[2][7] Cowell was mostly self-taught and developed a unique musical language, often blending folk melodies, dissonant counterpoint, unconventional orchestration, and themes of Irish paganism.

[9] His mother, Clara "Clarissa" Cowell (née Dixon), was a political activist, author, and native of the American Plains, who was 46 when she gave birth to Henry in addition to being over ten years older than her husband.

[9][10][11][12] Clarissa's ancestry was similarly Scotch and Irish, although her paternal lineage had been in America for centuries, with figures including astronomer Jeremiah Dixon, one of the surveyors behind the American Mason–Dixon line.

[13] After meeting for the first time, the two quickly wed and undertook bohemian lifestyles, residing in a small, crude cottage (later demolished in 1936) Harry had built on the outskirts of the city — where Henry would eventually be born.

It was during this time he exhibited a strong defiance of gender stereotypes — he refused to have his hair cut, often wore women's clothing and adored the color pink while preferring to be called "Mrs.

"[24] Clarissa's career as a progressive feminist writer did not earn her much money, and by the time they eventually returned to San Francisco, she had become terminally ill with breast cancer.

In order to keep them financially afloat, he took up small jobs such as picking and selling flower bulbs at the Menlo Park Train Station, janitorial work, farming, and cleaning a neighbor's chicken houses.

[25] While receiving no formal musical education (and little schooling of any kind beyond his mother's home tutelage), he began to compose short classical pieces in his mid-teens.

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

Beginning in the early 1920s, Cowell toured widely in North America and Europe as a pianist, with the financial aid of his former tutors — playing his own experimental works, seminal explorations of atonality, polytonality, polyrhythms, and non-Western modes.

[33][6] He gave his debut recital in New York, toured through France and Germany, and became the first American musician to visit the Soviet Union,[2] with many of these concerts sparking large uproars and protests.

Cowell later made such an impression with his tone cluster technique that prominent European composers Béla Bartók and Alban Berg requested his permission to adopt it.

He received a notoriously hostile reception during this concert, with some modern musicologists and historians referring to the event as a turning point in Cowell's performing career.

Cowell pursued a radical compositional approach through the mid-1930s, with solo piano pieces remaining at the heart of his output — important works from this era include The Banshee (1925), requiring numerous playing methods such as pizzicato and longitudinal sweeping and scraping of the strings (listenⓘ),[47] and the manic, cluster-filled Tiger (1930), inspired by William Blake's famous poem.

He built on his substantial oeuvre of chamber music, with pieces such as the Adagio for Cello and Thunder Stick (1924) that explored unusual instrumentation and others that were even more progressive: Six Casual Developments (1933), for clarinet and piano, sounds like something Jimmy Giuffre would compose thirty years later.

He created forceful large-ensemble pieces during this period as well, such as the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1928) — with its three movements, "Polyharmony," "Tone Cluster," and "Counter Rhythm" (listenⓘ) — and the Sinfonietta (1928),[50] whose scherzo Anton Webern conducted in Vienna.

Less than two years later, Cowell founded the periodical New Music Quarterly, which would publish many significant new scores under his editorship, both by the ultra-modernists and many other composers, including Ernst Bacon, Paul Bowles, Aaron Copland Otto Luening and Gerald Strang.

"[59] Encouragement of the music of Caturla and Roldán, with their proudly African-based rhythms, and of Chávez, whose work often involved instruments and themes of Mexico's indigenous peoples, was natural for Cowell.

He studied Carnatic theory and gamelan, as well, with leading instructors from South India (P. Sambamoorthy), Java (Raden Mas Jodjhana), and Bali (Ramaleislan).

[65] While jailed and awaiting a court hearing, he wrote a full confession accompanied by a request for leniency on the basis that "he was not exclusively homosexual but was in fact in love with a woman he hoped to marry".

Despite this time, Cowell taught music to fellow inmates, directed the prison band, and continued to write at his customary prolific pace, producing around sixty compositions.

[n 8] Cowell was eventually paroled in 1940; he relocated to Westchester County, New York, while under supervision, and resided with Australian ex-patriate composer and friend Percy Grainger and his wife in White Plains.

Despite the pardon — which allowed him to work at the Office of War Information, creating radio programs for broadcast overseas — his arrest, incarceration, and attendant notoriety had a devastating effect on Cowell.

[82] The experience took a lasting toll on his music:[dubious – discuss] Cowell's compositional output became strikingly more conservative soon after his release from San Quentin, with simpler rhythms and a more traditional harmonic language.

"[81] No longer an artistic radical, Cowell nonetheless retained a progressive bent and continued to be a leader (along with Harrison and McPhee) in the incorporation of non-Western musical idioms, as in the Japanese-inflected Ongaku (1957), Symphony No.

Perhaps liberated by the passage of time[dubious – discuss] and his own seniority, in his final years Cowell again produced a number of individualistic works, such as Thesis (Symphony No.

[87] In a career that spanned more than half a century, Cowell wrote in a very wide range of styles with his own idiosyncratic twist, including serialism, jazz, romanticism, neoclassicism, avant-garde, noise music, minimalism, etc.

Some reviewers and music critics of the time called him a "creative genius", who played "fantastically well",[90] while others referred to his compositions as "lawless, without a trace of counterpoint," and the "peak of atonal thought" ⁠— the latter of which Cowell sarcastically used as a promotion in a following tour.

Tone clusters in music have since been utilized by prominent classical composers such as Béla Bartók,[12] George Crumb,[95] Olivier Messiaen, Karlheinz Stockhausen,[96] Iannis Xenakis, Einojuhani Rautavaara,[97] and Krzysztof Penderecki, among others.

Experimental and progressive rock keyboardists like Keith Emerson,[98] Rick Wright, and John Cale[99] similarly employed string piano techniques and clusters in their performances, as did free jazz pianists Dave Burrell,[100] Cecil Taylor,[101] Sun Ra, etc.