Dynamic Motion

It requires the performer to use various limbs to play massive secundal chords, and calls for keys to be held down without sounding to extend its dissonant cluster overtones via sympathetic resonance.

While still a teenager and studying at the University of California, Berkeley, Cowell wrote the piano piece Dynamic Motion, his first important work to explore the possibilities of the tone cluster.

"We spent no small amount of time in planning assaults, in the form of concerts, upon New York, Paris, and Berlin, in which elbows, string-plucking, and fantastic titles figured largely."

He would later give the piece a futurist-infused programmatic meaning in future concerts, saying:Dynamic Motion is a musical impression of the New York subway.

The clamor in the subterranean darkness, the wireless-like crossing of many minds huddled together, and rushing along insanely under the earth, a touch of horror and jagged suspense, and then the far light in the tunnel and the dizzying jerk at the end.

The subject of Dynamic Motion spreads like a disease through the music...[4]The following year, in 1917, Cowell wrote five encores for the piece to be played during his various concert tours.

On March 31, 1922, Cowell appeared as a guest in Carl Ruggles's lecture on modern music at the Whitney Studio Club in Greenwich Village, New York City.

Gasps and screams were heard, and Cowell recalled hearing a man in the front rows threaten to physically remove him from the stage if he did not stop.

[10]During this excitement, a gentleman jumped up from one of the front rows and shook his fist at Cowell and said, "Halten Sie uns für Idioten in Deutschland?"