Henry Cowell's United Quartet

Abstract

Henry Cowell (1897-1965) wrote his String Quartet no. 4: United Quartet (L522)1 in 1936. Cowell is still considered by many to be a marginal figure, and piece itself is relatively obscure and almost six decades old. Why, then, should we invest time and effort in studying it? There are several reasons. First, importance we attach to Henry Cowell and his achievements depends entirely on cultural viewpoint we adopt when considering them. From a Eurocentric point of view Cowell is indeed a marginal figure: his links with the are at best tenuous, and much of what he did seems completely at odds with mainstream twentieth-century modernism. In this respect his position is far worse than those of two other composers with whom he is often linked, Charles Ives (1874-1954) and John Cage (1912-92), for their work (unlike Cowell's) is in a number of ways closely intertwined with Eurocentric tradition. If, however, we view Cowell from alternative position of cultural (rather than merely stylistic) pluralism, a tradition that Lou Harrison (b. 1917) and others have

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 20 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.