CHAPTER 12 | MUSICAL MODERNISM 283
Minnesota and New York, but lived most of his adult life in semi-seclusion in Ver-
mont. He was a friend of Varèse—until a falling-out with that irascible artist led to
a closer alliance with Rudhyar—and of Charles Ives, who stopped composing in the
1920s just as the younger ultramodernists were beginning to discover his music.
Like Ives, Ruggles had become aware of the new modernist movements in Europe
only after having formulated his own highly dissonant, nontraditional style,
which is well displayed in his best-known work, the orchestral Sun-Treader (1931).HENRY COWELL
Although he reached his musical maturity outside the infl uence of Varèse, Henry
Cowell shared with the older composer an enthusiasm for musical experimenta-
tion that was scientifi c in its rigor yet thoroughly romantic in its visionary ideal-
ism. Born in California in 1897 to bohemian parents, Cowell spent much of his
early life in poverty and had little formal schooling. Nonetheless, his unusual
talent and intellect came to the attention of a Stanford University psychologist
when Cowell was in his early teens. Funds raised by Stanford faculty members
and others allowed him to study music with Charles Seeger, a composer on the
faculty at the University of California at Berkeley, who encouraged Cowell’s
fondness for experimenting. (Seeger acted as a coach for several ultramodernist
composers, among them Carl Ruggles and Ruth Crawford; see chapter 13.) At an
early age, Cowell later explained, he had decided to use “a different kind of musi-
cal material for each different idea that I have.” The result was that “even from
the very start, I was sometimes extremely modernistic and sometimes quite old-
fashioned, and very often in-between.”
Cowell won a reputation fi rst as a composer-performer who treated the
piano like no one before him, not even Ornstein. The Tides of Manaunaun (ca. 1917)K In this photo from the
1920s, composer Henry
Cowell (1897–1965)
demonstrates his technique
of creating tone clusters
with fi st and forearm.172028_12_280-304_r3_ko.indd 283 23/01/13 8:40 PM