cinematography by Günther Krampf, and Hanns Eisler's dynamic musical contribution. It still provides a vivid insight into Berlin during the last years of the Weimar Republic.

By February 1933, Brecht’s work was eclipsed by the rise of Nazi rule in Germany.

Fearing persecution, Brecht left Germany in February 1933, when Hitler took power. He went to Denmark, but when war seemed imminent in 1939, he moved to Stockholm, Sweden, where he remained for a year. Then Hitler invaded Norway and Denmark, and Brecht was forced to leave Sweden for Finland where he waited for his visa for the United States until May 3, 1941.

During the war years, Brecht expressed his opposition to the National Socialist and Fascist movements in his most famous plays: Life of Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children, The Good Person of Szechwan, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, and many others.

Brecht also wrote the screenplay for the Fritz Lang-directed film Hangmen Also Die which was loosely based on the 1942 assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi Reich Protector of German-occupied Prague, number-two man in the SS, and a chief architect of the Holocaust, who was known as "The Hangman of Prague." It was Brecht's only script for a Hollywood film: the money he earned from the project enabled him to write The Visions of Simone Machard, Schweik in the Second World War, and an adaptation of Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. Hanns Eisler was nominated for an Academy Award for his musical score. The collaboration of three prominent refugees from Nazi Germany -- Lang, Brecht and Eisler -- is an example of the influence this generation of German exiles had in American culture.

[8898 Gershwin / 8897 Deutsch / 8897 Cowell]

Henry Cowell (1897-1965) - Tone Clusters

Henry Cowell (March 11, 1897 – December 10, 1965) was an American composer, musical theorist, pianist, teacher, publisher, and impresario.



[San Andreas Lake, near Menlo Park, CA]

Born in rural Menlo Park, California, to two bohemian writers -- his father was an Irish immigrant and his mother, a former schoolteacher, had relocated from Iowa -- Cowell demonstrated precocious musical talent and began playing the violin at the age of five. After his parents' divorce in 1903, he was raised by his mother, Clarissa Dixon, author of the early feminist novel Janet and Her Dear Phebe. His father, with whom he maintained contact, introduced him to the Irish music that would be a touchstone for Cowell throughout his career.

While receiving no formal musical education (and little schooling of any kind beyond his mother's home tutelage), he began to compose in his mid-teens.



By the summer of 1914, Cowell was writing truly individualistic works, including the insistently repetitive Anger Dance (originally Mad Dance).



That fall, the largely self-taught Cowell was admitted to the University of California, Berkeley, as a protégé of



[Charles, Peggy, and Ruth Crawford Seeger]

Charles Seeger. There he studied harmony and other subjects under Seeger and Edward Griffith Stricklen and counterpoint under Wallace Sabin.

After two years at Berkeley, Cowell pursued further studies in New York where he encountered


Leo Ornstein, the radically "futurist" composer-pianist. Still a teenager, Cowell wrote the piano piece Dynamic Motion (1916), his first important work to explore the possibilities of the tone cluste. It requires the performer to use both forearms to play massive secundal chords and calls for keys to be held down without sounding to extend and intensify its dissonant cluster overtones.

Cowell soon returned to California, where he had become involved with a theosophical community, Halcyon, led by the Irish poet John Varian, who fueled Cowell's interest in Irish folk culture and mythology.

In 1917, Cowell wrote the music for Varian's stage production The Building of Banba; the prelude he composed, The Tides of Manaunaun, with its rich, evocative clusters, would become Cowell's most famous and widely performed work.

In later years, Cowell would claim that the piece had been composed around 1912 (and Dynamic Motion in 1914), in an evident attempt to make his musical innovations appear even more precocious than they already were.



The Tides of Manaunaun (1917)





Quartet Romantic (1917)



Quartet Euphometric (1919)

In early chamber music pieces, such as Quartet Romantic (1917) and Quartet Euphometric (1919), Cowell pioneered a compositional approach he called "rhythm-harmony": "Both quartets are polyphonic, and each melodic strand has its own rhythm," he explained. "Even the canon in the first movement of the Romantic has different note-lengths for each voice."

In 1919, Cowell had begun writing New Musical Resources, which would finally be published after extensive revision in 1930. Focusing on the variety of innovative rhythmic and harmonic concepts he used in his compositions (and others that were still entirely speculative), it would have a powerful effect on the American musical avant-garde for decades after.



Conlon Nancarrow, for instance, would refer to it years later as having "the most influence of anything I've ever read in music."




Aeolian Harp (1923)



Beginning in the early 1920's, Cowell toured widely in North America and Europe as a pianist, playing his own experimental works, seminal explorations of atonality, polytonality, polyrhythms, and non-Western modes. He made such an impression with his tone cluster technique that Béla Bartók requested his permission to adopt it. Another novel method advanced by Cowell, in pieces such as Aeolian Harp (ca. 1923), was what he dubbed "string piano" -- rather than using the keys to play, the pianist reaches inside the instrument and plucks, sweeps, and otherwise manipulates the strings directly. Cowell's endeavors with string piano techniques were the primary inspiration for



John Cage's development of the prepared piano.

Piano Piece (Paris, 1924)



Cowell built on his substantial oeuvre of chamber music, with pieces such as the Adagio for Cello and Thunder Stick (1924) that explored unusual instrumentation.

The Banshee (1925)



He pursued a radical compositional approach through the mid-1930's, with solo piano pieces remaining at the heart of his output -- an important work from this era is The Banshee (1925), requiring numerous playing methods such as pizzicato and longitudinal sweeping and scraping of the strings.

Cowell was the central figure in a circle of avant-garde composers that included his good friends Carl Ruggles and Dane Rudhyar, as well as Leo Ornstein, John Becker, Colin McPhee, French expatriate Edgard Varèse, and Ruth Crawford, whom he convinced Charles Seeger to take on as a student (Crawford and Seeger would eventually marry). Cowell and his circle were sometimes referred to as "ultra-modernists," a label whose definition is flexible and origin unclear (it has also been applied to a few composers outside the immediate circle, such as George Antheil, and to some of its disciples, such as Nancarrow); Virgil Thomson styled them the "rhythmic research fellows."

In 1925, Cowell organized the New Music Society, one of whose primary activities was the staging of concerts of their works along with those of artistic allies such as Wallingford Riegger and Arnold Schoenberg, who would later ask Cowell to play for his composition class during one of his European tours.

n 1927 Cowell founded the periodical New Music, which would publish many significant new scores under his editorship, both by the ultra-modernists and many others, including Ernst Bacon, Otto Luening, Paul Bowles, and Aaron Copland. Before the publication of the first issue, he solicited contributions from a then-obscure composer who would become one of his closest friends, Charles Ives. Major scores by Ives, including the Comedy from the Symphony No. 4, Fourth of July, 34 Songs, and 19 Songs, would receive their first publication in New Music; in turn, Ives would provide financial support to a number of Cowell's projects (including, years later, New Music itself).

He created forceful large-ensemble pieces during this period as well, such as the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1928) -- with its three movements, "Polyharmony," "Tone Cluster," and "Counter Rhythm" -- and the Sinfonietta (1928), whose scherzo Anton Webern conducted in Vienna.

In the late 1920's, Cowell began teaching a course, "Music of the World's Peoples," at the New School for Social Research in New York and elsewhere -- Harrison's tutelage under Cowell would begin when he enrolled in a version of the course in San Francisco.

The ultra-modernist movement had expanded its reach in 1928, when Cowell led a group that included Ruggles, Varèse, his fellow expatriate Carlos Salzedo, American composer Emerson Whithorne, and Mexican composer Carlos Chávez in founding the Pan-American Association of Composers, dedicated to promoting composers from around the Western Hemisphere and creating a community among them that would transcend national lines. Its inaugural concert, held in New York City in March 1929, featured exclusively Latin American music, including works by Chávez, Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, Cuban composer Alejandro García Caturla, and the French-born Cuban Amadeo Roldán. Its next concert, in April 1930, focused on the U.S. ultra-modernists, with works by Cowell, Crawford, Ives, Rudhyar, and others such as Antheil, Henry Brant, and Vivian Fine.

The manic, cluster-filled Tiger (1930), was inspired by William Blake's famous poem.



Tiger (1930)

Cowell's interest in harmonic rhythm, as discussed in New Musical Resources, led him in 1930 to commission


[Leon Theremin playing the Theremin]

Léon Theremin to invent the



Rhythmicon, or Polyrhythmophone, a transposable keyboard instrument capable of playing notes in periodic rhythms proportional to the overtone series of a chosen fundamental pitch.

The world's first electronic rhythm machine, with a photoreceptor-based sound production system proposed by Cowell (not a theremin-like system, as some sources incorrectly state), it could produce up to sixteen different rhythmic patterns simultaneously, complete with optional syncopation. Cowell wrote several original compositions for the instrument, including an orchestrated concerto, and Theremin built two more models. Soon, however, the Rhythmicon would be virtually forgotten, remaining so until the 1960's, when progressive pop music producer Joe Meek experimented with its rhythmic concept.

From 1930 to 1933, Nicolas Slonimsky conducted concerts sponsored by the association in New York, across Europe, and, in 1933, Cuba.

Cowell performed in Cuba in 1930 and met with Caturla, whom he was publishing in New Music.

Cowell would continue to work on both his behalf and Roldán's, whose Rítmica No. 5 (1930) was the first piece of Western classical music written specifically for percussion ensemble.

During this era, Cowell also spread the ultra-modernists' experimental creed as a highly regarded teacher of composition and theory -- among his many students were George Gershwin, Lou Harrison, who said he thought of Cowell as "the mentor of mentors," and John Cage, who proclaimed Cowell "the open sesame for new music in America."

Encouragement of the music of Caturla and Roldán, with their proudly African-based rhythms, and of Chávez, whose work often involved instruments and themes of Mexico's indigenous peoples, was natural for Cowell. Growing up on the West Coast, he had been exposed to a great deal of what is now known as "world music"; along with Irish airs and dances, he encountered music from China, Japan, and Tahiti. These early experiences helped form his unusually eclectic musical outlook, exemplified by his famous statement "I want to live in the whole world of music."

In 1931 a Guggenheim fellowship enabled Cowell to go to Berlin to study comparative musicology (the predecessor to ethnomusicology) with Erich von Hornbostel. He studied Carnatic theory and gamelan, as well, with leading instructors from South India (P. Sambamoorthy), Java (Raden Mas Jodjhana), and Bali (Ramaleislan).

A prolific composer of songs (he would write over 180 during his career), Cowell returned in 1931 to Aeolian Harp, adapting it as the accompaniment to a vocal setting of a poem by his father, How Old Is Song?

Much of Cowell's public reputation continued to be based on his trademark pianistic technique: a critic for the San Francisco News, writing in 1932, referred to Cowell's "famous 'tone clusters,' probably the most startling and original contribution any American has yet contributed to the field of music."

Six Casual Developments (1933) for clarinet and piano

His Ostinato Pianissimo (1934) placed him in the vanguard of those writing original scores for percussion ensemble.

Many of the scores published in Cowell's journal, by others or himself, were made even more widely available as performances of them were issued by the record label he established in 1934, New Music Recordings.

Cowell began to delve seriously into chance procedures, creating opportunities for performers to determine primary elements of a score's realization.

One of his major chamber pieces, the Mosaic Quartet (String Quartet No. 3) (1935), is scored as a collection of five movements with no preordained sequence.

Cowell, who was bisexual, was arrested and convicted on a "morals" charge in 1936. Sentenced to a decade-and-a-half incarceration, he would spend the next four years in


[Mount Tamalpais, San Quentin State Prison, and San Francisco Bay, from the Richmond - San Rafael Bridge -- Marin County, CA]

San Quentin State Prison.

There he taught fellow inmates, directed the prison band, and continued to write music at his customary prolific pace, producing around 60 compositions, including two major pieces for percussion ensemble: the Oriental-toned Pulse (1939) and the memorably sepulchral Return (1939). He also continued his experiments in chance music: For all three movements of the Amerind Suite (1939), he wrote five versions, each more difficult than the last. Interpreters of the piece are invited to simultaneously perform two or even three versions of the same movement on multiple pianos. In the Ritournelle (Larghetto and Trio) (1939) for the dance piece Marriage at the Eiffel Tower, performing in Seattle, he explored what he called "elastic" form. The 24 measures of the Larghetto and the eight of the Trio are each modular; though Cowell offers some suggestions, any hypothetically may be included or not and played once or repeatedly, allowing the piece to stretch or contract at the performers' will -- the practical goal being to give a choreographer freedom to adjust the length and character of a dance piece without the usual constraints imposed by a prewritten musical composition.

Cowell had contributed to the Eiffel Tower project at the behest of Cage, who was not alone in lending support to his friend and former teacher. Cowell's cause had been taken up by composers and musicians around the country, although a few, including



Charles Ives, broke contact with him. Cowell was eventually paroled in 1940; he relocated to the East Coast and the following year married



Sidney Hawkins Robertson (1903–1995, married name Sidney Robertson Cowell), a prominent folk-music scholar who had been instrumental in winning his freedom. Cowell was granted a pardon in 1942.

The experience took a lasting toll on his music: Cowell's compositional output became strikingly more conservative soon after his release from San Quentin, with simpler rhythms and a more traditional harmonic language. Many of his later works are based on American folk music, such as the series of eighteen Hymn and Fuguing Tunes (1943–64); folk music had certainly played a role in a number of Cowell's prewar compositions, but the provocative transformations that had been his signature were now largely abandoned.

Despite the pardon -- which allowed him to work at the Office of War Information, creating radio programs for broadcast overseas -- arrest, incarceration, and attendant notoriety had a devastating effect on Cowell. Conlon Nancarrow, on meeting him for the first time in 1947, reported, "The impression I got was that he was a terrified person, with a feeling that 'they're going to get him.'"

And, as Nancarrow observed, there were other consequences to Cowell's imprisonment: "Of course, after that, politically, he kept his mouth completely shut. He had been radical politically, too, before."

His contribution to the world of music was summed up by



Virgil Thomson, writing in the early 1950's:

"Henry Cowell's music covers a wider range in both expression and technique than that of any other living composer. His experiments begun three decades ago in rhythm, in harmony, and in instrumental sonorities were considered then by many to be wild. Today they are the Bible of the young and still, to the conservatives, 'advanced.'... No other composer of our time has produced a body of works so radical and so normal, so penetrating and so comprehensive. Add to this massive production his long and influential career as a pedagogue, and Henry Cowell's achievement becomes impressive indeed. There is no other quite like it. To be both fecund and right is given to few."

Cowell served as a consultant to Folkways Records for over a decade beginning in the early 1950's, writing liner notes and editing such collections as Music of the World's Peoples (1951-61) (he also hosted a radio program of the same name) and Primitive Music of the World (1962).

He was elected to the American Institute of Arts and Letters in 1951.



[West Coast premiere of Henry Cowell's Symphony No. 13 ("Madras"), by the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Mark Alburger]



Symphony No. 13 ("Madras") (1957)

No longer an artistic radical, Cowell nonetheless retained a progressive bent and continued to be a leader (along with Harrison and McPhee) in the incorporation of non-Western musical idioms, as in the Japanese-inflected Ongaku (1957),



Symphony No. 13 ("Madras") (1957) (which had its premiere in the eponymous city), and Homage to Iran (1959).



[Cowell composing (c. 1960)]

His most compelling, poignant songs date from this era, including Music I Heard (to a poem by Conrad Aiken; 1961) and Firelight and Lamp (to a poem by Gene Baro; 1962). Despite the break in their friendship, Cowell, in collaboration with his wife, wrote the first major study of Ives's music and provided crucial support to



Lou Harrison as his former pupil championed the Ives rediscovery. Cowell also resumed teaching -- Burt Bacharach, J. H. Kwabena Nketia, and Irwin Swack were among his postwar students.

In 1963 he recorded searching, vivid performances of 20 of his seminal piano pieces for a Folkways album. Perhaps liberated by the passage of time and his own seniority, in his final years Cowell again produced a number of impressively individualistic works, such as Thesis (Symphony No. 15, 1960) and 26 Simultaneous Mosaics (1963).

He died in 1965 in Shady, New York, after a series of illnesses.

[8897 Adolph Deutsch / 8897 Henry Cowell / 8897 Wayan Limbak]

Wayan Limbak (1897-2003) - Ketjak (c. 1930)

Indonesia - Bali - Ketjak Dance



Ketjak (pronounced: roughly "KEH-chahk", alternate spellings: Kecak, Ketjack, and Ketiak), a form of Balinese music drama, originated in the 1930's and is performed primarily by men. Also known as the Ramayana Monkey Chant, the piece, performed by a circle of 100 or more performers wearing checked cloth around their waists, percussively chanting "cak" and throwing up their arms, depicts a battle from the Ramayana where the monkey-like Vanara helped Prince Rama fight the evil King Ravana. However, Ketjak has roots in sanghyang, a trance-inducing exorcism dance.



In the 1930's Wayan Limbak (1897 - August 31, 2003), an Indonesian dancer, worked with German painter Walter Spies to create the Ketjak from movements and themes in the traditional sanghyang exorcism ritual and the portions of the Ramayana. This collaboration between artists worked to create a dance that was both authentic to Balinese traditions but also palatable to Western tourist's narrow tastes at the time. Wayan Limbak popularized the dance by travelling throughout the world with Balinese performance groups. These travels have helped to make the Kecak famous throughout the world.