Editing Henry Cowell (section)

===Education and early career===

[[File:Dynamic Motion Manuscript 1916.jpg|thumb|The original manuscript to ''[[Dynamic Motion]]'' (1916), showing the young Cowell's early methods for notating large piano clusters]] While receiving no formal musical education (and little schooling of any kind beyond his mother's [[homeschooling|home tutelage]]), he began to compose short classical pieces in his mid-teens. Cowell saved what money he could from odd jobs, and at the age of fifteen, purchased a used [[upright piano]] for $60 ($1,772 in 2022).<ref name=h68>Hicks, p. 68</ref> The piano significantly aided his compositional output — by 1914, he had written over 100 pieces, including his first surviving piece for solo piano, the repetitive ''Anger Dance'' (originally ''Mad Dance'').{{refn|Cowell describes the inspiration for the piece in the commentary track he recorded for Folkways in 1963: "The ''Anger Dance'' was composed at a time when I had been very much annoyed by the fact that a doctor to whom I showed a bent-up leg suggested that it should be cut off immediately. And since I didn't in the least approve of this, and thinking of it over and over again made me more and more angry, I stomped home on my crutches, and the phrases of the ''Anger Dance'' went through my mind louder and louder as I walked home" (track 20/5:06–5:41). Cowell biographer Michael Hicks (2002) describes the work as one of Cowell's "most prescient" and "proto-minimalist" (p. 60). The piece does, in terms of structure, anticipate [[Minimalist music|minimalist]] procedures, and an interpretation by Steffen Schleiermacher from 1993 is simultaneously metronomic and jazzy in a way that reveals its kinship with the work of [[Steve Reich]], in particular. But in his own 1963 recording, Cowell expresses a torment, through jagged [[Tempo|tempi]] and ambivalent [[dynamics (music)|dynamics]] (all clearly purposeful), that renders ''Anger Dance'' very different in character from the work of the American minimalists.|group=n}} He would begin experimenting in earnest, often by slamming the keyboard with all his strength, and rolling his mother's [[darning#Tools|darning egg]] across the strings.<ref>Hays, Sorrel (2017). [https://folkways.si.edu/magazine-winter-2017-henry-cowell-mellifluous-cacophony-and-its-legacy/article/smithsonian "Henry Cowell: Mellifluous Cacophony and Its Legacy"] ''Smithsonian Folkways Magazine''. Retrieved 13 June 2022.</ref> In the same year, at the age of 17, Cowell enrolled at the [[University of California, Berkeley]], studying composition with renowned American [[musicology|musicologist]] and composer [[Charles Seeger]]. Seeger later made note of their, "concurrent but entirely separate pursuit[s] of free composition and academic disciplines." After showing Seeger the drafts of his music, he encouraged Cowell to write about the methods and theory behind his tone clusters, which later became the draft for his book ''New Musical Resources''.<ref name=h68/>

Still a teenager, Cowell wrote the piano piece ''[[Dynamic Motion]]'' (1916), his first important work to explore the possibilities of the [[tone cluster]] ({{Audio|Cowell-Dynamic Motion.ogg|listen}}). It requires the performer to use both forearms to play massive [[secundal]] [[Chord (music)|chords]] and calls for keys to be held down without sounding to extend its [[Consonance and dissonance|dissonant]] cluster [[overtone]]s via [[sympathetic resonance]]. After two years at Berkeley, Seeger recommended that Cowell study at the Institute of Musical Art (later the [[Juilliard School of Music]]) in New York City. Cowell only studied there for three months (October 1916 to January 1917) before dropping out, believing the musical atmosphere was too stifling and uninspiring.<ref name=bartok>Bartok et al., p. 14</ref> It was in New York, however, where he met fellow modernist piano composer [[Leo Ornstein]]. The two would collaborate in later decades.<ref name=bartok/>

In February 1917, Cowell enlisted in the army to avoid being drafted in [[World War I]] and seeing direct military combat. He served in the ambulance training facility at [[Camp Crane]], [[Allentown, Pennsylvania]], where he had a short stint as the assistant band director for a few months. In October 1918, Cowell was transferred to [[Fort Ontario]] in [[Oswego, New York|Oswego]], [[New York (state)|New York]]. He was transferred just before an outbreak of the Spanish flu killed thirteen men at Camp Crane.<ref>Hicks, pp. 91-96</ref>