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Playing with the music of Henry Cowell by Ian Douglas-Moore UCD Advocate, October 25th, 2006 Denver Post.com September 2nd, 2006 Westword Night and Day, September 2006 Best Bets: Just a Little Different Denver Post.com, May18th, 2006
Playing with the music of Henry Cowell
"It is said Cowell has invented tonal groups
that can be played on the piano with the fists and forearms! Why so coy? With
one's behind one can cover many more notes."
- Paul Zschorlich, 1932 American composer Henry Cowell (1897-1965) is remembered today primarily for his early piano pieces. "That's what made him famous," says Richard vonFoerster, cellist and vice president of The Playground, a chamber ensemble that will perform Cowell's music on Thursday. In these pieces, Cowell pioneered the use of tone clusters - chords made out of large numbers of adjacent notes. These are played on the piano with the fist or forearm, and it is understandable that Zschorlich and others might have thought it was just a bunch of noise. Cowell did not use these chords to make a racket, however. When I listen to a piece like "The Tides of Manaunaun," I barely notice the dissonance of the forearm clusters. I hear instead a sensitive, beautiful accompaniment to a haunting melody. Maybe this is because of the passage of time - tone clusters and Cowell's other innovations have been absorbed by the rest of the musical world. "He influenced in one way or another every composer that came after him," says vonFoerster. The program presented by The Playground will cover music from throughout Cowell's career, from those earliest piano pieces of the teens and twenties to music written just before he died. A hallmark of Cowell's music is the wide variety of pieces he composed, from dissonant modernist music to music influenced by other cultures (what we now call "world music"), to essentially conservative music that looks back to older styles. This diversity is shown just by the instrumentation of the music played. No two pieces have the same musicians. There are songs for voice and piano, chamber quartets, pieces for percussion and two works for solo accordion. One of the accordion pieces was thought lost. VonFoerster sought them out because the ensemble has an accordion player. The Library of Congress sent him a copy of the original manuscript, which had the lost piece appended at the end. "This will probably be the Colorado premier of the accordion pieces," he says. The name of the concert, "Mosaics," comes from another interest that preoccupied Cowell. He investigated chance and collage-like effects in his music as far back as the 1930s. In this, he anticipated the indeterminate music of people like John Cage, the collage forms of Anthony Braxton and the process music of Brian Eno. With "26 Simultaneous Mosaics," a late example of this style dating from 1963, there are five musicians who each have five or six movements to draw their material from. "The musicians play their movements in any order they want. They're not intended to line up or coordinate with one another, except that Cowell felt that every time the piece was performed, they would line up some," says vonFoerster. This is a pretty radical idea, even for today - the piece sounds totally different every time it's played because each musician picks the order of his or her movements without checking with the other players. Not all of Cowell's music is so modern. The Playground will perform "Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 9," one of more than 20 pieces written in a style popular in America in the 18th century, though here given a bit of a new twist. "This is one of his more conservative types of music," says vonFoerster. "You can actually hum along to them. They were written to be accessible, pleasing, nice, sweet." The original hymn and fuguing tunes were played in churches in colonial America. Cowell liked the style and felt it deserved more attention. This is also the basis for much of Cowell's work with music from other cultures. As early as his first piano pieces, he incorporated aspects of Irish music as in "Lilt of the Reel," a sprightly tune accompanied by heavy clusters. Throughout his life, Cowell studied music outside of the Western classical tradition, which he viewed as just one possibility among many. Part of the composer's importance, vonFoerster believes, is his "attitude of inclusiveness, and the fact that he was an advocate for all music. Now, for instance, we have an interest in world music, when no one was interested in those things in his time." In a time when classical composers sometimes incorporated elements of jazz, folk and scales taken from Asian music, Cowell still stands out for the degree that he studied and used these other ideas. "Homage to Iran," for violin, piano and percussion, was written while Cowell was a cultural ambassador to that country, and "employed by the U.S. to spread international good will through music and the arts," says vonFoerster. The piece does not borrow any melodies directly from Iranian songs, but shows the influence of that country's music. Another piece The Playground will perform is "Pulse" for percussion ensemble, which was inspired by Indonesian gamelan music. Even though he was very serious about modern advances in music, Cowell understood its marginal place in the world. This led to his untiring attempts to advance public knowledge. He ran a periodical about modernist music, organized concerts and helped out other composers whenever he could. But he also kept a sense of humor about the whole thing. Nicholas Slonimsky, a friend of his best known as a conductor, compiled a book of bad reviews and negative comments about classical music going back to Beethoven's time called The Lexicon of Musical Invective. In the book are ranting poems that Slonimsky culled from newspapers complaining creatively about modernist music of the previous generation. Cowell took three of these, directed at Wagner, Strauss and Stravinsky, and set them to music. These "Three Anti-Modernist Songs" also parody the style of the composer being trashed. VonFoerster notes these parodies are "very clever, and while they're amusing in general, the more you know about the music the more entertaining they are." If the incredible diversity of Cowell's output seems overwhelming, come to the concert early to catch a half-hour lecture by Dr. Peter Schimpf. He will be discussing "Cowell the Eclectic," and Schimpf certainly knows his topic - his doctoral dissertation was on Cowell, and he too has studied music of non-Western cultures. Schimpf is a Metro professor, and my History of Music teacher, so I can say with certainty that the lecture will be interesting and informative. The Playground was founded a few years back by Conrad Kehn, a graduate of and now instructor at DU's Lamont School of Music. He got together a group of his classmates and other peers. VonFoerster was also a founding member, and he says of the ensemble, "We all had an interest in music of the 20th century and music that was typically not as well known and not as often performed. We started talking about putting together something like this, and it just gradually took off." All the members of The Playground are accomplished musicians with a forward-looking point of view. They are interested in all sorts of contemporary music in addition to classical music. VonFoerster tells me that Kehn is beginning work on transcriptions of German industrial/noise band Einsturzende Neubauten for a future performance of their work. Other upcoming concerts will feature the music of Astor Piazzolla and contemporary Colorado composers - anyone who lives here can submit music for consideration. Ultimately, the goal of The Playground is to get this fairly obscure music heard in a live setting. In Denver especially, opportunities to hear modern classical music live are few and far between. Listening at home is fine and will have to do much of the time, but hearing this music in concert is the best way to check it out. With Cowell, most of his oeuvre has never been recorded. "Mosaics" is a rare opportunity to hear some amazing music in a great setting, and if you're a student, it's free! UCD Advocate, October 25th, 2006 -Ian Douglas-Moore
CooloradoHungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti's time ran out June 12 in Vienna, but the clock didn't stop on the revolutionary composer's influence on modern music performance. The Playground Ensemble, dedicated to the presentation of different, new, unusual, and let's just say it, weird music, will pay tribute to Ligeti's radical work - a piece played on car horns, for example - with two performances of one of his most oddball compositions, "Poeme Symphonique for 100 Metronomes." To bring this work to the concert hall, the University of Denver-based ensemble needs to borrow 100 metronomes. If you have a mechanical metronome - the old-fashioned, wind up, swing-arm type, not the modern digital type - that can be present at a dress rehearsal Sept. 19 and at the concerts on Sept. 21, contact Conrad Kehn at 720-641-2414 or playground@du.edu. "Poeme Symphonique" will be performed in a free concert at noon Sept. 21 in the Fredric C. Hamilton Recital Hall, Newman Center for the Performing Arts on the DU campus. A second performance will take place at 7:30 p.m. at Bethany Lutheran Church, 4500 E. Hampden Ave., Cherry Hills Village; tickets are $10, $5 for seniors and students with valid ID. For details on the rest of the day's tribute to Ligeti - the program still is developing - visit experimentalplayground.org. Denver Post.com September 2nd, 2006 -Dana Coffield
All in Time Because György Ligeti, creator of those mind-fucking sound masses so favored by 2001 director Stanley Kubrick, died earlier this year, Denver's avant-garde Playground Ensemble is performing two full concerts of his works. "Ligeti's music might be more listenable or accessible than that of his contemporaries," says ensemble member Conrad Kehn, adding that the composer's works stand out because they don't follow the inevitable — and eventually tiresome — rules of atonality and other modern styles. Perhaps the most interesting piece being presented is Poème Symphonique for 100 Metronomes, for which a battalion of swing-arm metronomes are simultaneously set to different speeds and allowed to tick-tock away until they peter out. In order to pull the piece off, the ensemble put out a call for metronomes, and they expect to have between forty and fifty timekeepers on stage, which is good, considering the backlash they've received from some more traditional types. "Some said, 'Oh, I'd rather listen to garbage cans,'" Kehn notes. But the show must go on: The ensemble members will explore all the facets of Ligeti's unique sound, which he dubbed "micropolyphony," today at noon at the Newman Center for the Performing Arts, 2344 East Iliff Avenue, and tonight at 7:30 p.m. at Bethany Lutheran Church, 4500 East Hampden Avenue. Admission to the noon show is free; tickets are $5 to $10 in the evening. Visit http://www.experimentalplaygound.org/ for details. And if you have a metronome to loan, contact Kehn at tepe@du.edu. Thu., Sept. 21, noon, free, 303-871-6412. Newman Center for the Performing Arts, 2344 E. Iliff Ave., Denver, 303-871-7720, http://www.du.edu/newmancenter. Westword Night and Day, September 2006 -
Just a little different CLASSICAL MUSIC|New and experimental music remains a difficult-to-find commodity in Denver. That's what makes the Experimental Playground Ensemble, in residence at the University of Denver, such a valuable asset. This week, the group performs works by such contemporary notables as Morton Feldman and Alfred Schnittke as well as local composer Conrad Kehn.|7:30 p.m. Thursday|Hamilton Recital Hall, Newman Center for the Performing Arts, 2344 E. Iliff Ave.; $14 and $16 general public and free for students; 303-871-6412 or du.edu/lamont. Denver Post.com, May 18th, 2006
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