286 PART 3 | FROM WORLD WAR I THROUGH WORLD WAR II
tunebook Southern Harmony (1835). Between 1944 and 1964 Cowell wrote, for
various instrumental combinations, eighteen Hymns and Fuguing Tunes, inspired
by early American hymnody, as well as eighteen of his twenty symphonies. He
and his wife traveled widely, in 1956 surveying the music of Ireland, Germany,
Greece, Turkey, India, Pakistan, Iran, and Japan with the support of a founda-
tion grant, and in 1961 representing the United States at international confer-
ences on music in Tehran and Tokyo. These travels led to such late works as
Ongaku (1957), in which Western instruments imitate Japanese ones, and Per-
sian Set (1957), for a chamber orchestra that includes the tar, a Persian string
instrument.
W hile seeking to live “in the whole world of music,” as he once put it, Cowell was
also a tireless advocate for his fellow American composers. As editor of the jour-
nal New Music from 1927 to 1936, he published the scores of many, including Ruth
Crawford, Carl Ruggles, and Charles Ives, whose biography he and his wife brought
out in 1955. Cowell also promoted new music concerts through composers’ societies.
He wrote hundreds of articles, gave countless interviews on behalf of new music,
and served as an overseas ambassador for the work of his American colleagues. And
he taught composition, both privately and through institutions, counting among
his pupils Burt Bacharach, John Cage, George Gershwin, and Lou Harrison.
Henry Cowell’s career demonstrated that neither European-based modern-
ism nor American nationalism was broad enough to encompass the creative
imagination of American composers between the two world wars. In fact, work-
ing outside the classical sphere, some of that era’s most innovative musicians
were developing a new kind of American music with a fresh, arresting sound
and a name to go with it: jazz.THE RISE OF JAZZ
The origins of the syncopated dance music called jazz remain a matter for specu-
lation. But virtually all authorities agree that the city of New Orleans played a key
role and that its African American citizens took the lead.
Among the traits that made New Orleans musically unique were its French
and Spanish heritage, a long-standing devotion to opera, the presence of many
free blacks in pre–Civil War years, and their freedom to assemble for various
festivities (see chapter 4). Education and musical training were also available to
some blacks. Yet it would be wrong to imagine that blacks and whites mingled
freely in the post–Civil War years. A caste system based on color and language split
New Orleans’s black citizens into French-speaking, lighter-skinned Creoles who
lived downtown and darker-skinned English speakers, many of them migrants
who had moved from the country into uptown New Orleans neighborhoods.
In the early 1900s, then, three distinct groups of New Orleans musicians—
white, black, and Creole—were playing the ensemble dance music from which
jazz evolved. While they shared instrumentation, repertory, and some audience
members, contact between these groups was limited.
It seems likely that jazz grew out of ragtime dance music as musicians in the
city began playing it early in this century. Dances imported from Paris in the
1840s such as the polka, the schottische, and the quadrille had long dominatedNew Orleans172028_12_280-304_r3_ko.indd 286 23/01/13 8:40 PM