Composers as Ethnographers: Difference in the Imaginations of Colin McPhee, Henry Cowell, and Lou Harrison

Abstract

This is a study of the ideas of musical difference held by three twentieth-century composers—Colin McPhee, Henry Cowell, and Lou Harrison. Each wrote about culture, and was thus in a broad sense an ethnographer, and each was influenced by non-Western musics in the development of innovative compositional techniques. I discuss how their very different views on non-Western musics were inextricable from other aspects of their professional work. I compare their ideas to those of his closest colleagues and contrast them with dominant anthropological understandings of culture difference in the twentieth century, particularly the attitude of cultural relativism dominant in Ethnomusicology. In the introduction I discuss the importance of formulations of differences to American modernist composers generally, in particular the lines of differentiation they drew among their own music, "conventional" Western music, European music, Romantic music, "Oriental music," and "primitive music." I argue that modernists very often formulated their representations of non-Western musics through the same process of negation of conventional ideals and styles by which they developed their own aesthetic programs.

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