Beyond the Score: Henry Cowell's The Banshee

Beyond the Score is an online exploration of distinguished composers featured in our performing arts archival collections. Each talk highlights rare and seldom-seen materials from our research collections, illuminated by our NYPL music librarians. This project is a collaboration between the Library for the Performing Arts and the Grand Central Library.

Upcoming talks will focus on the works of 19th century composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk and the 20th century composer and arranger Sy Oliver.

 In September we held our first talk on Henry Cowell's 'string piano' work The Banshee. This talk was prepared using sources accessible at the New York Public Library, including Joel Sachs' Henry Cowell: A Man Made of Music , articles by Maria Cizmic and Nancy Yunhwa Rao, images from our digital collections, and our extensive archival collections.  

Born in Menlo Park, California, to Irish father Harry and American mother Clarissa, Henry Cowell (1897 - 1965) had an unconventional childhood. His parents were both writers in the burgeoning bohemian California world of the turn of the 20th century. Clarissa eschewed traditional discipline and education while taking the primary role in raising Henry. Cowell was in and out of school but was able to teach himself a great deal through books and through the company of the thinkers and writers he met. He learned violin from an early age showing clear musical talent, but health problems led him away from that instrument toward the piano.

Also from an early age Cowell showed a keen interest in folk music and the music of other cultures. When the family bought a property in San Francisco the young boy was given rein to explore Chinatown where he recollects listening to Chinese music. He also heard Japanese music in the city. Amongst the eclectic group of acquaintances the growing Cowell befriended were the children of theosophist John Varian. It was John Varian himself and not Henry’s father who instilled in the boy a fascination with Gaelic folklore. As Henry learned piano he also learned to compose, again not in a very formal manor at first. As a radical teenager in a radical environment by the mid 1910s Cowell was already moving in directions that would lead towards works like The Banshee. He was working with extended piano techniques and combining the sounds he created with poetic evocations of Irish folklore from John Varian. Perhaps the most famous of these works is The Tides of Manaunaun which was written for a musical theatrical show envisioned by Varian entitled The Building of Banba and based on his poetry cycle of the same name. The score pairs a lyrical folk like melody in the right hand with a left hand accompaniment of tone clusters. Tone clusters are groups of neighboring semitones played at the same time to form dissonant chords.

 It would appear that both Henry Cowell and the East Coast composer Charles Ives came up with the idea of translating these clusters to large groupings on the piano around the same time, although neither of them knew of each other’s work at this stage. Later in life Cowell worked extensively to promote the music of Ives while Ives gave him support in return.

Cowell’s technique for tone clusters involved using the spread out flat of the hand and the whole forearm (left or right). This created quite a stir on tour at home and abroad. One story goes that the famous Hungarian composer Bela Bartok asked permission from Cowell to use piano tone clusters in his own music, while Cowell was touring Europe in the 1920s and early 1930s.

By the time Cowell was touring Europe he had developed an even more novel "string piano" technique of playing inside the body of the piano directly on the piano strings. This is what is going on in The Banshee and it may have started for Cowell back in California in his teens in the 1910s. There is a tantalizing recollection to support this theory from an acquaintance with a grand piano who was moved to prop up the lid carefully when Cowell visited to play, lest it came crashing down on his arms.

Once again it would appear that Cowell may not have been the first off the mark in terms of playing inside the piano. Percy Grainger, for one, who became friends with Cowell later in life, used mallets to play the strings of the piano briefly at the end of the 3rd movement of his 1916 composition In a Nutshell Suite.

But it was in Cowell’s playing where the truly radical techniques developed, at first as part of pieces which also involved keyboard playing, such as his work titled Piece for Piano With Strings. 

The program for Cowell’s 1924 Carnegie Hall debut shows tone cluster works alongside other keyboard works and the Piece for Piano With Strings.

Cowell had been concertizing since at least 1914 but it took a while before he was given a platform as lofty as Carnegie Hall. By 1924 though he had certainly spent a fair amount of time in New York. After his parents divorced when he was still a child Clarissa briefly made a go of it in the city with Henry in tow. In fact, as he fondly recollected, at this time Henry was a frequent visitor to the New York Public Library. He would return to the city later as a student, and establish himself there as a lecturer, eventually settling down in his mature years between Shady, New York and Manhattan

His earliest known work for "string piano" alone, i.e. completely without the keyboard, was titled Aeolian Harp and is dated 1923. But it is The Banshee that has become the quintessential example of this playing.

The techniques used create an eerie sound which is alluded to in the title, once again based on a poetic interpretation of Gaelic folklore by John Varian. According to Henry Cowell:

A Banshee is a fairy woman who comes at the time of a death to take the soul back into the Inner World. She is uncomfortable on the mortal plane and wails her distress until she is safely out of it again. The older your family, the louder your family banshee will wail, for she has had that much more practice at it.

The score  opens with a set of instructions as follows:

The Banshee is played on the open strings of the piano, the player standing at the crook. Another person must sit at the keyboard and hold down the damper pedal throughout the composition. The whole work should be played an octave lower than written. RH stands for right hand. LH stands for left hand. Different ways of playing the strings are indicated by a letter over each tone.

The instructions then go on to list the playing methods under the letters A to L. The first six are:

A) indicates a sweep with the flesh of the finger from the lowest string up to the note given

B) sweep lengthwise along the note given with flesh of the finger

C) sweep up and back from lowest A to highest B flat in this composition

D) pluck string with flesh of finger where written, instead of octave lower

E) sweep along three notes together, in the same manner as B)

F) sweep in the manner of B) but with the back of finger-nail instead of flesh

The work contains a number of what Cowell referred to in his theoretical works New Musical Resources and the unpublished The Nature of Melody as "Sliding Tones". For example the A) technique is an example of sliding up to a pitch from a starting note, not unlike the portamento on standard string family instruments for example, and the B) technique is an example of sliding along the same pitch to change the sound or timbre of the note.

It may have been New York where Cowell gave the debut of The Banshee early in 1926 at Aeolian Hall. Like with most of his folkloric works with extended techniques of this time The Banshee received varied reviews from critics. Paul Rosenfeld expressed shock at the performance. Referring to how the piano might react to Cowell’s playing of the strings Rosenfeld wrote:

…Few members of the audience could help feeling that if they were the piano, they would certainly get up and sock the fellow…

Although of this concert Cowell himself noted that The Banshee had to be repeated due to the level of audience enthusiasm.

Cowell took the work on his 1926 European tour and over in the UK a London performance elicited a similarly mixed response. Critics mockingly wondered why he didn’t use his nose, knees and feet. One critic at the Daily Mail wrote:

...The housemaid at home when she dusts the piano, often gives us an unconscious imitation of Mr Cowell’s Art...

In the same review however, it was admitted that the piece was popular with the audience and had to be encored. Encores of this work in particular became a running theme. The public was clearly fascinated.

The appeal of the piece led to Cowell later rewriting it effectively to be combined with chamber orchestra as part of a suite of three Irish pieces for string piano and chamber orchestra. Cowell began writing for dance performers in the 1920s striking up collaborations with Martha Graham and others. Some of his music was also arranged to be danced to, and Doris Humphrey danced The Banshee to critical acclaim.

Cowell subsequently developed a new technique of combining stringpiano and keyboard playing at the same time in his work Sinister Resonance.

The "sinister resonance" is created by holding a finger over the strings for a particular note inside the piano with one hand while playing the corresponding key with the other.

Cowell’s radical new techniques sent waves through contemporary art music that still permeate today. One of the preeminent American composers of the 20th century, John Cage, cites his friend Henry as a major influence on his own developments in piano writing.

Quoting from an interview from the Yale Oral History of Music. Cage said of Cowell that:

...He clearly made connections where connections hadn’t been made...

...His openness of mind was cheering and yet it was inherent in him and from a very early age. I don’t know how old he was when he began playing the piano with his arms and with his fists but it needed a very open minded person to do that and nobody taught him to do it...

And crucially:

...Certainly my own prepared piano is unthinkable without the example of his stringpiano...

Cage introduced objects like screws and nails into the piano, placing them between strings to create a range of new percussive sounds when the keys are depressed. At times the effect is not dissimilar from Cowell’s sound world. For example,  the relationship between the sound of Tossed as it is Untroubled and Sinister Resonance is clear. Contemporary composer George Crumb features varieties of string piano playing in a number of his piano works including the Five Pieces for Piano. Another major contemporary composer who utilizes string piano playing in novel ways is Sofia Gubaidulina. In Dancer on a Tightrope the composer cleverly connects extended techniques such as slides on the violin with the sound of a glass being rubbed over the strings of the piano.

There are numerous other examples within the piano solo and chamber literature. And as hinted at with the previous example the techniques developed in relation to the string piano can be translated to instruments of the regular string family in different ways. Returning to Cowell, his concept of the sliding tone which is so pervasive on the strings of the piano in The Banshee continued to be developed throughout his career, reaching one of its most dramatic statements in his 11th symphony, composed in 1954. The strings slide around each other creating other worldly textures in conjunction with the rest of the orchestra in the slow 5th movement.

Henry Cowell composed using, and developing, a range of techniques. He was also one of the pioneering figures in the West exploring and promoting folk music and the music of non-Western cultures. This experience had a marked effect on his own output.  His papers are held at the Library for the Performing Arts along with holographs of his manuscript scores.