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Henry Cowell "Tune Takes a Trip"

Author: redwine
Date: 2007-05-31 23:32

Hello,

I wanted to relate an experience that I had recently which was quite rewarding.

I am the Artistic Director for a concert series in the Annapolis, MD area. For my finale concert, I decided to put together a group of my friends to play a clarinet choir concert. While researching music to perform, a friend of mine mentioned that the famous American composer, Henry Cowell, had written a piece for clarinet choir and all of his papers were at the US Library of Congress.

So, my friend and I travelled to the LOC (I'm so lucky to live in the D.C. area) and checked out the Henry Cowell catalog. We found the piece, entitled "Tune Takes a Trip", actually written for 4 b-flat and one bass clarinet (could be played by b-flat, as notated in the score). Because of antiquated copyright law, the librarian said we could not photocopy the music, but we could take a digital photo (I still don't see the difference), which I did. Of course, we had to obtain permission to perform the work from the Cowell estate, which we did. The piece is in 4 movements and each movement uses the same theme but treated as if it were written in 4 different locations around the world, one being an "Indiana minstrel show", one being a Scandanavian Hymn Tune, one being a Celtic tune, and one being a Mediterranean tune. You might think that the piece wasn't very good because it had never been played, but, in fact, the piece was very good. I guess that because of the strange instrumentation, and it being written towards the end of Cowell's life is why it was never performed. In with Cowell's papers was a page long description of the piece. Because of the margin markings, it appears that he was preparing to have a biography written of him, which never was. I believe there is at least one biography of him, but the notes we got were addressed to a different author.

I entered the photo of the score into Finale and then my friend (a composer) cleaned up my entries, and added markings, etc., producing a playable set of parts and score.

While we may be wrong, from all of Cowell's writings, we believe we performed the premiere of "Tune Takes a Trip", originally written in 1948, on May 6th, 2007 in Annapolis, MD. Because we performed a complete clarinet choir concert, and because Cowell indicated that the bass part could be played by b-flat clarinet, we doubled all of the parts, with the bass part doubled by b-flat clarinet. All of the players were excellent musicians (myself and clarinetfreak <I believe that's his screen name> played on the concert to represent bulletin boarders), so the piece went off great, along with the rest of the concert, which included:

Barber Adagio for Strings (Cailliet arr.)
two Grainger pieces arranged by local composers
two premieres of new works by D.C. composer Dr. John Stephens
premiere of new work "The Hunting of the Snark" by D.C. composer Maurice Saylor
Schickele's "Monochrome III"
Roden's "Difference of Opinion"

It was a great experience. Other than being difficult to coordinate 13 musician's schedules, it was a pleasure all around.

Well, I just thought you might be interested in my recent experience.

If you don't know about Henry Cowell, he's a composer that is very interesting. He was a friend of Charles Ives and many other great American composers. He was imprisoned for several years for homosexual charges. He is credited with inventing "prepared piano" and was one of the first, if not the first composers to use "tone clusters". He's definitely worth researching, if you don't know of him.

I'd be interested to know anything that any of you know about him, if you're interested. Please feel free to contact me directly, if you don't want to use this forum.

Ben Redwine, DMA
owner, RJ Music Group
Assistant Professor, The Catholic University of America
Selmer Paris artist
www.rjmusicgroup.com
www.redwinejazz.com
www.reedwizard.com

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