String Quartet No.1 - Henry Cowell

Performed by the Colorado String Quartet. I - Andante sostenuto (♩ =76) - (attacca): 0:00 II - Allegro non troppo (♩ = 112): 3:02 III - Andante (♩=84): 4:08 Cowell's String Quartet No.1 was composed in 1916. It was premiered at Aeolian Hall in New York, on February 2 of 1926, performed by the Ralph Hendle String Quartet. It was originally called "Pedantic Quartet" because in 1916, dissonance and even counterpoint in U. S. contemporary composition were regarded with severity as "uninspired" and were relegated strictly to the world of academic theory. Cowell was not satisfied with the title at the time, and since it is even less appropriate today than it was then, he has abandoned it. In a perceptive account of the period when Cowell came to study with him at the University of California in Berkeley, Charles Seeger wrote in 1940: "I was in that year [1916] giving my first rather tentative course in dissonant counterpoint to a senior class Cowell out-stripped us all in quantity of work and went off on a tangent to develop a [dissonant] system of his own which differed radically from mine..." Cowell filled several notebooks with exercises he devised for himself and then attacked the present piece. The second movement was published in Hungarian periodical "Új Föld" in 1926, but the entire work wasn't published until 1965, the same year as the composer's death. After finishing this piece Cowell went to work, in the same year, on the two so-called "rhythm-harmony" quartets, the Romantic and the Euphometric, whose metric structures are derived from the ratios of the overtone series. All three quartets generated ideas which Cowell began to describe and develop, in 1916, in a series of articles which grew into the book New Musical Resources, finished in 1919, and published (with numerous omissions) ten years later. The work is in three movements (the first two played continuously), being written in the first systematically dissonant style Cowell evolved, which was in rather literal contradiction to convention: consonance was reserved for passing tones and resolved onto dissonance. The third movement is homophonic and comparatively short. Chords are usually in five parts; their basis is consonant but each includes one or two dissonant tones that are not resolved. Picture: "Across the Park" (1910) by Canadian-U.S. Painter Edward Middleton Manigault. Source: https://tinyurl.com/27xumbsh To check the score: https://tinyurl.com/27xumbsh