Retro Americana

It would be interesting to know if in composing the Six Ings (c. 1922) Cowell had heard Schoenberg’s Six Little Piano Pieces (Opus 19), composed in 1911. The material of Cowell’s music, which incorporates major and minor third intervals as building blocks in a non-tonal fashion, is common to both composers, as is the brevity of the works. Moreover, the lack of interest by both composers in the usual goal-directed or climactic drama, typical of most 19th and much of 20th century music, makes Cowell’s pieces stand apart even from those of such an iconoclastic contemporary as Charles Ives. Certainly, Cowell was something of a radical, as demonstrated by his fascination with what he called “tone clusters”—groups of adjoining notes struck simultaneously on the piano by a variety of unconventional physical means. He created a sensation by doing this as early as without playing the keys. Each of the Six Ings (Floating, Frisking, Fleeting, Scooting, Wafting, Seething) stakes out a somewhat different territory through its clear but brief exploration of a single consistent musical texture in static time. In this, Cowell seems to anticipate his later active professional interest in Asian music, many of the later pieces sharing a similar time concept. Along with its extended piano techniques and the first experiments with chance music, this work blazes a trail clearly followed by his famous student, John Cage.