COMPOSERS AS ETHNOGRAPHERS:

DIFFERENCE IN THE IMAGINATIONS OF COLIN MCPHEE, HENRY COWELL,

AND LOU HARRISON

Ethan Lechner

A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the
Department of Music.

Chapel Hill
2008

Approved by:

Severine Neff (chair)

Annegret Fauser

David García

Sarah Weiss (advisor)

Philip Vandermeer
 © 2008
Ethan Lechner
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

ii
 ABSTRACT

ETHAN LECHNER: Composers as Ethnographers: Difference in the Imaginations of

Colin McPhee, Henry Cowell, and Lou Harrison
(Under the Direction of Sarah Weiss)

This is a study of the ideas of musical difference held by three twentieth-century

composers—Colin McPhee, Henry Cowell, and Lou Harrison. Each wrote about culture,

and was thus in a broad sense an ethnographer, and each was influenced by non-Western

musics in the development of innovative compositional techniques. I discuss how their

very different views on non-Western musics were inextricable from other aspects of their

professional work. I compare their ideas to those of his closest colleagues and contrast

them with dominant anthropological understandings of culture difference in the twentieth

century, particularly the attitude of cultural relativism dominant in Ethnomusicology. In

the introduction I discuss the importance of formulations of differences to American

modernist composers generally, in particular the lines of differentiation they drew among

their own music, “conventional” Western music, European music, Romantic music,

“Oriental music,” and “primitive music.” I argue that modernists very often formulated

their representations of non-Western musics through the same process of negation of

conventional ideals and styles by which they developed their own aesthetic programs.

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To my Parents, Judith and Norbert Lechner

iv
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my committee members, Annegret Fauser, David García,

Severine Neff, and Philip Vandermeer, who have all provided tremendous intellectual

and personal guidance. In particular I must thank Sarah Weiss, who has been a treasured

mentor and a source of inspiration. Thanks to Fulbright-Hays and the UNC-Chapel Hill

Graduate School for financial assistance. Thanks to Carol Oja, Leta Miller, and David

Harnish, who shared insights.

There were many librarians and archivists who offered assistance in this study. In

particular I would like to thank the archivists at the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archives,

the New York Public Library Performing Arts Division, the Library of Congress, and the

North Carolina State Archives. Also, special thanks must go to Charles Hanson at the

University of California at Santa Cruz Special Collections, who dug through the as-yet

uncatalogued materials in the Lou Harrison Archive to find items useful to this study.

The music librarians at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have provided

tremendous support and guidance for years. I am especially grateful for the courtesy and

humor of Philip Vandermeer, Diane Steinhouse, and Eva Boyce.

I would not have been able to start on this dissertation, let alone complete it, without

the support of family and friends, colleagues and mentors. In particular I would like to

thank my parents, Judith and Norbert, whose love, encouragement and wisdom have been

v
unceasing. Thanks to my Mother and brother Walden who proofread exactingly and

offered many useful suggestions.

There are many more who have shared in this effort. They are too many to name,

though they should be anyway.

vi
 PREFACE

My original goal for this dissertation was to come to an understanding of cultural

difference that could account for hybridity in the compositions of a variety of composers.

In the end, I do not claim to have come to such an understanding, or to have arrived at an

analytical approach that can account for music that subsumes difference in the manners

of works as varied as Colin McPhee’s Tabuh-tabuhan, Henry Cowell’s United Quartet,

and Lou Harrison’s Double Concerto. My subjects have not cooperated with that aim.

Each approached the issue of cultural difference uniquely—though certainly not in

isolation from others grappling with the same issues—so that I have been drawn away

from my original goal of explicating a single method by which to analyze them all, and

have been forced to delve more deeply into their particularities. The analyses that I have

done, then, have necessarily become specific to the terms by which each of these

composers dealt with the same concerns that were originally my own: namely, the

bafflement of cultural difference, and how, in the context of music, differences

sometimes dissolve into sameness.

I had originally planned to develop a theory of intentional hybridization in

composition. Through the development of the study, I have been forced to come to terms

with the insight that meaning (defined broadly to encompass all aspects of musical

experience) is not inherent to music but is something that arises in the moment, imputed

vii
by the listener willingly or unwillingly. This implies that hybridity is also not something

that can be considered immanent to music and analyzed as such, but is something that

must be considered in the terms by which it is ascribed. Thus, the central question of the

project has been transformed from How can the hybrid qualities of the musics of various

composers be understood? to How did various composers understand their musics as

hybrid, on what terms did they stake their claims to hybridity, and how did they articulate

their claims to others? The result is that the word hybrid, which was the central concept

of the dissertation at its conception, is now practically absent from my discussion.

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES………………………………………………………………………..xi

LIST OF MUSICAL EXAMPLES………………………………………………………xii

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS…………………………………………………………..xiii

Chapter

I.
Introduction…………………………………………………………………….14

Similitude as a Key to Hybrid Composition…………………………………..31

Contemporary Paradigms of Constructing Difference………………………..34

Issues in this Project’s Assemblage…………………………………………...42

II. Colin McPhee and “The Absolute Music of Bali”……………………………. 49

Omission and Metaphor in A House in Bali………………………………………. 53

American Modernist Views of “the Primitive”

in the 1920s and ‘30s…………………………………………………………. 64

A 1935-36 Return Visit: Textual Issues of Ethnography

in “The ‘Absolute’ Music of Bali” and Tabuh-tabuhan………………………… 75

Conclusions: McPhee in Retrospect…………………………………………..

103

III. Henry Cowell and the “Whole World of Music”……………………………...

110

An Outline of Cowell’s Views on Music,

Experiment, and Culture…………………………………………………….. 115

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 New Musical Resources…………………………………………………….. 119

Mr. Ch and Chinese Meter…………………………………………………...131

Neo-Primitivism and the Proletariat………………………………………… 139

“Primitives,” Dance, and Percussion………………………………………... 144

"The Nature of Melody”……………………………………………………. 148

Joseph Yasser………………………………………………………………...155

The United Quartet…………………………………………………………………. 161

The Schillinger System………………………………………………………167

Conclusion…………………………………………………………………...173

IV. Lou Harrison and the “Whole Round World of Music”……………………..177

Prelude: The Question of the Double Concerto……………………………...177

Introduction…………………………………………………………………..179

The Dawning of a New Reality: Black Mountain College

and the influence of Harry Partch…………………………………………… 181

Harrison’s “Reality” Part 1: Similitudes through Dualism…………………..190

The “Reality” Part 2: The Construction of Similitudes through

the Hierarchical Ordering of Trans-National Musical Concepts……………. 210

Rational Eccentricity………………………………………………………... 219

Another “Reality” from Cultural Relativism………………………………... 222

Conclusions…………………………………………………………………..234

V. Conclusions: Reflections upon Modernism

as a Peculiar Style of Concern with Difference……………………………... 237

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………… 246

x
 LIST OF TABLES

Table

1. McPhee’s Metaphors Between Balinese Gamelan and

Modernist Composition……………………………………………………...64

2. Lou Harrison’s Chains of Antitheses………………………………………179

xi
 LIST OF MUSICAL EXAMPLES

Example

1. “Shifting accents…that sound as though composed

of units of five notes” (AMB, 168).………………………………………….79

2. Syncopations of the 3 + 3 + 2 variety (movement 1

“Ostinatos,” mm. 49-52, piano I)……………………………………………82

3. “The melodic outline is generally restricted to some

form or other of a pentatonic scale. . .” (AMB, 169)………………………...84

4. Flute and Piano I figuration at the opening of

Tabuh-tabuhan (mvt. 1 “Ostinatos,” mm. 1-6)……………………………...85

5. Movement 2, mm. 93-96. “A barbaric splendor

of clashing tonalities”………………………………………………………86

6. Two juxtaposed textural blocks (Tabuh-tabuhan,

movement 1, mm. 7-11)…………………………………………………....88

7. The Overtone Series (NMR)……………………………………………….108

8. Examples of Polymeter (NMR)……………………………………………114

9. Quartet Euphometric (or Romantic)............................................................117

10. 2nd Movement, United Quartet…………………………………………….153

11. Excerpt from Gending Hephaestus, Violin Staff Notation………………..191

12. The same excerpt, Kepatihan Notation………………………………........191

13. Chart from Music Primer (MP)……………………………………………198

xii
 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

Frequently cited works are identified with full reference in the first citation, and
subsequently with the following abbreviations:

AMB Colin McPhee, “The Absolute Music of Bali”

HIB Colin McPhee, A House in Bali

CTW Carol Oja, Colin McPhee: Composer in Two Worlds

McPhee Coll. Colin McPhee Collection, UCLA Ethnomusicology Archives

CAW Miller and Lieberman, Lou Harrison: Composing a World

LHR Peter Garland, ed., A Lou Harrison Reader

GOM Harry Partch, Genesis of a Music

MP Lou Harrison, Music Primer

Cowell Coll. Henry Cowell Collection, New York Public Library for the
Performing Arts

NMR Henry Cowell, New Musical Resources

NOM Henry Cowell, The Nature of Melody

B HCB Michael Hicks, Henry Cowell, Bohemian

xiii
 Chapter I: Introduction

“Loosely speaking, every one interested in modern music realizes there is some
resemblance between certain aspects of primitive and of contemporary music.”
Henry Cowell, 1933

In his introductory overview of “modernism” for the Oxford History of Western

Music, Richard Taruskin comments on the special relationship the movement had with its

time:

To make an ism out of being modern is on the face of it paradoxical, since if

modern simply means "of or pertaining to present and recent time" (as one
dictionary defines it), then everyone is modern by default, and always has been,
since we cannot live at any other time than the present. To be modernist, then,
is more than to be modern. Modernism is not just a condition but a commitment.
It asserts the superiority of the present over the past (and, by implication, of the
future over the present), with all that that implies in terms of optimism and faith in
progress."1

Based on my own examination of United States composers of the first half of the

twentieth century, it appears that Taruskin’s statement can be amplified somewhat.

Modernism was characterized not only by enthusiasm for the progressive aspects of the

present, but also by antipathy for the present’s recalcitrant mainstream. Modernism’s

feelings for the immediate past (specifically the nineteenth century) were largely

disdainful, while its feelings for the long past were often admiring. With respect to the

1
Richard Taruskin, The Early Twentieth Century, volume 4 of The Oxford History of Western Music
(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005), 1.
rest of the world, modernism in the U.S. was often pointedly dismissive towards Europe,

while it was concerned with gaining deeper understanding and appreciation of the musics

of the non-West and its own “folk” and indigenous “primitives.” As will be seen, within

the minds of modernists all of these issues were inextricably related.

For modernism, particularly in America, cultural difference was always an immediate

concern, even when it was not the explicit concern. This fact is reflected in the intensive

study of non-Western musics in which modernists frequently engaged, and which is

documented in their writings. It is also reflected in the frequent allusions to non-Western

musics in their compositions. In this dissertation I examine how in both of these idioms,

writing and composition, modernists represented both particular non-Western musics and

the nature of the world’s cultural divisions in general. This introduction explicates the

most general features of modernist thinking about difference, and the remainder of this

dissertation analyses the written and musical works of Colin McPhee, Henry Cowell, and

Lou Harrison.2

By way of introduction to these issues, consider Stravinsky, who said,

“Expressiveness has never been an immanent feature of music.”3 By what means did

Stravinsky ascertain certainty about the “immanent” features of music? By what methods

of induction or deduction and by what evidence did he arrive at this knowledge? As we

will see, one cannot get far tracing this notion and others like it without encountering the

ideas about cultural difference (and non-difference) that were in circulation at the time,

2
For my purposes here I define modernism circularly. My modernists are those twentieth-century
composers who formed a discourse community, whose style of thinking about cultural difference it is my
primary purpose here to explicate.
3
Stravinsky, An Autobiography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962), 53.

15
both within the modernist composers’ own community and beyond it in other fields.

Knowledge of the “immanent features” of music, whatever they were believed to be, was

sooner or later connected to ideas about non-Western musics, either developed through

direct observation or, as frequently, through imaginative imputation.

Indeed, Stravinsky made his above statement about the nature of music—as a

universal phenomenon—in the course of describing the Russian folk poetry, in which he

had observed this essential, elemental quality of non-expression (and upon which he had

imputed it). It was as if, by simple virtue of being distant from Western European

bourgeois culture, Russian folk peasants could by negative association be cited as the

bearers of music’s most elemental, “immanent” properties. It was also as if, by simple

virtue of being Western, the music of the bourgeois concert hall could be regarded as in a

strange way disconnected from its truest nature, its own “primitive” essence.

Stravinsky also stated, “It is in the nature of things—and it is this which determines

the uninterrupted march of evolution in art quite as much as in other branches of human

activity—that epochs which immediately precede us are temporarily farther away from us

than others which are more remote in time.”4 This statement provides a summary of the

modernist position vis-à-vis its others as I have observed it. It indicates a belief in the

unified march of culture, and an acknowledgement of the propensity to value that which

was far removed in time and to regard with antipathy that which came directly before. It

is the aim of this dissertation to elucidate how this style of thought played out, albeit in

quite various ways, in the writings and compositions of Colin McPhee, Lou Harrison, and

Henry Cowell.

4
Stravisnky, An Autobiography, 91.

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 If there were features of the American modernist preoccupation with difference that

were historically peculiar, certainly the tendency of these composers to construct an

identity for themselves—both as individuals and as a movement—in antithesis to a

constructed other predated them. In very general terms, earlier ideas about cultural

difference, those dominant among anthropologists in the 19th-century United States, had

been largely focused upon paradigms that placed “civilized” society as unambiguously

superior to all others by dint of its supposedly higher evolutionary state. Whether through

explicit, theorized racism or through a notion of unilinear cultural evolution without

racial differentiation as its basis, non-Western peoples were understood as crude and

irrational, and their artistic products were in a significant sense irrelevant to the

“civilized” person.5 If a great deal of effort was expended in proving this to be the case, it

was then possible for a person of distinction to expend little effort looking to other

cultures for artistic and intellectual guidance. Indeed, we can witness many

representations of non-Western people and their music by 19th-century composers in the

U.S. and Europe that were fanciful, sensational, and unconcerned with veracity.

This style of thought has been discussed at length in musicological criticisms of 19th-

century representations of the ethnic other (particularly in opera). It has been frequently

argued that there was an all-but-total disconnect between such musical representations

and that which was represented. There was, in other words, a great deal of fantasy. Susan

McClary, for instance, notes that to consider Bizet’s Carmen as an example of Spanish

5
Three resources on the history of anthropology that I have found invaluable in this study are George
W. Stocking, Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (New York: The
Free Press, 1968); Adam Kuper, The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of an Illusion
(London and New York: Routledge, 1988); and Ronald E. Martin, The Languages of Difference: American
Writers and Anthropologists Reconfigure the Primitive, 1878-1940 (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press,
2005).

17
music “confuses the image of the ethnic other concocted by the Northern European with

the thing itself…” Bizet did some research into Spanish music by studying arrangements

of Spanish folk songs, but “any ‘authentic’ Spanish flavor Bizet received from this

source too was already heavily mediated.” McClary states definitively that, despite “the

influence of actual Spanish, Spanish-American or gypsy sources…Bizet’s agenda was

not ethnography.” 6

The very broad cultural trend that tended to validate styles of representation that were

fantasies (or all but), has come to be referred to in academic discourse as “Orientalism,”

and in musicological discourse it is often referred to as either “Orientalism” or

“exoticism.” In musicological discussions, the term Orientalism refers most often to

musical representations that were created, as McClary states of Carmen, “not through

instinct or by virtue of … borrowing from ethnic sources, but rather by means of [a] well

developed set of signs that … audiences shared…” (p. 54). To describe an opera as truly

“exoticist” is then to state that the various signs (including musical ones) that it used to

represent the other had only an arbitrary relationship to any actual person or peoples.

For this study, what marks the rise of musical modernism is the intellectual shift

among a few early-twentieth-century composers in which explicitly condescending

attitudes towards the “pre-civilized” were no longer compelling, and the rights of a

composer to freely engage in fantasy was severely curtailed. A corresponding shift in

anthropology was associated with Franz Boas. Beginning roughly with his critique of

6
Susan McClary, George Bizet: Carmen (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), 53-54. On 19th-
century musical exoticism, see also Ralph P. Locke, “Cutthroats and Casbah Dancers, Muezzins and
Timeless Sands: Musical Images of the Middle East,” in The Exotic in Western Music, Jonathan Bellman,
ed. (Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press, 1998), 104-136. Also in that collection see Richard Taruskin,
‘Entoiling the Falconet’, Russian Musical Orientalism in Context,” 194-217.

18
anthropological racism in The Mind of Primitive Man, anthropologists began focusing

their studies of non-Western peoples into critiques both of the cultural biases in

anthropological theories and of Western societal norms more broadly, rather than

proceeding with an assumption the West’s unassailable superiority, against which non-

Western cultures were measured and inevitably found to be inferior.

Corresponding trends in the arts began to make use of non-Western artistic products

(as observed and as imagined), which had previously been regarded as culturally inferior,

into critiques of prevailing aesthetics. For instance, as we will see in Chapter 2, where

contemporary aesthetic norms called for continuous melodiousness, the other was

invoked as a case for disjunction and percussiveness. When norms called for grand and

amorphous orchestral sounds, the other was invoked as a case for sparseness and clarity.

When norms demanded expressiveness, the other was invoked in the case for non-

expression. The other represented a new source of authority, not based upon its

acquisition of “civilization” but upon its very freedom from it. If faith in the superiority

of “civilization” had produced absolutist arguments about the nature of music as a

universal phenomenon, the new primitivist epistemology countered these with

absolutisms of its own.

Pierre Boulez, for instance, made such statements in the tersest way, for to him there

were only a few very distinct things that were of interest about “Oriental music,” and

those he understood as antitheses to aspects of Western music: “the time structure, the

conception of time being different; the idea of anonymity; the idea of a work of art not

19
being admired as a masterpiece but as an element of spiritual life.”7 Beyond these points

there was only “great foolishness” in going to the “the Orient,” for its music “that has

attained perfection is now frozen, and if there is no modern Oriental music it is because

those peoples have lost their vigour.” The particular aspects of “Oriental music” that

interested Boulez differed from those that interested the three composers of this study,

and his tone was far more arrogant than theirs. Yet, his manner of discovering Oriental

music,” seeing it purely as a reflection of his own aesthetic concerns will be echoed in

each chapter of this dissertation.

With the rise of modernism, constructions of difference were coming to serve a new

function and assuming a new form. It was not so much that among artists and

anthropologists discussions of difference were moving past binary paradigms, but that the

way in which such oppositions were drawn began to shift. Before modernism (and to a

great extent continuing concurrently with it), discussions of difference had focused upon

the poverty of value in non-Western culture. This lack was opposed with, and gave shape

to, the high value of the favored arts of “civilization.” Edward Said has described this

dualism as structural to Orientalist thought and furthermore as integral to the construction

of the Western image of itself. He summarizes the 19th-century propensity to categorize

humanity into groups as based upon a

rigidly binomial opposition of “ours” and theirs,” with the former always
encroaching upon the latter (even to the point of making “theirs exclusively a
function of “ours”)…. “Our” values were (let us say) liberal, humane, correct;
they were supported by the tradition of belles-lettres, informed scholarship,

7
Pierre Boulez, “Oriental Music: A Lost Paradise?” in Orientations (London: Faber, 1986): 421. For a
critique of Boulez’s view of culture see Georgina Born, Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the
Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-garde (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

20
 rational inquiry; as Europeans (and white men) “we” shared in them every time
their virtues were extolled.8

Now with modernism a double opposition was formulated: first was that between the

non-West and the West, in which the non-West was interpreted as a newly significant if

not superior source of influence for artists; second was the opposition between the small

modernist movement and the mainstream of society. This meant that, with these two

oppositions, modernism took the innovative step of correlating its own ideas and styles

with those of non-Western people, rather than with the supposedly superior “West” (with

which it self-identified, if only for rhetorical purposes).

As an example, we can observe Debussy commenting upon Sundanese (West

Javanese) music that he heard in 1889 as, “able to express every shade of meaning, even

unmentionable shades, and which make our tonic and dominant seem like ghosts.”9

Though Debussy’s encounter with gamelan was far more casual than that of the three

American composers I focus upon here, in this structuring of oppositions they were alike.

In remarking upon the relative merits of Sundanese music over Western music, he was on

the one hand remarking that “theirs” was better than “ours.” On the other hand, once we

take a closer look at that which was “ours” we see that Debussy did not in fact

unequivocally identify with it, but that it was precisely what he aimed to distance himself

from. By 1895 when he made these comments he had himself developed a compositional

8
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). Said’s analysis of the Orientalist
tradition has been critiqued by some as reductive. For a critical assessment of Orientalism’s impact on
academia, see Daniel Martin Varisco, Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid (Seattle and London:
Univ. of Washington Press, 2007). See also James Clifford, “On Orientalism,” in The Predicament of
Culture (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1988), 255-76.
9
Debussy to Pierre Louÿs, 1895, quoted in Edward Lockspier, Debussy: His Life and Mind (London:
Cassell, 1962): 1, 115. For a detailed account of the music presented at the Kampong javanais at the 1889
Paris World’s Fair see Annegret Fauser, Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair (Rochester:
Univ. of Rochester Press, 2005).

21
idiom which had distorted conventional tonic and dominant (for instance in Pelléas et

Melisande and Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune), and he did so, if not in direct imitation

of Javanese music, then with an either/or mentality through which Javanese music and his

own fell into ideological alignment.10 He made this either/or concept more explicit in a

1913 statement of how the Javanese were different from “civilized” peoples:

There were, and there still are, despite the evils of civilization, some delightful
native peoples for whom music is as natural as breathing. Their conservatoire is
the eternal rhythm of the sea, the wind among the leaves and the thousand sounds
of nature which they understand without consulting an arbitrary treatise. Their
traditions reside in old songs, combined with dances, built up throughout the
centuries. Yet Javanese music is based on a type of counterpoint by comparison
with which that of Palestrina is child’s play. And if we listen without European
prejudice to the charm of their percussion we must confess that our percussion is
like primitive noises at a country fair.11

We may note that each aspect of Debussy’s representation of these “delightful native

peoples” was articulated in antithesis from some aspect of Western culture that had

become tiresome to him. If “their” music was natural, this implied that “ours” was

contrived. If “theirs” was drawn from the elements of humans and nature, “ours” was

10
For a summary of the literature addressing how Debussy was influenced by gamelan, see Annegret
Fauser, “French Encounters with the Far East,” chapter 4 in Musical Encounters at the 1889 World’s Fair
(Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2005). Fauser writes, “In general terms, Debussy’s
orchestra, especially in Nocturnes (1987-99) and La Mer (1903-5), has been described as a “stylized
gamelan” because of the often layered instrumentation. The superimposition of different timbral,
rhythmical, and registral strata is also one of the character traits of works such as Pagodes and has been
identified as influenced by the gamelan” (p. 199). Of particular relevance to my present discussion of
modernist ideology is Fauser’s observation that the musicological literature has tended to read Debussy’s
encounter with the gamelan in terms of a propulsion towards innovation, a peculiarly modernist narrative:
“The musical innovations of Debussy’s piano music with respect to structure and harmonic language can
thus be understood through his encounters with a new sound-world. His new sonorities then found their
basis in complex materials appropriated from a different world, and their presence could thus be attributed
to a rupture with tradition—a concept dear to the ideology of modernism—rather than to the more
suspicious notion of late-nineteenth-century French eclecticism within a continuous development of the
Western tradition” (p. 200). See also Richard Mueller, “Javanese Influence on Debussy’s Fantasie and
Beyond,” Nineteenth-Century Music 10 (autumn 1986-87): 157-86;.and Mervyn Cooke, “’The East in the
West’: Evocations of the Gamelan in Western Music,” in The Exotic in Western Music, ed. Jonathan
Bellman (Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press, 1998), 258-80.
11
Debussy, Revue S.I.M., quoted in Lockspier, Debussy, 115.

22
inscribed in arbitrary treatises. If “their” percussion was sophisticated, our “civilized”

percussion was, ironically, “primitive.”

What I am identifying as the modernist style of thinking amounted to a reversal but

not necessarily a revision of earlier ethnocentricity. Although Debussy used of the word

“primitive” as a criticism of the percussion of Western culture, he was not actually

overturning the dominant cultural evolutionist paradigm in which “primitives,”

conceived of as aboriginal peoples of Africa, America, Asia, and Australia, were

understood to persist in the same state as Europe’s long past. It was a reversal of the

system of values that underlay the paradigm, but his statement maintained evolutionist

logic. Whether it was good or bad to be “civilized,” what remained certain was that some

people were, and others were not. And what it was to be “not-civilized” could be

determined simply by imagining the opposite of what it was to be “civilized”: to be

uncontrived, to draw one’s music from nature, and have sophisticated percussion

techniques. Even with as limited direct contact as the World’s Fair provided him,

Debussy could deduce such knowledge of the lives of the Javanese performers, for he

possessed, as a supplement to his limited contact with the musicians there, a battery of

preconceptions about the binomial differences between “civilized” and “non-civilized”

peoples.

Many parallels will be found among the three composers of this study. Though in his

publications Cowell often described specific, geographically located musical traditions,

he also frequently referred to both “primitive” and “Oriental” musics as broad classes,

without any reference to actual temporally or geographically located persons or peoples,.

“Primitives,” he noted for instance, did not make distinctions between speech and song,

23
whereas, of course, Westerners did.12 It is most likely that in cases such as this Cowell’s

“primitives” were functions of his Westerners, derived through imaginative assumption

about what would be the opposite of them: if Westerners differentiated between speech

and song, primitives surely did not. “Orientals” then occupied a space along a continuum

drawn between “moderns” and their “primitive” opposites. This form of thinking,

apparent in many anthropological accounts of the “primitive”—in other words most

anthropological writing prior to the rise of Boasian relativism, and many thereafter as

well—has been described by Adam Kuper:

For [the anthropologists] modern society was defined above all by the territorial
state, the monogamous family and private property. Primitive society therefore
must have been nomadic, ordered by blood ties, sexually promiscuous and
communist. . . . [Anthropologists] looked back in order to understand the nature
of the present, on the assumption that modern society had evolved from its
antithesis.13

Debussy’s representation of the Javanese was more romanticized and less informed

than were the representations by the three composers of this study, but in its structuring

of antitheses it was the same. As will be seen, even after years of study in Bali, McPhee

also constructed his representations of Balinese music so as to conform to certain pre-

formed categories occupying the thinking of his composer colleagues, describing

Balinese music as in many ways the antithesis of 19th-century European music: as non-

expressive, as socially functional, as rhythmically complex, and as orchestrally lean. As

mentioned, Cowell made primitivist statements similar to Debussy’s, and developed

ideas about “primitive” music based simply upon assumptions that it would be the

12
This statement appears in Cowell’s unpublished manuscript, The Nature of Melody (hereafter cited
as NOM), Henry Cowell Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (hereafter cited as
Cowell, Coll.).
13
Kuper, The Invention, 5.

24
opposite of “cultivated” music. Harrison’s views of Java were different from Debussy’s,

far more informed by careful study of gamelan, but no less determined by what he saw

Javanese music to not be.

As early as 1931, Charles Seeger noted the tendency among his modernist colleagues

to create their own music through negation of conventional styles:

Most modern composition seems to restrict itself to a comparatively narrow

variety of moods. In avoiding romantic sentiments, there has been little left except
excitement, which is not an emotion or sentiment. . . In its abhorrence of the
pretty, the sentimental, the self-pitying revelry, the exuberant optimism and
subjectivism of romantic ardor, modern music has run almost entirely to the
grotesque, the unsentimental, the merely exciting, and the almost inevitable
pessimism of pure objectivity.14

To a great extent, American modernists not only forged self identity and compositional

style through negation of “romantic sentiments,” “prettiness,” and so forth, but conceived

of non-Western musics through a similar process of negation. They defined their bearers

of “the truth about music” in contrast with European styles and particularly with

Romanticism, for instance by representing them as rhythmically rather than harmonically

complex, or as utterly inexpressive, out of contrast with the emotiveness of Romanticism.

This style of constructing the other through contrast from familiar cultural figurations

served a double function. On the one hand, it provided the modernists with an image of

the other from which they could easily draw influence by virtue of its very perfect

dissimilarity from familiar musical style. The other was created on familiar terms

through the simple inversion of its aspects. This constituted an enormously rich way of

developing original material in a heartbeat, and offered a potent opportunity for

modernists to think their way out of the hegemonic modes (not just musical ones). On the

14
Charles Seeger, Tradition and Experiment in (the New Music) in Studies in Musicology II, ed. Ann
M. Pescatello (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 166.

25
other hand, this method of conceptualizing non-Western musics functioned to create a

source of authority for the validation of the music modernists had already composed,

even if it had not in fact been directly inspired by any non-Western image. These two

tendencies went hand in hand, and their reciprocal relationship propelled some of the

stylistic shift of the twentieth century. The modernist created the other in his own image,

while fashioning himself after his imagined other.

This raises the question, whom did the modernist really imagine to be his other?15

Was it the non-Western person, or was it the other musician of his own society who was

stuck in European styles of the 19th century, or in some other sense ignorant of the “truth

about music” as it was apparent to the modernist himself? If the question is which was

the object of the American modernist’s antipathy (at least as evidenced in his

publications), then the answer is clearly the other Western musician. For instance, Boulez

exhibited this attitude in the above quotation, for although he spoke dismissively about

“Oriental musics,” his real adversary, the real other that he sought to intellectually

dominate, was the Western composer who might look for false forms of inspiration in

“Oriental musics.” The reality of “Oriental music” itself was only represented in order to

win an argument that was internal to his own community of composers.16

15
I will occasionally use the pronoun his to refer to a general, non-specific modernist composer. I have
chosen to do so as an acknowledgement that musical modernism was a largely male (an often masculinist)
historical movement. Otherwise, in referring to members of mixed-gender populations I write he/she,
his/her.
16
Born and Hesmondhalgh have made a similar though not identical argument about the modernist’s
other being the popular culture of his/her own society: “…mass culture is modernism’s other in music as in
the other arts, while references to ‘authentic’ folk and ethnic musics, primitive and exotic constructions,
have remained more enduring and acceptable as forms of appropriation and projection in music” (Western
Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music, ed. Georgina Born and
David Hesmondhalgh [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2000], 16). They focus more upon “high
modernism” than upon the “eclectic modernists” of this study. Though antipathy to popular music is
apparent in the writings of these three composers, I have not found it to be nearly as recurrent a theme as
antipathy to other styles of art music, particularly European ones.

26
 A recurrent tendency of the composers of New Music—which will be seen again and

again in the three studies that follow—was their taking exception to the prevailing

musical norms as coercive and tiresome. The non-Western counterexample to these

norms offered both the opportunity and the compulsion to innovate. As noted, it is not

necessarily the case that one of these aspects preceded the other. The desire to innovate

led the modernist to new investigations into the musics of others; meanwhile,

investigations of the musics of other produced revelations that necessitated innovation.

In the effort to challenge Western hegemony modernists frequently found it

imperative to go beyond merely introducing examples of alternative forms of music-

making, and to make absolutist statements about music and humanity staked upon

representations of such other musics. The other offered not merely another example of

how music might be made, but was a key to a singular “truth about music” which

modernists sought to ascertain, in much the same way that Foucault describes 19th-

century scientists having sought the “truth about sex.”17 The tendency to seek the “truth

about music” among modernists might be regarded as part of a larger intellectual

holdover from the nineteenth-century. As Martin describes:

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ethnic researchers had gone
into the field and into the libraries with many varied agendas and subagendas, but
most usually with the ethnocentric assumption of objective expert authority and
the propensity, in the standard style of nineteenth-century science, to steer their
findings into the channels of universal truths about human nature and societies.18

17
The following quote from Foucault on the notion of “suppressed sexuality” as ripe with parallels in
the modernist discourse on what might be called “suppressed musicality”: “The notion of repressed sex is
not, therefore, only a theoretical matter. The affirmation of a sexuality that has never been more rigorously
subjugated than during the age of the hypocritical, bustling, and responsible bourgeoisies is couple with the
grandiloquence of a discourse purporting to reveal the truth about sex, modify its economy within reality,
subvert the law that governs it, and change its future” (Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An
Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 8. If one replaces the word “sex”
with “music” one comes very close to a summary of the position common among modernist composer.
18
Martin, The Languages, 12.

27
Though modernists constantly advocated revolt from the cultural molds of the 19th-

century, ironically their means toward their revolutionary ends were in this case

retentions of the 19th-century scientific positivism. The methods and findings varied

significantly, and yet the tendency to seek such “truths about music” through totalizing

schemas was pervasive, and non-Western culture was one of the key objects of study

toward that aim. This will be seen to be especially clear in the chapters on Cowell and

Harrison that follow.

Modernist composers were usually only casual consumers of anthropological ideas.

For this reason, there is little terminological unity evidenced within modernist

publications when they refer to issues of cultural difference. I will use terms such as

“primitive” and “exotic” in reference to particular threads of modernist thought, even

though they were occasionally used differently by the modernists themselves. The term

“primitive” is an important case in point, for while I have found relatively few uses of the

term in modernist publications, and while primitivism is not often thought of as having

been as significant a movement among early-20th-century composers as among visual

artists, a great deal of the ideas about difference articulated by modernist composers

implied evolutionist and primitivist styles of thought.19

For instance, McPhee was probably equivocal in his regard of the Balinese as

“primitives,” and yet he often implied that the Balinese were the bearers of elemental

human traits, which implied primitivism. When Cowell wrote about “Orientals” he was

19
On primitivism as a literary movement literature, see Michael Bell, Primitivism (London: Methuen
and Co., 1972). Bell discusses the authorial aim to produce “primitive consciousness,” or “mythic
consciousness,” connected closely with the notion of “primitive religion,” i.e. animism. I have not found
these themes to have been important to the three composers I have studied, though they may have been
significant to other modernist composers.

28
not speaking about the same category of humanity as “primitives,” and yet he was

referring to an evolutionary schema that implied the existence of “primitives” as a

category less developed than “Orientals.” Furthermore, Cowell sometimes decried the

term “primitive” as condescending, while in the same utterance affirming that there were

categories of humanity ranging from least to most advanced (even at the point when

Cowell lost his taste for the word “primitive,” he continued to refer to a least advanced

stage of human cultural development, the notion of which would have popularly been

called “primitives,” “barbarians,” or “savages”). Harrison did not much refer to

“primitives,” but he did remark that there were “primitives.” His own interests were in

“cultivated Oriental” peoples, a category which took definition in contrast from

“primitive” peoples (Harrison probably was most influenced by Cowell in his

understanding of differences between “primitive” and “cultivated” peoples).

The objective of modernists in this regard was most often counter-institutional, in so

far as their findings about musical “truths” were articulated as challenges to what they

saw as the hegemonic order. As far as this goes these modernists might be regarded as

“relativists,” for non-Western musics were important to them in the critique of

absolutisms in contemporary currency. None of these ethnographer/composers, however,

were epistemological relativists. They did not maintain that knowledge was ultimately

relative to culture, and that universals were actually ethnocentrisms. Each of them held

absolutist views on the “truth about music.” I will discuss the subtlety of this distinction

at length in regard to Cowell, who in spite of and indeed because of his positivistic style

of inquiry was a bearer of current relativist ideals of tolerance and pluralism.

29
 Both the non-Western other and the mainstream Western other were constructions of

the modernist imagination. I wish to emphasize that for the purposes of this study what I

am explicating and critiquing is the non-West only in terms of its existence in the minds

of modernists. I am not, in the following criticisms of the images of difference held by

Colin McPhee, Henry Cowell, and Lou Harrison, attempting to clear away their

“misunderstandings” so that the correct “understandings” may emerge. I reiterate that if

the identity of the non-Western other, of the mainstream other, and of the modernist

himself were all constructions, this is not to say any was simply a fantasy. As noted,

many modernists expended a great deal of effort in their studies of non-Western musical

practices, the three that I focus on being particularly notable examples, and their

representations continue to be compelling in many regards. If, for the purposes of this

study, the other ultimately only existed as images in the mind of these composers, this is

not to say that these were images uninformed by careful study and even interaction.

It is also important to emphasize that, though at moments in this study I will describe

a particular representation of the other having given rise to a particular style, or a

particular stylistic concern having given shape to the representation of the other,

ultimately none of these factors should be understood to have preceded the other two.

The modernist’s conception of his mainstream other was continuously reinvented with

his shifting conception of the non-Western other. His self-conception was continuously

reborn in opposition to his shifting conception of his mainstream opponent. His non-

Western person or peoples were continuously re-imagined as correlates to his shifting

concept of self. This process of reciprocation is discussed in greater concreteness in the

Chapter on McPhee.

30
 Even in cases, such as that described by Kuper above, in which the attributes of

“primitives” seem to have been invented purely by calculating the antitheses to the

attributes of “civilization,” there is still the question of how and why certain attributes of

civilization became problematized in the first place. How did Kuper’s anthropologists

come to reflect on there being anything peculiar about their territorial states,

monogamous families, and private properties? It was only by encountering, at some

historical moment, that which seemed to be startlingly non-territorial, non-monogamous,

non-private, and hence non-civilized. Similarly, modernist composers’ problematizations

of Western musical norms were the result of modernist engagements with difference in

some form. Constructions of difference as a world-wide phenomenon meanwhile fell into

shape along the ideological fault lines of contemporary Western discourse. Neither came

prior to the other.

Similitude as a Key to Hybrid Composition

If so far I have emphasized the importance of dichotomization in the imagining of

difference by modernist composers, I have done so to a great extent in order to point to

the most important compositional technique that modernist composers employed in their

compositional engagements with difference. This was the flip-side of the construction of

difference: the construction of sameness, or, as I will call it, “similitude.” The

construction of similitude was most precisely a strategy of constructing knowledge of

foreign musics in a manner by which those musics could become sources of influence.

Similitudes were those features of music that could be said to be both “theirs” and “ours,”

and were so, demonstrably, because within a binaristic framework they were not a third

party’s.

31
 This strategy can be found in use by the three composers I have studied, in spite of

their varied compositional styles and ideas about difference. In his 1935 article “The

‘Absolute’ Music of Bali,”20 McPhee described Balinese music on terms so familiar to

the members of his milieu that the word “Balinese” might have been substituted with

“modern” with little resulting incongruence. He generated these similitudes by

dichotomizing Balinese music with Romanticism. Balinese music was not made of

amorphous masses of orchestral sound, was not performed in concert halls, was not guilty

of hyper-emotional oozing, and was not harmonically overloaded. In all these regards, it

resembled various new ideas of modernist music, and in some of these respects it

resembled McPhee’s own composition Tabuh-tabuhan, which was a Bali-inspired work.

(He did not give these similitudes explicit statement; rather I interpret them as

ethnographic allegory in the sense described by Clifford, see below.) For Tabuh-tabuhan

this meant that McPhee composed each passage so as to speak in the very same “breath”

and in the very same “utterances” about Balinese music and about modernist music. This

unit of similitude, in which two voices speaking two distinct languages were heard within

a single breath, corresponds to what Bakhtin calls the “intentional hybrid.”21

Similitude becomes salient in my analysis of Cowell’s United Quartet (1936) at two

levels. First, Cowell created similitude in the construction of categories of human music-

20
McPhee, “The ‘Absolutle’ Music of Bali,” Modern Music 12 (May-June 1935): 163-69.
21
Mikhael Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist,
trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, Univ. of Texas Press, 1981), 259-422. “What we are
calling a hybrid construction is an utterance that belongs, by its grammatical (syntactic) and compositional
markers, to a single speaker, but that actually contains mixed within it two utterances, two speech manners,
two styles, two ‘languages,’ two semantic and axiological belief systems…. It frequently happens that even
one and the same word will belong simultaneously to two languages, two belief systems that intersect in a
hybrid construction—and consequently, the word has two contradictory meanings, two accents” (304-305).
I had originally intended this Bakhtinian sort of similitude to be the organizing concept of this project. I
have found, however, that I had to conceive of similitude differently with Cowell and with Harrison, and so
the concept has lost its centrality.

32
making. With these categories he subsumed various musical traditions into units of

sameness: “primitive,” “Oriental,” “archaic” and “classic” musics, along with other

categories that together encompassed all of human musicianship (spanning back

throughout the history of humanity). Second, he created similitude in the “uniting” of the

features of these various categories of humanity, based upon certain “elemental” bases

that he viewed as transcending all of these ethnic/historical divisions. The result was a

work that Cowell not only claimed to be universal, in the sense that it was based upon

musical features so fundamental as to be shared by every human musician, but

comprehensively human, in the sense that it represented aspects of every category of

human music throughout history.

Harrison’s approach to constructing similitudes was also dependent upon the

perception of the sameness of various distant traditions—unifying, for instance, the music

of Indonesia, Ancient Greece, and the modernist composer Harry Partch—by

understanding them to be in antithesis from others—those employing the tuning system

of equal temperament. Harrison, however, went much further than McPhee in imagining

the world, in very many aspects, to be lined up entirely into two forces of opposition, one

good and one bad. On the one side were the forces of reason, exemplified by Asia,

Greece, and certain modernists, and on the other hand were those of absurdity,

exemplified by dominant urban styles of music making and life. He associated reasonable

phenomena, differentiated them from absurd phenomena, which he then associated with

each other and differentiated from reasoned ones, and so forth. In the end a tremendous

amount of knowledge of the world—his “reality”—was coordinated within a single

dualistic framework: the good half he celebrated and the bad half he deplored.

33
Compositionally, this style of associating and differentiating yielded certain trans-

national conceptions of musical materials, which then permitted their combination as

simple workings out of what was “really the same” as it in fact existed in the world. I

discuss the relevance of this compositional method to Harrison’s Double Concerto for

Violin, Cello, and Javanese Gamelan.

The three composers that I have examined have turned out to have only limited

commonalities in terms of their views on difference, and this was in spite of their close

personal relationships. The more closely I have examined each, the more their

dissimilarities in their most fundamental terms of thinking about cultural difference have

become apparent. Certainly not one of them was content merely to work in the mold of

another. Still, each of them focused heavily upon differences and similitudes, and for

each this style of thinking was critical to his style of composing. This fact alone offers

argument for considering these three composers as of a single meaningful cultural

movement called modernism. I discuss the conception of modernism arrived at through

this study further in this introduction.

Contemporary Paradigms of Constructing Difference

Among intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century, it was commonly

believed that there were “primitives,” peoples who might have existed on various spots

on the globe, persisting in more-or-less the same state as more “civilized” societies had in

their own very distant past.22 Such notions as there being an “primitive” form of society

based upon certain kinship structures, a “primitive” religion which was animism, closely

22
See Kuper, The Invention.

34
tied to “primitive” consciousness (mythic consciousness), and other “primitive” cultural

forms were commonplace and served as the foundation of inquiry in a variety of fields.

But, as Adam Kuper has pointed out, this long-lasting and pervasive surety about the

existence of “primitive society” was a delusion:

The rapid establishment and the endurance of a theory is not particularly

remarkable if the theory is substantially correct. But hardly any anthropologist
today would accept that this classic account of primitive society can be sustained.
On the contrary, the orthodox modern view is that there never was such a thing as
“primitive society.” Certainly, no such thing can be reconstructed now. There is
not even a sensible way in which one can specify what a “primitive’ society” is.
The term implies some historical point of reference. It presumably defines a type
of society ancestral to more advanced forms, on the analogy of an evolutionary
history of some natural species. But human societies cannot be traced back to a
single point of origin, and there is no way of reconstituting prehistoric social
forms, classifying them, and aligning them in a time series. There are no fossils of
social organization.23

And he continues:

The persistence of the model is particularly problematic since various of its basic
assumptions were quite directly contradicted by ethnographic evidence and by the
logic of evolutionary theory itself. The difficulties were clearly stated by some of
the leading scholars in the field (notably Westermarck, Boas, and Malinowski).
Notwithstanding, social anthropologists busied themselves for over a hundred
years with the manipulation of a fantasy… (p. 8)

Given the commonness of the belief among highly respected thinkers in the existence

of various “primitive” cultural forms, it is not surprising that many composers and music

theorists assumed that there must be some particular sort of music possessed by

“primitive” peoples all over the world. Even if the notion of “primitive” music was

untenable in light of the data available (and arguments launched in 1911 by Franz

23
Kuper, The Invention, 7.

35
Boas24), all three of the composers of my study, to one extent or another, worked under

its sway, as did most of their colleagues.

Primitivism, a reversal of more commonplace styles of evolutionist thinking that

found value in “primitive” cultural forms (rather than regarding them as inferior to the

products of “civilization), was common among artists and intellectuals in the early

twentieth century. Rather than viewing “primitives” as crude and barbaric, primitivists

saw them as more in touch with the fundamental aspects of human existence. Yet

primitivism only reversed the assignment of value in the evolutionist view of culture, and

in other respects maintained the ethnocentrism inherent to it. In the primitivist view, the

history of all the world’s peoples was still a single march of culture, with Western culture

having traveled the furthest.

The only question was whether it was better to be where “we” (as civilized people)

were, or to be where “we” had come from. In the evolutionist view, culture was not

something possessed uniquely by each group of people, but was singular and was

accumulated, with Euro-American society possessing it in the greatest degree. I use the

term primitivism exclusively in this sense, as an ideology that assumed the existence of

“primitives” in the contemporary sense grounded in cultural evolutionist theory, and not

in reference to other ideologies of valuation of long-past peoples living in simpler states.

Therefore I will not use the word primitivism to describe Harrison’s interest in Chinese,

Korean, and Javanese musics, because he did not regard these groups as “primitive” nor

did his conception of their significance have to do with a belief in unilinear evolution. He

did, however, share with primitivists the idea that non-Western peoples existed in a state

24
Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man (New York: Macmillan, 1911). In my understanding of the extent
of Boas’s critique of received ideas on race and evolution, I rely upon Martin, The Languages; Stocking,
Race, Culture, Evolution; and Kuper, The Invention.

36
that was more fundamentally and “naturally” human, and that it is desirable for moderns

to “regain” certain of those peoples’ attributes. I do use the term primitivist in connection

with McPhee and Cowell.

Sigmund Freud’s ideas on difference provide a useful parallel to the primitivist

thinking among some composers. Though Freud was not an anthropologist, he was highly

concerned with anthropology because its concept of the “primitive” represented a key to

his own endeavors in the field of psychology. The “primitive” was essential man,

possessing the essential psychology of man (which Freud also found that his hysterical

patients possessed). He held the evolutionist view that civilization had advanced out of

“primitive” states, and yet, as Martin describes, Freud did not imagine that in “civilized

society” the irrational and savage aspects of the psyche had been conquered. “We” had

never ceased being “primitives”:

We live in the presence of in the presence of our ultimate ancestors’ urges and
deeds and we always will. Our understandings and institutions might differ from
those of primitive peoples, but our psychological and moral makeup is a
continuing heritage.25

Martin describes how, unlike other evolutionists who imagined that civilization came

about through the “triumph of knowledge over ignorance, of reason over superstition,”

for Freud civilization arose to a large extent by “the suppression of instincts” (p. 119).

This attitude characterizes a great deal of modernist speculation about difference: that

there were musical instincts possessed and acted upon by non-Western peoples that were

merely suppressed in “our” own society. The modernist composers that I study do not

seem to have been greatly influenced by Freud, yet it was not necessary to have been

25
Martin, The Languages, 119. Martin primarily discusses the primitivism of Freud’s Totem and
Taboo: Resemblances between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics, trans. A. A. Brill. (New York:
Moffat, Yard, 1918).

37
directly influenced by Freud in order to sympathize with his regard of “primitives” as a

key to understanding human nature and the “truth about music.”26

Mark Slobin has remarked that, for much of the twentieth century the idea of the

“primitive” was one of three fundamental categories used in the study of non-Western

musics, along with “Oriental” and “folk”:

The study of world musics moved out of what would nowadays be called an
Orientalist stance only in the 1960s. Till then, few people seriously questioned the
notion that beyond the Western classical tradition there were three kinds of music
to be studied: Oriental, folk, and primitive. This triad underlaid many works and
was implicit in the training of my generation of researchers. “Oriental” of course
referred to those Asian “high cultures” that had long-term, accessible internal
histories and that could be “compared” with similar European systems.
“Primitive” encompassed all the “preliterate” peoples of the world, who had to
rely on oral tradition for transmission and who had no highly professionalized “art
musicians” in their midst. The “folk” were the internal primitives of Euro-
America.27

These categories pervading the thinking of early ethnomusicology were held by McPhee,

Cowell, and Harrison. Cowell, who was perhaps the most informed on theories of

difference in the social sciences broadly, kept particular stock in these three categories. In

Chapter 3 I will discuss in detail the use he made of them.

Not all of the modernist composers who expressed primitivist views would have

subscribed to cultural evolutionism in full form. Many were not interested in developing

full fledged and consistent theories of culture, but only in referencing concepts such as

“the primitive” in a more casual way. None was beholden to any schema of organized

26
Of the three composers discussed in this dissertation, McPhee was the most in sympathy with
Freudian ideas, perhaps due to the influence of his wife Jane Belo, an anthropologist with Freudian
leanings, and his close association with Margaret Mead, who, though not precisely a Freudian, frequently
made observations about human psychology through her anthropological work. I have not found any the
three composers central to this dissertation to have spoken at length in psychoanalytical terms, and
Harrison’s rationalist epistemology all but excluded entirely psychoanalytical interests in the subconscious
and irrational.
27
Mark Slobin, Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan Univ. Press,
1993), 4.

38
understanding of human difference. Though I will describe in each chapter a single

conception of difference possessed by each composer, in actuality what I point to in each

case were merely recurring styles of thought, not philosophies which they followed with

perfect consistency. Like most modernist composers, McPhee, Cowell, and Harrison read

eclectically and their ideas neither fell squarely along the lines of a particular established

paradigm nor were perfectly integrated. Like other modernists they were capable of

valuing “primitive” or “Oriental” culture at one moment, and holding up the value of the

modern civilized world at the next, as it suited their various agendas and appeared to be

sensible given the evidence they possessed.

Though the terms “primitive” and “primitivism” were employed by modernist

composers, they were not used with great consistency. It was sometimes the case that

other words, such as “exotic,” were used, even while the ideas expressed were distinctly

primitivist. I have attempted to use such terms with greater consistency than they

received in the modernist writings I analyze. The result may be some discrepancy

between my own use of terms and their use in the quotations of modernist composers I

provide.

The composers that I study were either just as interested in the musics of “Orientals”

as they were of “primitives,” or were all but exclusively interested in “Orientals.”

Nevertheless, I have given a great deal of attention to primitivist notions, because they

are a key to understanding how these composers conceived of “Orientals.” John Corbett

has described the relationship between these two concepts in the minds of experimentalist

composers:

Already, right at the outset of the proverbial golden years of American

experimentalism, a familiar nineteenth-century form of Orientalism helps guide

39
 an overriding interest in non-Western music: “Oriental” music is linked, at least
by persistent proximity, with the “primitive,” and both are looked to for their
rejuvenative powers in a period of mounting dissatisfaction with conventional
Western musical civilization.28

Cowell often spoke of “primitives” and “Orientals” together, not because he regarded

them as the same, but because they were conceptually linked: “primitives” represented

the stage of human evolution at its origins, while “Orientals” represented a stage of

evolution that was higher than that of “primitives”—Oriental music, like Western music,

was “cultivated”—but lower than that of Euro-Americans (actually Cowell objected to

the words “higher” and “lower” in this context because of their Eurocentric connotation,

but he nevertheless maintained a unilinear understanding of human societies’ evolution

that implied higher and lower degrees of evolution). To the extent that Harrison’s

thinking about non-Western musics was organized within these categories, he was all but

exclusively interested in “Orientals,” not in “primitives.”

Although there seems to be an unavoidable degree of arrogance attendant with

cultural evolutionism, holding as it did that all societies were engaged in a march of

progress inevitably directed to the state of advancement of Euro-American society (and

implying, at the very least, that modern people were the only ones qualified to claim the

wisdom of hindsight upon the history of humanity and foresight into its future), not all

evolutionist arguments carried an equal degree of condescension. The phenomenon of

primitivism attests to this variance, for it held that the evolution away from more

emergent states of humanity had in fact been a decline, and not an achievement.

28
John Corbett, “Experimental Oriental: New Music and other Others,” in Western Music and Its
Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music, ed. Georgina Born and David
Hesmondhalgh (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2000), 167.

40
 The dominant philosophy of anthropology in the twentieth century has perhaps been

cultural relativism, which is often described as having supplanted cultural evolutionism. I

discuss cultural relativism in both the chapter on Cowell and again more fully in the

chapter on Harrison. The principle as I define it in that latter chapter may, again, not be

exactly the same as usages of the term found elsewhere. I had originally sought a

standard meaning of cultural relativism with which to frame the argument of that section,

but found that the meaning has varied in different corners of the field and has been the

subject of debate. It is also inevitably the case that explicit articulations of a philosophy

for the purposes of methodological orientation for a field and the actual ways that

researchers carry out their inquiries do not match perfectly. I have opted to define the

term myself in a manner that reflects the intellectual trends that I have observed in

Ethnomusicology. In regards to the non-unity of cultural relativism as a philosophy of

difference, see Alison Dundes Renteln.29 Renteln argues that the principle has been

poorly articulated by both its advocates and opponents, and that the result has been much

unnecessary argument over the theory’s merits.30

29
Renteln, “Relativism and the Search for Human Rights,” American Anthropologist 90, no. 1 (March
1988): 56-72.
30
For a sample from the debate on cultural relativism in the 1950s, see Frank E. Hartung, “Cultural
Relativity and Moral Judgments,” Philosophy of Science 21, no. 2 (April 1954): 118-126; and Herskovits’s
defenses of the theory “Tender- and Tough-Minded Antrhopolgy and the Study of Values in Culture,”
Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 7 (1951): 22-31; and “Some Further Comments on Cultural
Relativism, American Anthropologist 60, no. 2 (April 1958): 266-273. Some more recent discussions
include Wilcomb, E. Washburn, “Cultural Relativism, Human Rights, and the AAA,” American
Anthropologist 89, no. 4 (December 1987): 939-943; James W. Fernandez, “Tolerance in a Repugnant
World and other Dilemmas in the Cultural Relativism of Melville J. Herskovits,” Ethos 18, no. 2 (June
1990): 140-164; Amy Gutmann, “The Challenge of Multiculturalism in Political Ethics,” Philosophy and
Public Affairs 22, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 171-206; and William Max Knorrp, Jr., “What Relativism Isn’t,”
Philosophy 73, no. 284 (April 1998): 277-300. Both Kuper, The Invention, and Martin, The Languages,
include discussions of relativism as it represented an early critique of cultural evolution by Boas and his
students.

41
Issues in this Project’s Assemblage

Although I hope for this dissertation to contribute to a general historical picture of

ideologies of cultural difference held in the modernist composers’ community, I have

approached the question through detailed and focused studies of only three composers.

The obvious disadvantage of this approach is that focus upon three composers cannot go

very far in yielding a broad picture of the movement, and I freely admit that ideas of

difference and their significance to composition among 20th-century composers were far

more diverse than that which is represented in this dissertation. It is because of this very

fact of the intense internal diversity within the modernist movement that I have found it

necessary to focus upon three composers in such depth. Each of them possessed quite

idiosyncratic ideas on difference that only have come into full light through detailed

consideration of a broad selection of their publications. In studying a movement of

individuals who were eager not to reproduce conventional modes of thought—or even

those of their closest colleagues—I have found it essential to proceed from a careful

consideration of individual cases in order to produce worthy historical generalizations. At

the same time, these individuals were certainly not islands, and in each chapter I offer

comparisons between the ideas of the focus composer and those of some of his closest

colleagues.

The three composers that I picked for focused analysis each gave cultural difference

(and non-difference) an especially central place in his compositional and theoretical

endeavors. There were others who did the same, and whom I might also have chosen. I

hope in a future version of this project to include more modernist voices in my analysis. I

selected Cowell because he was central to so many of the activities of American

42
modernists, especially as they related to the study of cultural difference. I selected

McPhee and Harrison because each of them made special study of Indonesian musics

(Balinese and Javanese respectively) and, as I have myself been conducting fieldwork in

Indonesia since 2002, I felt well equipped to study them.31 Since we share a field, I have

found that I have been able to come particularly quickly to a critical perspective upon

their representations of Balinese and Javanese musical culture. Strictly speaking,

however, my critical study does not rely upon my first-hand experiences in Indonesia. I

do not “correct” McPhee or Harrison’s representations of Indonesia based upon my own

understandings of Indonesian musical culture, but rather critique their arguments based

on features immanent to them and contrast their representations with others produced by

scholars working in other milieus, guided by other methods and interests. In the end, the

only population that this dissertation seeks to represent is that of modernist composers,

not Indonesians.

The study on McPhee addresses textual issues of his ethnographic writing and relates

them to his composition Tabuh-tabuhan; the two studies on Cowell and Harrison are

meanwhile mostly concerned with epistemological issues. This disunity has arisen

because of these composers’ different writing styles and research styles—McPhee was

the only one of the three to engage in extensive field research. McPhee’s publications

about Bali have limited unity in tone and content, perhaps because they were spread out

in time (his first came in 1935, while his most significant ethnographic work, Music in

Bali, was only released posthumously in 1966, long after his fieldwork had been

concluded). Cowell, meanwhile, wrote more prolifically—and it seems less self-

31
I lived in Indonesia in the summers of 2002, 2003, and 2005, and for a ten-month period in 2007
with financial assistance from Fulbright-Hays. In my current field research I am interested in the use of
music in Javanese mystical movements.

43
consciously—and the result is many texts that together contribute to a big picture of his

ideas on musical difference. I have therefore focused upon textual issues of discreet

discursive acts in McPhee’s case, and have developed exegeses of epistemological

matters as evidenced across texts for Cowell and Harrison.

My discussion of Colin McPhee is an examination of his ethnographic writing, and of

how the same issues become relevant to his “ethnographic composition.” By the latter, I

mean a composition that aims to represent musical materials that are foreign to its

intended audience. The ethnographic composition, like conventionally conceived musical

ethnography (a book about foreign music), presents the audience with documentations of

the foreign music and implies, even when it does not articulate explicitly, interpretations

of the nature of what it shares with and how it differs from the audience’s own music.

The represented materials of an ethnographic composition, not being precise

documentations of foreign sounds as a field recording would be, present a series of

statements about what the foreign music most essentially “is.” I discuss McPhee’s

ethnographic composition Tabuh-tabuhan as an encounter with difference in which that

which was represented was ultimately compelled—for the sake of coherence and

appeal—to speak on terms familiar to its audience. It was an allegory in the sense that

although it most explicitly spoke about one thing (Balinese music), it at the same time

represented something else unstated (modernism). That which was represented, then, far

from appearing to the audience as a novel object for neutral apprehension, inevitably

appeared in the forms of the audience’s own familiarity, and spoke to their own particular

concerns.

44
 I draw this concept of ethnographic allegory from James Clifford, who describes how

in ethnography the constructed image of the other and the other’s manners of making

meaning are unveiled, “seen” and “heard,” in a continuing structure of metaphors

between what the reader presumes to be the meanings belonging to the other and the

meanings that had articulated themselves to the reader prior to his/her opening of the

book: “What appears descriptively to the senses… seems to be ‘other,’ while what is

suggested by the coherent series of perceptions is an underlying similitude.”32 Even if the

ethnographer were to offer no parallel structure by which the other was to by regarded,

Clifford argues that, in the interest of coherence, an allegorical frame would be

constructed by the reader. “Even scientific ethnographers cannot fully control the

meanings—readings—provoked by their accounts” (p. 110). Such parallels are the terms

on which the meaningfulness of ethnographic accounts is contingent.

As noted, the materials available for both Harrison and Cowell were such that in each

case periods of marked consistency could be observed in their voices as they articulated

views on cultural difference—even in periods when they composed with a variety of

voices. For that reason, my analyses of those two composer/ethnographers have been

concerned with the exegesis of theoretical stances that come into full focus through

examination of multiple writings. Rather than focusing on the dynamics of a single

utterance, as I did with McPhee, I focus in the chapters on Harrison and Cowell on the

tendencies of thought that permitted a variety of statements about the cultural other and

which provided the means of drawing compositional influence from the cultural other.

32
James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Allegory,” in Writing Culture, ed. James Clifford and George E.
Marcus (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986), 101.

45
 As I have already mentioned, I argue that an overarching dualism informed Harrison’s

understanding of cultural difference and can be heard in his compositions—through the

generation of materials in opposition to certain undesirable forms of musicality, such as

equal temperament. Meanwhile, Cowell’s views on difference idiosyncratically combined

three styles of conceiving of difference: scientific positivism, cultural evolutionism, and

cultural relativism. I have discussed the latter two in the previous subsection of this

introduction. By positivism, I mean that Cowell understood there to be inherent features

of music, transcendent of culture. While Cowell respected that the world’s peoples’

musics differed in many significant respects, he saw difference as only descending to a

certain depth, below which was a fundamental level at which any music could be studied

with the same scientific apparatus. This basic level, music’s “elements,” offered a

unifying foundation for his inquiry by which Euroecentrism could be dispelled and upon

which all musics could be championed as equally valid. This was relativistic in spirit, but

epistemologically speaking was not “cultural relativism” as it is generally defined today.

My analyses of the compositions of these three modernists are somewhat

idiosyncratic. In each case, I have prioritized analysis of the composer’s verbally

articulated views on difference, and then developed musical analyses that expose how

each made notes accomplish the same thing as words. Beyond this, there has been no

overarching music analytical method, because, just as I have allowed the writings of each

composer to determine what was significant to say about them as writers, I have done the

same for them as composers. I have discussed how McPhee’s orchestral work Tabuh-

tabuhan acted as ethnographic allegory, in the sense described by James Clifford. With

Cowell and Harrison I have discussed how the same epistemological issues that were

46
structural to their written statements about cultural difference and non-difference were

present in and structural to their compositions.

There are certain themes which I have not taken up but might have, and it is worth

mentioning those now. One is race. This study, though it is concerned with cultural

difference on a worldwide scale, does not touch upon issues of race because those were

not explicitly touched upon by these composers in their writings. Racialism was one

common component of anthropological thinking in the nineteenth century and in the

twentieth century as well, and in some cases cultural evolutionist theories went hand-in-

hand with racist ones. The composers I have studied, in so far as they subscribed to

cultural-evolutionist theories, did not suggest that differences in culture were due to

differences in biology, but rather subscribed to what Martin calls the “civilization

paradigm”:

Certainly this [civilization] paradigm, too, was hierarchical, but it did not involve
marking any peoples as absolutely, hereditarily inferior, but only as to some
degree and for some reason—climatic or historical, say—slower in their
development as a society.”33

The composers of this study seem to have believed in the biological unity of

humanity, to have been anti-racist, or not to have considered race an issue worth

stressing. The absence of explicit racism is not, however, an indication of pure

colorblindness. Cowell must have conceived of his “Orientals” as having darker skin than

he did, and his “primitives”—as they happened to exist in Africa, Australia, and wherever

else—as being darker still. Yet he articulated no reason why this should necessarily be so.

If a study of ideas of race among these American modernists were undertaken, it would

require different methods from the ones I have used.

33
Martin, The Languages of Difference, 23.

47
 The relationship of sexuality (particularly homosexuality) and interest in non-Western

musics among modernist composers is another issue that I might have pursued. Each of

these three composers had sexual relationships with other men, either partially or

exclusively, as did many 20th-century American composers that were interested in non-

Western musics. I regret that I cannot offer any explanation for the overwhelming

gayness of this historical phenomenon. Rather than offer crude interpretations of

something so complex, I have opted to leave the issue to other scholars, able to offer the

issue the focused study and finesse that it deserves. As a start, for those interested in this

line of inquiry, I refer the reader to Nadine Hubbs’s thoughtful The Queer Composition of

America’s Sound,34 which focuses on the gay community surrounding Virgil Thompson

and Aaron Copland.

My aim in this introduction has been to offer the reader a sense of what all three

studies of the following studies point to about modernist styles of engaging with

difference. The fact that all three follow address different though related concerns has

arisen because, after some struggle, I have relented to allow the materials I have accessed

on each study to give me their forms and themes, rather than the reverse. I have had to

ignore less than I would had I asked all the materials to speak to the same concerns, and

so I hope that the result is studies that are both more incisive and less reductive.

34
The Queer Composition of America's Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National
Identity (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2004).

48
 Chapter II: Colin McPhee and “The Absolute Music of Bali”

“From a musician’s viewpoint the island of Bali is the legendary isle joyeuse.”

Colin McPhee, 1935

During the 1920s and ‘30s American composers were becoming increasingly

interested in foreign musics. Many hoped that the closer examination of such musics and

their incorporation into a new modern music would lead composers away from the

influence of Western Europe, and toward a music that was at once more confidently

American and more deeply human. Toward this aim, both nationalist and universalist, the

musics of “primitive” peoples from all parts of the earth (not just those indigenous to the

U.S.) were of interest. “Primitives” were understood to be in touch with those “first

principles” of music making that had become obscured in the European classical music

tradition, especially that of the nineteenth century.

Perhaps no American composer of that era could claim to have made as careful and

prolonged a study of a foreign music as Colin McPhee. McPhee lived on the island of

Bali (in modern Indonesia) for much of the decade of the 1930s, and intermittently during

and his time there wrote articles, compositions, transcriptions, and lectures introducing

Balinese music to Western audiences. His first profession was composition, but his
ethnographic publications, particularly the encyclopedic Music in Bali35 (posthumous,

1966), ultimately received the greatest recognition. Upon Music in Bali’s publication the

ethnomusicologist Judith Becker reviewed it as “one of the most carefully written,

complete and precise descriptions of any musical style outside the Western world.”36

McPhee’s memoires A House in Bali (1946) gave a rich, non-technical description of

Balinese life, and as such may also be considered an ethnographic work. As I will

discuss, it was widely read and received excellent critical reviews.

McPhee’s most well known composition is probably Tabuh-tabuhan, scored for two

pianos and orchestra and saturated with Balinese musical ideas.37 He wrote it on a return

visit to the West in 1935-36. Although McPhee was please with its premier performance

in Mexico City (conducted by Carlos Chávez), he subsequently suffered disappointment

by failing to procure a U.S. premier: the work was hear on U.S. radio in 1948 and the first

U.S. concert performance did not occur until 1953. The discouragement all but ended

McPhee’s compositional career, and yet Tabuh-tabuhan has been much admired by

some, in part as a sort of compositional ethnography. Reviewing the 1948 radio

performance, Henry Cowell remarked: “No Western composer has probably ever known

the music of another culture so thoroughly as McPhee does the Indonesian, so that when

35
McPhee’s three books are A House in Bali (New York: The John Day Company, 1946) (hereafter
cited as HIB), his memoir of life in Bali during the 1930s; A Club for Small Men (New York: The John Day
Company, 1948), a children’s book describing his forming of a musical club for the children of his Balinese
village; and Music in Bali (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), his largest project, a detailed
description of Balinese music with transcriptions of several Balinese musical genres.
36
Judith Becker, review of Music in Bali, Journal of the American Musicological Society 21(Fall
1968): 404.
37
Tabuh-tabuhan (New York: Associated Music Publishers, Inc., 1960).

50
he writes in this style he is able to retain the characteristics that are most important to

Indonesian culture and at the same time most attractive to us.”38

My concern in this chapter is with how McPhee crafted some of the earliest

compositions and texts so as to make Balinese music comprehensible and indeed

interesting to his American audiences. In the following section I will discuss how the

success of McPhee’s memoir A House in Bali is attributable in part to his skillful use of

two authorial techniques: omission and metaphor. Omission is the technique whereby the

author, particularly the author of ethnography, excludes from the text that information

that would be unlikely to be meaningful or appealing to his intended audience. Metaphor

in this context (connected to Clifford’s concept of “ethnographic allegory”, which I

discuss in the Introduction) is the technique whereby an author presents information

foreign to his/her audience in a way that will make it seem to be the same as that which

the audience already knows.

Following the discussion of McPhee’s handling of omission and metaphor, and the

success they earned for A House in Bali, I turn to the questions of how and why

composers of new music in the U.S. early in McPhee’s career were interested in non-

Western musics. I argue that the terms by which modernist composers of the time were

prepared to and interested in engaging with non-Western music determined the way

McPhee chose—or was compelled—to shape his representations of Balinese music. The

remainder of this chapter will then be devoted to a consideration of two of McPhee’s

earliest representations of Balinese music, the 1935 article published in Modern Music

38
Henry Cowell, “Current Cronicle,” The Musical Quarterly 34, no. 3 (July 1948): 410-411, 405-429.

51
“The ‘Absolute’ Music of Bali” 39 and Tabuh-tabuhan. 40 Taking Cowell’s statement that

in Tabuh-tabuhan McPhee had retained the characteristics of Indonesian culture “most

valuable to us” as telling, I discuss the many ways in which these two representations

were, in their content and form, fitted for reception in the modernist community. I argue

that what those representations said—and indeed could say—about Balinese music was

determined to a great extent by what American composers were already thinking about

“primitives,” Europeans, and themselves. The techniques of omission and metaphor,

which can be considered as compositional as well as authorial, were both crucial for the

construction of coherent representations of Bali on these terms.

As McPhee produced a relatively small body of compositions and writings, which are

quite spread out over his career, my analytical approach is different in this chapter than it

will be in the chapters on Cowell and Harrison. Whereas for the latter composers

exegeses of coherence in their long-term outlooks could be developed, for McPhee I have

focused on the rhetoric he employed in two productive moments in his career, starting in

1946 with the publication of A House in Bali and then moving back to 1935-36 with the

publication “The ‘Absolute’ Music of Bali” and the performance of Tabuh-tabuhan.

McPhee’s voice, unlike Cowell’s and especially unlike Harrison’s, shifted considerably

over his career and depending on his intended audience, making it difficult to draw out

unifying terms of coherence.

39
“The Absolute Music of Bali,” Modern Music 12 (May-June 1935): 163-69 (hereafter cited as AMB).
40
Richard Mueller has produced a significant study of Tabuh-tabuhan. See his “Bali, Tabuh-Tabuhan,
and Colin McPhee’s Method of Intercultural Composition, The Journal of Musicological Research, part 1:
10, no. 3-4 (1991): 127-75; part 2: 11, no. 1-2 (1991): 67-92. Also see his “Imitation and Stylization in the
Balinese Music of Colin McPhee,” Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Chicago, 1983.

52
Omission and Metaphor in A House in Bali

A House in Bali tells the story of McPhee’s life on the island, which spanned the

years 1931 to 1939. It was at once memoir and ethnography: a narrative conveying events

in temporal order and confining the story to McPhee’s personal experiences, it

nevertheless directed the reader’s attention toward McPhee’s Balinese acquaintances and

their music, not toward McPhee himself.41 Its reviewers were astonished with McPhee’s

success at conveying an unmediated, physical experience of life in Bali (both his own

experience and, notably, that of the Balinese!), but, as I will argue, the book was in fact

carefully crafted so as to convey such immediate experiences via imagery that was

already familiar to McPhee’s readership. The apparent universality of the description was

thus actually a skillful mediation, directed at a particular, historically contingent

readership.

In light of some of the evidence I raise, it will be seen that aspects of McPhee’s story

were distorted by the omission of information: in particular the omission of the fact that

he had a wife (the anthropologist Jane Belo) and that he lived among a community of

Western intellectuals that included the anthropologist Margaret Mead and the painter and

poet Walter Spies. Yet, as a fact of memoir writing omission is par for the course. I do

not note these few omissions to correct the story, to provide the crucial details so that the

“true” story can come to light, but rather raise them in the course of arguing that the art of

memoir writing is necessarily one of fishing from an ocean of memories a very few

details to include. The only “true” story would be the impossible narrative organization of

41
Throughout this chapter and particularly in this discussion of A House in Bali I rely heavily upon
Carol Oja’s biography, Colin McPhee: Composer in Two Worlds (Washington and London: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1990) (hereafter cited as CTW).

53
that vast continuum of experience that was left behind. As does any personal recollection,

A House in Bali presents only a partial account of all that really transpired, and yet, the

potency of A House in Bali, its ability to communicate convincingly and pleasurably

about its subjects, rests precisely in its design by omission.

For ethnography, which involves describing people and locations that are utterly

foreign to one’s readership, omission is the first necessary step that permits the other

essential technique, metaphor. A metaphor in this case refers to the literary device

whereby the ethnographer renders something for his/her reader belonging to the studied

subject (e.g. a concept, perceived object, remembered experience) in terms that the

ethnographer suggests correspond to something from the reader’s vocabulary. Metaphor

can be understood theoretically as a feature of all ethnography, as inherent to the art of

communicating a physical world that is totally unknown. McPhee’s reviewers praised his

ability to render in words the physical sensation of being in Bali through direct appeal to

the universal senses: I suggest that McPhee’s success in this regard can be understood in

terms of his deftness with ethnographic metaphor. While he seemed to have created for

his readers an experience of physically being in Bali, he did so by stimulating their own

bodily knowledge of the urban American landscape.

McPhee’s story begins in 1931, when McPhee set out from New York in search of

music he had heard on a recording:

I was a young composer, recently back in New York after student days in Paris,
and the past two years had been filled with composing and the business of getting
performances. It was quite by accident that I had heard the few gramophone
records that were to change my life completely, bringing me out here in search of
something quite indefinable—music or experience, I could not at this moment
say. The records had been made in Bali, and the clear, metallic sounds of the
music were like the stirring of a thousand bells, delicate, confused, with a
sensuous charm, a mystery that was quite overpowering. (HIB, 2)

54
McPhee described how at the time of the initial voyage he had not planned to stay long.

But his stay in Bali would linger on for nearly a decade. Some of the major events

McPhee described include the building of a home in the Balinese style, adopting a son

who would prove a talented dancer, and initiating a revival of gamelan semar

pegulingan, a genre that had all but disappeared by the time McPhee arrived. Though he

never made himself the focus of the stories, he was nonetheless one of his own objects of

representation. This he accomplished mostly by contrast in his interactions with the

Balinese characters, and, in one case, with a Westerner. When McPhee first came to Bali,

A Dutch hotel manager chastised him for riding in the front seat of his car, next to his

Balinese driver:

I don’t like to see you there in the front seat. The white man must never forget
to maintain the dignity of the white race.
He gave a gentle belch.
Then as an afterthought he added, If you really must sit in the front, drive the
car yourself and let the chauffeur sit behind.
But I continued to sit the way I pleased. We drove with the top down, the hot
sun beating on our heads. It was only when we passed the tennis court or entered
the hotel driveway that I felt self-conscious, ostentatious and subversive. (HIB,
16-17)

As the only other Western character given a voice in the story, the hotel manager

contributes to an impression of McPhee as quite alone. The manager speaks

condescendingly about his Balinese servants and lasciviously about the young women

peddling souvenirs. It would seem, based on this one case in contrast, that the other

Westerners on the island held attitudes toward the Balinese that were elitist, objectifying,

and hypocritical. McPhee would have little to do with them, nor they with him. He lived

only among the Balinese and shunned other Westerners.

55
 Bali, as McPhee described it, did not resemble the sexualized image of its earlier

travel literature. McPhee’s audience would have associated the island with bare-breasted,

nubile women; such had been central to Bali’s lore in the early days of tourism, the first

travel brochure having been released by the Dutch government in 1914, only a few years

after conquering the island in a series of takeovers of the royal courts so bloody and

disturbing that it shocked the Dutch citizenry.42 McPhee wrote little about Bali’s women.

His characters were mostly Balinese musicians and dancers, men. This restraint inspired

praise from some reviewers: “With great skill McPhee brings Bali to life and engages our

interest without any allusion to sex in any form apart from that of the native mores.

Hollywood might be aroused by McPhee’s brilliant photographs of Balinese dancers and

domestic help, but Hollywood would have to invent its own peculiar moral story.”43

The book’s many positive reviews repeatedly praised McPhee both as a person and as

a writer. They noticed the ease with which he moved among the Balinese and the

simplicity and vivid sensuousness with which he committed his experience to prose.

“[For McPhee], obviously, the process was as natural as taking a swim. It involved no

loss of face, no surrender of personality, no degradation. These factors simply do not

42
On the Dutch colonial takeover of Bali and the ensuing early travel literature on Bali produced by the
Dutch, see Adrian Vickers, “The Birth of Bali the Paradise,” chap. 3 of Bali: A Paradise Created
(Singapore: Periplus Editions, 1989). Vickers describes a shift in the popular conception of Bali in the
Western imagination from an island of bare-breasted women to an island of art and music. This shift was in
part effected by the work of artists and anthropologists on the island in the 1930s, among them Walter
Spies, Miguel Covarrubias, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and McPhee himself. One of the most
famous early travel books on Bali, with dozens of evocative (and provocative) photographs and drawings,
was Miguel Covarrubias, Island of Bali (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1937).
43
William McFee, “Pleasant Research Into Bali’s Music,” The New York Sun, 24 September 1946;
clipping accessed in the Colin McPhee Collection of the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archives (hereafter cited
as McPhee Coll.).

56
enter his story.”44 Another reviewer commented, “Perhaps McPhee owes his success with

the Balinese to his personality. The impression we get from his book is that we are

reading the adventures of one who has been living in paradise and has returned to earth to

tell us about it.”45

Although few of the enthusiastic reviewers of A House in Bali were likely aware of

just how much McPhee had left out of the narrative, to those who knew him personally

during his Bali years, the book’s omissions must have seemed glaring. McPhee gave Jane

Belo, his wife of the time, no mention whatsoever, though she had lived with him in the

“house in Bali” and had in fact paid for its construction, its team of servants, and the

expenses of the entire Balinese excursion. The development of conflict in their

relationship and their eventual separation, in large part over McPhee’s hot temper and his

relationship with a Balinese man, received no mention.46 One presumes that the excision

of her presence could not have been accomplished without major reconstruction of the

story.

Yet of greater bearing for McPhee’s representation of Balinese culture was his almost

total excision of the other Western artists and scholars on the island. These intellectuals,

along with a booming tourist industry (which McPhee did briefly describe with some

distaste), were actively influencing the arts that fascinated them, helping to give reality to
44
Frederic G. Hyde, “Musician’s Sojourn in Bali: McPhee Tells of Five Years on Storied Isle,” The
Philadelphia Inquirer Book Review; clipping accessed at McPhee Coll.
45
McFee, “Pleasant Research.”
46
The evidence for the latter source of strife between him and Belo comes in a letter to Sidney Cowell,
in which McPhee wrote: “My few emotional-sentimental relations have not penetrated too deeply. My
alliance with Jane was broken off by me in a final fit of stubbornness, and on the whole I don’t regret it, for
she had turned into what for me was a prig, probably because she was tired of my untidy and carefree
attitude towards life. Anyway, I was in love at the time with a Balinese, which she knew, and to have him
continually around was too much for her vanity. So it all ended as I’d foreseen at the beginning, and Jane
was unbelievably loyal long after there was any reason for it” (McPhee to Sidney Cowell, May 23 [after
1945], quoted in CTW, 142).

57
the famous claim that in Bali everyone was an artist. McPhee would have interacted with

the members of this community continuously. All of their studies would have been both

significantly affected—both aided and curtailed—by the Dutch colonial government.

Such issues went unaddressed, as did the harsh economic conditions that colonialism was

currently imposing on the Balinese.47

One of the most influential Western consociates of McPhee was the German painter,

writer, and musician Walter Spies, whose two-piano transcriptions of Balinese music

were likely the inspiration for McPhee’s own many efforts in the same genre.48 Spies’s

near total absence from A House in Bali (he did receive passive mention) did not escape

comment by one reviewer: Beryl De Zoete was herself a contemporary of McPhee in

Bali, and the coauthor of Spies’s Dance and Drama in Bali (1937). Though she otherwise

wrote positively about McPhee’s book, she criticized his omission of Spies:

Mr. McPhee was of course at liberty, as his story is personal, to make no allusion
to other European or American residents in Bali. But as he does make casual
mention of that very original painter and musician, Walter Spies, the most
learned, beloved and trusted of all alien inhabitants of Bali, whose death by
drowning during the war was far more than a personal calamity, one feels that
recognition of the writer’s many debts to him would have been a becoming
gesture. Perhaps this awaits Mr. McPhee’s book on Balinese music, which no one
is so qualified to write as he.49

There were more omissions. McPhee described the pleasures of transcribing Balinese

music with I Made Lebah, his driver and assistant (Lebah was an extraordinary musician

47
On Balinese tourism, the circle of intellectuals, the colonial administration, and the economic
circumstances during the 1930s, see Vickers, Bali: A Paradise Created.
48
For a discussion of Spies and kebyar’s emergence, see Tilman Seebasss, “Change in Balinese
Musical Life: Kebyar in the 1920s and 1930s,” in Being Modern in Bali: Image and Change, ed. Adrian
Vickers (New Haven, CT: Yale University Southeast Asian Studies, 1996), 71-91.
49
Beryl de Zoete, review of A House in Bali, by Colin McPhee, The New Statesman and Nation, 3
April 1948, p. 279.

58
who was becoming famous in his own right, eventually leading the internationally

renowned gamelan community in Peliatan for many years): “Seriously, leisurely, we

worked together till sundown” (HIB, 157). He did not mention that his employee found

these sessions tedious and bewildering.50 McPhee described himself as a gentle and

detached participant in Balinese life, patient with some of the more difficult personalities;

he did not mention that Lebah and surely others were disturbed by his sudden outbursts

of anger when he drank. McPhee described how he had stimulated a revival of gamelan

semar pegulingan; he did not credit Lebah for having done a good deal of the

organizational work, while he provided the financial support for the project (which would

not have been possible without Belo).

One reviewer marveled that McPhee had done more than render an accurate

experience of being in Bali; he had transformed his reader into a Balinese:

So explicit is the translation (of sense, not words), that we glimpse Bali’s shadow-
plays, hear Bali’s music, breathe Bali’s air, not as tourist spectators but as natives.
This is no easy trick of portrayal, as any who have visited foreign lands—even the
more analogous countries of Europe—and then have tried to interpret their
inhabitants to the home folks can testify. . . . Therein, in [McPhee’s] gift for
accepting a civilization on its own terms and then in those same terms
representing that civilization to outsiders, lies his success.51

Minna Lederman similarly remarked on the physical immediacy of Bali as relayed by

McPhee. She found that as she read the book she physically experienced Bali, and, what

is most astonishing, she did so as though not with her own body but with a Balinese one.

50
My thanks to David Harnish, who provided much valuable information on McPhee’s relationship
with Lebah in a personal correspondence of 7 December 2007. Harnish discusses the relationship in “A
Hermeneutical Arc in the Life of Balinese Musician, I Made Lebah,” The World of Music: Journal f the
Department of Ethnomusicology, Otto-Friedrich University of Bamberg 43, no. 1 (2001): 21-41. On these
topics also see CTW, 90-91 and 125-134.
51
Hope Stoddard, “Books of the Day,” International Musician (Nov. 1946). p. 21; accessed at McPhee
Coll.

59
She not only breathed Bali’s air, she breathed with Balinese lungs. She found that

McPhee had successfully abandoned preconceptions and theories, and then had the

intelligence and integrity to commit his experience unmediated into prose. The key was

that he had stuck closely to the five senses, which were universal:

All is sight, sound, smell, taste, touch—an undeviating record of personal

experience. But when we have read the last word we are in possession of the
Balinese nature; we know how these islanders feel, play, worship, almost how
they breathe.”52

These two reviewers described feeling as if they had become Balinese, even though

McPhee never professed to tell his story from a Balinese point of view, only from his

own. McPhee himself wrote to Sidney Cowell that he was pleased with how the book had

come out, and indicated that he was consciously aware of the importance that omission

had played in the writing process, as well as the importance of directing the writing to a

particular audience. Rather than stressing how he had created a transparent window upon

Bali, he stressed how he had managed, by not including too much material, to create a

sense of mystery (ironically what might be taken as the very definition of “exoticism”):

Really, I’m pleased with the book. It’s a snobbish book, in a way, for what I’ve
withheld, and where I’ve placed the accents. And yet it has a wide appeal, I know,
from the variety of readers who have enjoyed the pieces. The only effect that
counts in the long run is one of mystery, of what you imply rather than say.
Perhaps I feel that way because I’ve been trained as a musician, and feel words
the way I feel tones. The sentence must float, if you know what I mean. Not be
weighted down. Just as the music of Mozart floats, while Beethoven, my god, and
Bach too at times, sinks, sinks to the bottom of the glass. That’s what comes of
being too insistent about being sincere, or putting yourself into it.53

52
Minna Lederman, “Music in the Bali Air,” Saturday Review, 23 November 1946, p. 19; accessed at
McPhee Coll.
53
McPhee to Sidney Cowell, “Friday” [1946]; quoted in CTW, 143.

60
 A few of the metaphors in A House in Bali are particularly evocative. One example is

the following, in which McPhee employed two images peculiar to a city like New York

or Paris in order to evoke the change of light throughout a Balinese day:

In the early morning the island had a golden freshness, dripped and shone with
moisture like a garden in a florist’s window. By noon it had become hard and
matter-of-fact. But in the late afternoon the island was transformed once more; it
grew unreal, lavish and theatrical like old-fashioned opera scenery. As the sun
neared the horizon men and women turned the colour of new copper, while
shadows grew purple, the grass blue, and everything white reflected a deep rose.
(HIB, 18)

Otherworldly colors—gold, copper, purple, blue, and rose—here collaborated with the

similes of the florist’s window and the opera set. Both of the latter, as encountered in an

urban landscape, were themselves representations, pointing to things physically separated

from the viewer. The florist’s window offered excerpts from a garden that could only be

imagined. The flowers were encased in glass like artifacts in a museum, and they

beckoned the passerby into the shop. The opera, perhaps the luxurious, “old-fashioned”

kind of nineteenth-century productions in particular, cast in artificial lighting the

fantastic, the alluring, and the bizarre, but only as enactments. These two visual

metaphors for the Balinese times of day suggested to the reader that an adequate

rendering of the beauty of Balinese light could be conveyed only through the peculiar

magic of Western display and theatrical spectacle itself.

In another episode, McPhee similarly described three young legong dancers with

imagery from the world of Western representation and display, specifically via the media

of sculpture and of film:

Their gestures had infinite elegance, and they seemed like little statues, intricate
and delicate, that had come to life—not with suppleness, but, like the sequence of
images in a film, in a series of poses that lasted the mere fraction of a second. You
felt they were conscious of every sixteenth-note in the music. (HIB, 19)

61
The effectiveness of McPhee’s account, which the readers had remarked upon as

universal, was in fact contingent upon their occupation of a particular historical position.

The presence of such metaphors for the young dancers as “statues” and “images in a

film” suggests that, to the extent that McPhee’s readers felt themselves to be mysteriously

occupying Balinese bodies, that “trick of portrayal” was accomplished by awaking their

own bodily memories, in particular their experiences of other evocative representations.

The fact that Bali seemed so immediate to them was precisely because McPhee had

drawn upon images from the world that they, as urbanites, already occupied.

The above discussion of McPhee’s representational techniques is meant to provide

illustrations of how the task of cultural representation necessitates the cutting away of

materials, the bringing forth of only a few, and the construction of something coherent

from those few on formal/ideological terms that are accessible to their new

readers/observers/listeners/consumers, which may be quite foreign to the people

represented. In transference for comprehension on new terms, cultural information must

be processed into the form of knowledge previously consumed, acquiring the taste of that

which is already understood and desired. The artistry of representing an experience in a

foreign culture involves choosing which details to forget. It involves knowing the

suppression of which sensations will evoke the desired, the excision of which details will

establish an intelligible story, and the inclusion of which would bore, confuse, or disgust

a person likely to sit down with one’s book.

In McPhee’s case this is no exclusively theoretical issue. As shown, in A House in

Bali McPhee’s omissions were extravagant and occasionally brazen, as in his excision of

Belo from the story. Fortunately for McPhee, he was skillful enough with the technique

62
that there was little suspicion of his artistic cuts. And yet, though I have emphasized how

McPhee’s representation of Bali was neither objective nor “true” in any naïve sense,

neither do I argue that his representations were false or even that they were less truthful

than those of other authors of such ethnographies (though McPhee might have been more

canny than some other authors about his artistic manipulations). Based on my own

experiences in Bali since 2002, no part of McPhee’s description of Bali in the 1930s

strikes me as improbable, and there is much that feels familiar. Rather than observe that

McPhee created a false or inauthentic account, I seek to examine how even an earnest and

informed ethnographer must play elaborate games in order to transform something

foreign into something intelligible. It is McPhee’s trick of conjuring a non-mediated

representation of Bali that I seek to unveil.

A House in Bali was not the first of McPhee’s artistic representations of Balinese

music and culture, nor was it the first in which he employed the techniques of omission

and metaphor. As will be seen, these techniques were present in both the article “The

‘Absolute’ Music of Bali” and the orchestral composition Tabuh-tabuhan of 1935-36. In

both works McPhee employed metaphors to link the music of Bali and that of the

modernist milieu of New York. These were not literal metaphors in terms of their syntax:

there were no statements such as “the Balinese percussion orchestra is the percussion

orchestra of our contemporary modernist composers.” The latter half of the metaphor

was, for the most part, unstated. To those from outside of McPhee’s modernist circle,

those statements about Bali might have seemed to be neutral, perhaps intriguing but not

reflecting directly upon the Western world. But within McPhee’s milieu, his words would

have been powerfully charged. Before discussing the metaphors of “The ‘Absolute’

63
Music of Bali” and Tabuh-tabuhan I will present an overview of the position of

composers of new music in the 1920s and ‘30s upon “the primitive” (in broad terms),

which will prepare the discussion of metaphor in McPhee’s works.

American Modernist Views of “the Primitive” in the 1920s and ‘30s

While McPhee’s compositions were few, he was a successful ethnographer in so far

as his ethnographic works, particularly the posthumous ethnography Music in Bali,

continue to be remembered and referred to. As I have argued, McPhee’s accomplishment

was of a sort that must necessarily be attributed to a successful ethnographer: that of

having composed convincing partial truths. Already preceding A House in Bali, in the

brief article “The Absolute Music of Bali” published in Modern Music and the orchestral

composition Tabuh-tabuhan McPhee represented Bali in prediction of that which

members of the community of composers of new music had the capacity to hear. The

themes of representation in each work are in fact much the same. Though McPhee

constructed a tailored representation of Bali to appeal to his composer colleagues, I do

not consider that to be a dishonest act. He did not distort what he knew of Bali so as to

increase its allure. Rather, I am considering his tailored truths as necessary to the act of

speaking about non-Western music within his particular milieu.

At the time of McPhee’s return visit to the U.S. in 1935-36, when he created these

two works, he was already the most deeply initiated of modernism’s voyagers into non-

Western culture. McPhee seems at that time to have been eager to share his Balinese

musical discoveries and to make a name for himself not only as a composer with a

specialized knowledge of a non-Western musical tradition but as a composer who,

64
through extended study of such a tradition, had attained special certainty about what

music (as a trans-cultural concept) most fundamentally was.

McPhee’s efforts to introduce Balinese music to this audience must be read as taking

advantage of a broader mode of thinking in the modernist milieu regarding the relation

between modernist music and music of the “primitive.” Primitivism, on the one hand and

as it is most commonly understood, was an artistic movement that sought to emulate

“primitives.” Who these “primitives” were and what they were like was not at all given,

since most modernist composers had little or no contact with the people that they

believed to be primitives. Recordings of “primitive” music were less available than

“primitive” art objects, and even the latter required interpretation if one was to

understand their “primitive” essence. All this meant that the “primitives” that influenced

modernist composers were, to a very great degree, their own constructions. This does not

imply that they were simply fantasies, that the conception of “primitives” bore no

relationship to any actual living people. Some modernists devoted tremendous amounts

of time to their studies, and in McPhee’s case, studied through first-hand contact with

“primitive” peoples.

On one side of the coin modernists drew influence from “primitives;” on the other

side modernists created these “primitives” in their own image. This was inevitable, as the

terms at hand by which to conceive of “primitives” were necessarily the ones of the

modernists’ own intellectual milieu. The result was a continuous reshifting of modernist

aesthetics based on new ideas about “primitives” and a continually revised conception of

the nature of “primitives” in parallel with shifts in modernist aesthetics. In the minds of

modernists, modernists and primitives were brothers.

65
 An explicit articulation of this idea was made in 1934 by Raymond Petit, who argued

that exotic music was “modern” music, and that in terms of its “modern”-ness—in the

sense of forward-looking—it fared well in comparison with the supposedly “civilized

arts” of the concert hall. Petit used the term “exotic” rather than “primitive,” but he

shared with primitivism the idea of a generalized Other that had universal characteristics

that Western concert music lacked:

At all events, exotic music . . . seems to me to be something of the present, as

modern as many of our socalled civilized arts. A Khen solo intended to aid the
search for the body of an infant, is as alive and of the present as any artificial and
ephemeral sonata which flourishes in our concert halls. The congress of
Mohammedan music held in Cairo in 1932 seems to me as modern as most of our
music festivals…. In some quite different fashion, the musician of the future
should be able to guide himself by principles like these, to re-establish contact
with the universe.54

McPhee’s statements of 1935-36 were located within this paradigm. Prior to his 1931

departure to Bali, McPhee had been a member of a tightly knit community of young

composers, and he directed his 1935-36 statements to them. Returning to the U.S. that

year McPhee had already written to Cowell of his plans: a book on Balinese music and

the intention to have “a couple of orchestral work[s] finished by fall—a prelude and

toccata [sic], and a ‘fantasia’ for piano and orchestra on Balinese melodies and

rhythms—authentic stuff and not dished-up impressionism à la Eichheim.”55 He

proclaimed: “After those years of silence, and geographical remoteness, I announce my

return to the land of the living.” Among those “living” friends and colleagues were the

54
Rayond Petit, “Exotic and Contemporary Music,” Modern Music 10 (1934): 203.
55
McPhee to Henry Cowell, written from “New York Central Lines—En Route,” spring 1935, quoted
in CTW, 93. McPhee refers to Henry Eichheim, a composer and conductor who championed Debussy,
Ravel, and Fauré. Eicheim composed two works for orchestra and Javanese gamelan instruments: Java
(1929) and Bali (1933).

66
composers Carlos Chávez, and Edgard Varèse, and Cowell himself. McPhee’s statements

about Bali at this time were uttered in dialogue with those of these composers and others;

his field experiences served as reiteration and elaboration of their ideas (which were

mostly uninformed by fieldwork) rather than in contradiction of them.

Almost a decade earlier, when after a two-year stint of study in Paris (1924-26)

McPhee had first arrived in New York, the modernist movement in America was still

quite young. Its members made this a point of pride. McPhee was one of the movement’s

many promising but not-yet established figures. He had studied composition with the

avant-garde leader Varèse, and in 1928 became a founding member of the Pan America

Association of Composers along with Henry Cowell, Carlos Chávez, and Edgard Varèse.

Modernism in 1920s New York thrived on a desire to be artistically independent from

Europe. Varèse had observed upon his 1915 arrival in the U.S. that no one seemed to

know anything about modern music.56 In 1921 he founded the International Composers’

Guild with the intention of establishing a footing for modern music in New York. By

1923, as interest in an American composition had risen, another organization splintered

off. The League of Composers, whose design was to focus on American compositions,

began publishing the journal Modern Music in 1924 (it was originally titled the League of

Composers Review). In 1927 the Guild dissolved, and in 1928 Varèse created The Pan

American Association of Composers. The formation of this new organization suggested

56
See R. Allen Lot, “’New Music for New Ears’: The International Composers’ Guild,” Journal of the
America Musicological Society 36, no. 2 (Summer 1983): 266-286, on Varese’s role in establishing modern
music as an American movement through The International Composers’ Guild. The assumption that Varèse
entered an American musical scene that was completely absent of modernist interests has been challenged.
In 1915, Leo Ornstein had already performed a concert of modernist piano works. On the subject of
Ornstein’s early modernist career and his withdrawal from concert life in the mid-1920s, just as American
modernism was in its rise, see Michael Broyles and Denise Von Glahn, Leo Ornstein: Modernist
Dilemmas, Personal Choices (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana Univ. Press, 2007).

67
that the Americas (with New York as implied capital), in their explosion of modernist

activity, now themselves constituted an independent musical culture, not merely a

satellite of Europe. The mission statement of the Association indicated the newness of

this situation:

Encouragement may be derived from the fact that whereas a few years ago it
would have been impossible to find a sufficient number of American composers
with new musical ideals to form such an association, today there is a sizable
group of progressive men and women who, although representing many different
tendencies, are banded together through serious and sincere interest in furthering
all the finest music being written in the Americas.57

Besides having his works performed on programs by the Guild, the Pan American

Association, and other groups, McPhee participated in the community of composers by

contributing to Modern Music (1924-1946), which was perhaps the most significant

forum for discussions of “new music” at the time.58 One can see modernism emerge in its

pages as a movement as seriously believed in by its members on the one hand as it was

indefinable and diffuse on the other. Buzz words such as absolute music,

Gebrauchsmusik, mechanism, neoclassicism and (neo)primitivism peppered the journal’s

submissions. In its mission statement, the editors invited a plurality of opinions united in

the name of innovation:

In this magazine we shall present the opinions of informed men who accept the
changing world of music to-day as inevitable. While the League of Composers is
not pledged to the support of any new phase or dogma, it affirms a belief in the
progressive development of art…. Our sole intention is to bring forward the ideas

57
Mission statement of the Pan American Association of Composers, quoted in Deane L. Root, “The
Pan American Association of Composers (1928-1934),” Anuario Interamericano de Investigacion Musical
8 (1972): 51.
58
On the importance of Modern Music to the milieu of composers, see Minna Lederman, The Life and
Death of a Small Magazine (“Modern Music,” 1924-1946) (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Institute for Studies in
American Music, Conservatory of Music, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, 1983);
Wilfrid Mellers, “Modern Music—Seen from America,” The Musical Times 125, no. 1694 (April 1984):
206-207; and Eric Salzman, “Modern Music in Retrospect,” Perspectives of New Music 2, no. 2 (Spring-
Summer 1964): 14-20.

68
 of men who have chosen to lift their eyes from the certainties of the past to read
the portents of their time.59

This statement reflects the fact that, though in its diversity this American modernist

movement permitted definition only as a constellation of ideas and compositional

techniques, the imperative to innovate and to be reflective of present times was clearly its

pervasive element. The statement’s metaphor for innovation as a “lifting of the eyes”

reflects the movement’s habit of defining its various endeavors in terms of what it

awakened from: what they saw as a befuddled European tradition. At their heels was the

behemoth of romanticism, ahead were the various paths to a more vital future, paths

perhaps only unified by their point of departure. One of the methods of distinguishing

themselves from the European tradition was the adoption of various sorts of indigenous

musical materials, especially but not exclusively those of the Americas. An easy

familiarity with such materials, it was sometimes stated, was what distinguished

American composers from overly sophisticated Europeans. For this reason, primitivism

became one of the main tendencies of American music. Dane Rudhyar, for instance,

stated that for the Western world

The gateway to the Orient is through Occidental America. It is therefore natural to

assume that it will be through America that the influence of Oriental music will
first be felt in the Occident.60

A paradigm of past/future dichotomies arose. More precisely, the contemporary

rhetoric tended to divide the history of music into three units. The long past (which might

be identified in various historical periods and in living “primitive” cultures) and the

59
Introductory statement, League of Composers Review (Modern Music became the title beginning
with volume 3) 1, no. 1 (February 1924).
60
Dane Rudhyar, “Oriental Influence in American Music,” in American Composers on American
Music, ed. Henry Cowell (Stanford Univ. Press, 1933), 185.

69
future (reflected in the works of a few modernist composers) were equated, with the

immediate past of the nineteenth century, which also represented the current mainstream

of the Europe-oriented concert-music culture of America, sandwiched in between. What

the avant-garde heralded in music’s future they also tended to see mirrored in music’s

long past. Since living “primitive” cultures were commonly viewed as bearing the same

traits as Europe’s long past, they were often made the object of study and discussion.

These studies and their resulting innovations lent an increasing “reality” to the equation

of “primitive” and modernist practices. Modernists found that their own tendencies were

inspired by “primitives,” and they proved those tendencies as authentic by reference to

“primitives.” Among the movements that grew from interpretations of past practices were

Neoclassicism and Gebrauchsmusik. Indeed, most contemporary ideological movements

made some association with the long past, even if, as in the case of the absolute music

movement, their ideological origins were actually in the nineteenth century.

Frequently woven into discussions of “primitive” musics published in Modern Music

and similar spaces—earnest, perceptive, and informed as they often were—were

attributions to those long-past musics of that which was currently of interest in the

musical centers of the West (e.g. rhythmic complexity). Behind this interest in an

authentic source of music was not only a desire for compositional guidance but also a

desire to find antecedents to composers’ already established practices. As I stated in the

Introduction, I find it best to understand these modernist engagements with cultural

difference, whether in study of the past or in study of non-Western culture, neither as true

“recoveries” of the facts of other cultures for the modern world on the one hand, nor as

pure fantasies of the modernists’ creation on the other. The process of creating a

70
primitivist modernism was necessarily reciprocal: composers were indeed influenced by

different musics, but this necessitated the construction of an image from which to be

influenced. The modernists constructed their “primitives” in their own continuously

shifting image and in distinction from the image they simultaneously constructed of

mainstream European concert music. Not one of the elements can be understood in

isolation from or as prior to the others.

McPhee’s colleague and supporter Carlos Chávez was one such modernist with one

eye on “the primitive” and the other on a peculiarly American modernism. For Chavez,

who in 1936 conducted the premiere of McPhee’s Tabuh-tabuhan in Mexico City, these

complementary interests were both pursued on Mexican soil. Chávez was something of

an archeologist of Aztec and other indigenous materials. Herbert Weinstock called him

“one of the men now giving a musical meaning to the geographical term America,”

suggesting that his stylistic roots sunk deep into the soil of rural Mexico, even as his style

was emblematic of urban modernity.61 In the same year that he conducted McPhee’s

Tabuh-tabuhan he conducted his own Sinfonía India (1935-36) on Mexican indigenous

themes. Also that year Chávez described in Modern Music a program in “free

composition” that he had established at the Conservatory of Mexico. The program was an

integrative approach for students to develop individual “technic” through careful study of

Mexico’s Indian musical traditions.62

Though few composers in McPhee’s circle adopted the specific designation of

“primitivist” (as will be seen in the next chapter, Cowell did announce a “neo-primitivist”

61
Herbert Weinstock, “Carlos Chavez,” The Musical Quarterly 22, no. 4 (October 1936): 438.
62
Carlos Chávez, “Revolt in Mexico,” Modern Music 8, no. 3 (March-April 1936): 35-40.

71
movement), many displayed the primitivist tendency to think that musics outside of the

West, whatever their particular features, would necessarily represent humanity at a more

fundamental or authentic state. It was because of this view, that “primitives” represented

modern peoples’ more elemental selves, that composers of the modernist milieu took as a

point of pride the proximity of their own music to that of primitives, and sought to paint

the romanticist style as distant form that of primitives. Henry Cowell wrote in a 1933

submission to Modern Music that, though there had been no formal embrace of a

“neoprimitivist” movement, the tendency “to draw on those materials common to the

music of all the people of the world” was growing stronger in modern music, and that the

newest music being composed was far more genuinely related to this primitive source

than that of any preceding musical period. As far as modern music was rhythmically

complex, it resembled music of the primitive, “because rhythm is more complex in

aboriginal than in classic music.”63 Even if such a resemblance was accidental and not the

result of any true influence by “primitive” music, to Cowell it nevertheless represented a

real correlation. I will discuss Cowell’s views on “the primitive” at greater length in the

next Chapter.

With equal intensity of inspiration and of scorn for those who lacked it, McPhee’s

associate Lazare Saminsky wrote of how Eastern musics were revitalizing the faded

Western tradition:

Marvelous are those flare-ups of a renaissance appearing from an Eastern racial

direction just in this era of marasmus and death, in an age of visible petrification
in Western European music! Possibly, the new Russian, Hungarian, Hebrew,
Spanish and other vibrant and living streams of the Eastern flood now pouring its
cutting waters into the new music of the West, have as their mission the stamping
out of creative Ptolemaism ingrained in the Western musical mass-mind. This

63
Henry Cowell, “Towards Neoprimitivism,” Modern Music 10, no. 3 (March-April 1933): 151, 149-
53.

72
 new and triumphant cortège of the musical East, augurates a real return to our
common racial spring, heralds a reunion of the musical creed, a tonal merging of
the Orient and the Occident.64

Occasionally McPhee’s own crassly primitivist side emerged, not when he wrote with

his characteristic subtlety about Balinese music but when discussing other musical

traditions. Though never floating to such fanciful heights as Saminsky, McPhee would

occasionally fall back on the principle, applied a priori as a determinant of authenticity,

that robust and hard-edged music was “primitive.” By the simple virtue of having those

qualities, a composition could be championed as representative of music at its most

essential. By having other undesirable qualities a composition could be labeled as

“exoticist.” He praised Chávez’s Sinfonía India on those terms:

One feels on hearing this music first of all a primitive energy that has nothing of
the exotic but is a clear and forceful expression of racial vitality both youthful and
healthy. Here one will find none of the Europeanisms or French impressionism
still lingering in the works of so many Latin-American composers…. The
orchestration is done in primary colors; the sonorities are hard and penetrating,
superimposed upon a resilient percussive base composed as far back as 1926…. A
physical tension prevails from the first note to the last.65

Other than by these methods, it is hard to guess how McPhee, who at the time of this

review would have had little or no direct contact with native Mexicans, assessed the

authentic representation of their “racial vitality.”66 From a crassly primitivist point of

view, direct contact and study didn’t matter. The terms of authenticity for the

representation of pre-colonial Mexican music were largely based on ideas of “the

64
Lazare Saminky, Music of Our Day: Essentials and Prophecies (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co.,
1932), 81-83, quoted in CTW, 62-63.
65
McPhee, “New York—January, February 1936,” Modern Music 13, no. 3 (March-April 1936): 42.
66
In early 1936 when writing this review, McPhee had not yet been to Mexico. He and Belo would
travel there in June of that year and stay through the premier of Tabuh-tabuhan in early September. See
CTW, 100-102 and 117-119.

73
primitive” that were pre-established and could be assumed to apply to early Mexicans by

virtue of their being “primitives.” An authentic portrayal was then not so much a matter

of demonstrating careful study but of using approved techniques and tropes. “Primary

colors,” shifting meters and polyrhythms, and extensive use of percussion were proper

means to express “the primitive.” Impressionistic clouds and romantic storms were not,

nor were the alluring melodic turns and chromatic harmonies that had characterized many

nineteenth-century representations of non-Western musics. A few years later McPhee

called the Sinfonía India “a perfect example of the right way to utilize exotic material,”67

again giving weight to the style of the utilization among criteria for assessing authentic

representation. For modernists, a peculiar interdependence developed in this way between

stylistic concerns developed in an urban milieu—in argument with other, more dominant

urban musics—and primitivist claims to authenticity.

When speaking of Bali, McPhee was both like and unlike those of his colleagues who

were more casually acquainted with foreign musics. Others did little more than detect

certain predictable features in foreign musics, replacing romanticist clichés with

differently uninformed modernist ones. Some, when describing non-Western musics, did

little more than give a self-description of modernism as they saw it—speaking about non-

Western musics was also a method of self definition, and, by negative comparison, a

method of defining the conservative musical mainstream. It would be absurdly reductive

to understand McPhee’s investigation into Balinese music, lasting nearly a decade, as

having taken him no further than the readymade impressions he started off with.

Nevertheless, the 1935-36 communication of his discoveries in Bali to members of his

67
McPhee, “Scores and Records,” Modern Music 17 (November 1939): 52.

74
American world necessitated that he engage with the currently established conventions of

primitivism.

A 1935-36 Return Visit: Textual Issues of Ethnography in “The ‘Absolute’ Music of

Bali” and Tabuh-tabuhan

Printed in Modern Music, McPhee’s first article on Balinese music “The ‘Absolute’

Music of Bali” was directed specifically to American composers. Its style was descriptive

and direct, and at seven pages it was short (though of fair length relative to most of that

journal’s articles). Aside from its provocative title, it did not employ other current buzz

words (some of which I will discuss below) of modernism or engage in heavy-handed

polemics, as did many contemporary articles in Modern Music. Nevertheless, when read

among other articles in that journal, McPhee’s flat, neutral descriptions do begin to buzz

argumentatively in the style of those others. Only in a few parts of the article did McPhee

explicitly contrast Balinese music and “our” music, “ours” being not literally his own

compositions, but the music he identified as emblematic of Western culture (i.e. 19th-

century concert music):

In conception Balinese music is static, whereas ours is dynamic and generally the
expression of a crisis, a conflict. In execution Balinese music is extremely
dynamic, while paradoxically much of our own music, especially that of the
nineteenth century, seems by comparison, turgid and lethargic. The very phrasing
of our music is declamatory; our orchestras are heavy and lack buoyancy. A
breath of fresh air needs to be let into the concert halls. (AMB, 164)

McPhee’s authorial persona was of a former naïf, who had only come to his

expressed realizations about the true nature of music after living in Bali. Through

extended exposure to Balinese music (which McPhee stated was essentially the same as

75
that of other Oriental musics), he had arrived at an entirely new and “purified”

understanding of how musical truth was grounded in human nature:

What can be the reactions of an Occidental, after prolonged contact with such a
music, so essentially different from his own? What influences will penetrate his
growing acquaintance with it? For four years the writer has lived in Bali, in an
isolation broken only by brief trips to Java, Siam, China and Japan, where the
approach to music is fundamentally like that of Bali, abstract and anonymous.
During such a period of time one’s conceptions inevitably experience some
change, become, it is hoped, broadened and purified. (AMB, 163)

McPhee explained that the nature of Balinese musical expression was entirely

inexpressive, its forms in no way intended to give voice to individuals’ emotions. He also

discussed the function of music in Balinese society, its percussive instrumentation, the

manner in which the Balinese might arrange old musical materials into a new

composition, and how they organized pitch and rhythm. As will be seen, these were not

in fact uprecendented observations; these “discoveries” in the field were all echoes of

McPhee’s compositional concerns prior to his 1931 voyage to Bali.

The same was true of Tabuh-tabuhan. It would have seemed that in its incorporation

of authentic Balinese musical materials, Tabuh-tabuhan was bringing something truly

foreign and perhaps revelatory into the concert hall. Yet, as I will discuss, the medium of

this work determined its content: it was music for the concert hall, and it was ultimately

only capable of speaking in the concert hall’s vocabulary, however novelly. In the very

same utterances with which Tabuh-tabuhan “spoke” about Balinese music, purportedly

as “a breath of fresh air” in the concert hall, it recycled modern music’s sounds and

expressed its familiar themes.

Table 1 presents some metaphors that I argue McPhee implied in “The ‘Absolute’

Music of Bali” and realized musically in Tabuh-tabuhan. The left column lists quotations

76
from “The ‘Absolute’ Music of Bali” that describe aspects of Balinese music. The right

column lists modernist ideas to which these quotations correspond. In the case of

“absolute music” McPhee used the buzz word itself. On other points he did not, and made

no explicit reference to modernist music. Taken literally, he was simply describing

Balinese music in a neutral fashion. In the following sections I will explain what McPhee

meant by “absolute music” and several of these non-explicit connections, point-by-point.

For the most part I will not be discussing the accuracy of McPhee’s statements about Bali

in “The ‘Absolute’ Music of Bali.” My purpose rather will be to illuminate how the

article’s statements about Bali were in fact reflections upon modernism, as they would

have to be.

Description in “The ‘Absolute’ Music of Modernist Concept apparent in

Bali” Tabuh-tabuhan
“absolute,” “impersonal and non-expressive” absolute music
“primarily utitlitarian” Gebrauchsmusik
“At a ceremony its presence is as necessary as
incense, flowers, and offerings”
“The apotheosis of percussion” percussion orchestras
“The present tendency...to break up the old textural juxtaposition
compositions and weld fragments or episodes
from these into new works”
“no voice in gamelan is without its rhythmic polyrhythm, polymeter
function”
“aerial sonority” pandiatonicism, panpentatonicism
“each of the five notes of the scale may be a
point of gravity, thus forming five tonal
centres through which the melody may pass at
will”
“often four or more types of gamelans will be Polytonality, bitonality
assembled..., a barbaric splendor of clashing
tonalities”

Table 1. McPhee’s Metaphors Between Balinese Gamelan and Modernist Composition

(Quotes on left are taken from McPhee, “The ‘Absolute’ Music of Bali”)

77
 I am not sure that McPhee intentionally invoked all these metaphors. In “The

‘Absolute’ Music of Bali” he made his assessment of Balinese music as “absolute music”

explicit. As for the other double-meanings that I discuss, it may be that some were

intentional, some were unconscious, and some, within that milieu, were simply beyond

his prevention.

That Balinese music was “absolute” music was McPhee’s boldest assertion. What did

he mean in applying to Balinese music the concept of absolute music, particular as it was

applied to the concerns of his own artistic milieu? Though the term is clothed in

quotation marks in McPhee’s title, it appears without them in the body of the text, and

there is no indication that he intended it with irony:

[In Bali] is a music which has successfully achieved the absolute,—impersonal

and non-expressive, with a beauty that depends upon form and pattern and a vigor
that springs from a rhythmic vitality both primitive and joyous…. The original
nature of music reveals itself with ever greater clarity as a phenomenon of sound
rather than of language, as something springing from the urge to rhythmic
expression, spontaneous and physical, rather than as a means for unembarrassed
self-revelation. (AMB, 163)

What McPhee implied by absolute music was a more complex idea than simply music

without a program. His was a more radical concept of music of pure form and without

emotion, defined in differentiation from German orchestral music, which expressed

programs, ideas, emotions, and the unique personality of an individual. German

orchestral music was fettered to language, and as such doomed to contingency. The

absolute music McPhee claimed to have discovered in Bali had a rhythmic vitality by

which it bypassed semantic and subjective levels and connected directly to the human

body. In the West, such a pure form of music could only be proposed, experimented at, or

78
argued for, but in Bali McPhee claimed to have found it, “achieved,” in the living culture

of a people.

Such ideas about “the original nature of music” were already in circulation among

modernists before McPhee arrived in Bali in 1931. In fact, McPhee’s statement came

around the same time as, and indeed may have been directly or indirectly influenced by,

similar remarks by Antonin Artaud, whose relationship to Balinese arts was far more

casual. Artaud had witnessed a Balinese dance drama at the 1931 Colonial Exposition in

Paris, and based on that performance he had declared that “The Balinese have realized,

with the utmost rigor, the idea of pure theater, where everything, conception and

realization alike, has value, has existence only in proportion to its degree of

objectification on the stage. They victoriously demonstrate the absolute preponderance of

the director (metteur en scène) whose creative power eliminates words” (Artaud’s

italics).68 This would be the independence of theater from language, a theater with its

own language which would emerge directly from the body of the actor.

Other composers spoke similarly about the non-expressive “nature of music.” As

already noted in the Introduction, Stravinsky stated, “I consider music, by its nature,

incapable of expressing anything, whether a feeling, an attitude, a psychological state, a

natural phenomenon, etc. Expressiveness has never been an immanent feature of

music.”69 Absolute music was, then, music reduced to its “immanent” features, and it was

68
Antonin Artaud, “On the Balinese Theater,” chap. 4 in The Theater and It’s Double, trans. Mary
Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 53-54. As Artaud’s writings on Balinese theater predict
McPhee’s themes, Artaud’s in turn were predicted by other reviewers of the same performance. See Nicola
Savarese, “1931: Antonin Artaud Sees Balinese Theatre at the Paris Colonial Exposition,” trans. Richard
Fowler, TDR 45, no. 3 (Autumn 2001): 51-77.
69
Igor Stravisnky, An Autobiography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962), 53.

79
as such the music of that most elemental segment of humanity “the primitives,” who it

could be expected would exhibit it un-self-consciously.

Ironically, though among musicologists today the term absolute music is most often

associated with Edward Hanslick, romantic philosophy, and 19th-century instrumental

music, for those in McPhee’s circle the chief foil of the absolute had become precisely

that same German orchestral tradition. McPhee’s crowd tended to articulate their ideas of

what absolute music was through statements of what it was not: the gloomy, self-

absorbed moans and enervated sobs that they saw as characteristic of German music.70 In

a 1925 publication in Modern Music Adolph Weissman took note of both this combative

character of the movement and its primitivist associations. His explanation of the term

had a note of parody, as he in fact felt that the ideal was too uncompromising:

One of the chief tenets in the doctrine of the new music is evolution toward the
absolute,—in other words toward pure music, or better still, pure counterpoint….
The tendency, it is obvious, has been developed in opposition to the music of the
nineteenth century. It is in conflict with the romantic, the emotional and the
naturalistic. It demands of music the abolition of everything realistic, everything
human, so that the art may emerge in its native purity.71

Among composers of new music, there was no consensus as to the meaning of

absolute music. Musical purity was its critical theme, but purity from what? Most

inclusively, absolute music sought purity not from “everything human,” as Weissman

70
In defining “absolute music” for the New Grove Dictionary, Roger Scruton observes that meaning of
the term has historically—not just in the time of McPhee—tended to become clear only when stated in the
negative: “The term “absolute music’ denotes not so much an agreed idea as an aesthetic problem…. It
names an ideal of musical purity, an ideal from which music has been held to depart in a variety of ways;
for example, by being subordinated to words (as in song), to drama (as in opera), to some representational
meaning (as in program music), or even to the vague requirements of emotional expression. Indeed, it has
been more usual to give a negative than a positive definition of the absolute in music. The best way to
speak of a thing that claims to be ‘absolute’ is to say what it is not.” Roger Scruton: “Absolute Music,”
Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed 3 December 2004), http://www.grovemusic.com.
71
Adolph Weissman, “The Tyranny of the Absolute,” Modern Music 2, no. 2 (1925): 17.

80
suggested, but from everything that limited it to being human in any particular time and

place. The modernists’ objective was precisely to create a music that was more purely

human—a human stripped of its ideas and emotions, down to its body, unadorned and

pulsing with energy. This ideal contained within it the promise of a “true” music,

independent of culture, and further the possibility that such a music actually existed in the

world, somewhere far outside of the concert halls of the West.

Though my purpose in this chapter is not to challenge the accuracy of McPhee’s

statements about Bali, I feel that is worth discussing how his claim that Balinese music

would “never contain an emotion” may be impugned simply on its face, as it implies that

he had access to the emotional lives of all Balinese. It is contradicted in Tilman Seebass’s

discussion of the expressive differences that were emerging in the 1920s and ‘30s

between classical genres such as gong gede or semar pegulingan and the newer genre of

gong kebyar:

The function of the [traditional gamelan repertories] is to fill the air with sound
and to establish an emotional state. This is also true of the traditional musical
accompaniments in drama, where music underlines and illustrates specific
emotional states and does not function in a narrative fashion. Action, however, is
the key word for kebyar. Several scholars describe it as a potpourri of styles and
techniques, in which the various pieces, used in an extended theatrical
performance for the illustrations of topical scenes (love, grief, joy, battle), are
compressed into a single composition.72

Kebyar was the style emerging as dominant during McPhee’s years in Bali, and it

seems to have been the first to catch his attention. At the time of writing “The ‘Absolute’

Music of Bali” McPhee was certainly aware of the distinctions among styles, although he

72
Tilman Seebass, “Change,” 82. On the emotional and semantic dimensions of kebyar, see Michael
Tenzer, Gamelan Gong Kebyar: The Art of Twentieth-Century Balinese Music (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2000).

81
wrote later that he did not begin to analyze the older forms until his later period in Bali.73

Either the older or the newer Balinese music might have been interpreted as more

“absolute.” Kebyar tended to incorporate materials from various sources, setting them in

rapid juxtaposition, the result of which might be thought of as “absolute” or “formalistic”

in the sense that no single emotional tone was allowed to dominate for long. Meanwhile,

the classical genres with their consistent moods and precise structures might equally have

been regarded as formalistic. Neither sort could really have been defined as emotionless

(if emotion is understood to be immanent to the music itself), or to have existed in an

emotional vacuum. Today an ethnomusicologist might discuss emotion (or non-emotion)

in Balinese music by offering accounts of individual Balinese people’s descriptions of

their musical experiences. In “The Absolute Music of Bali” McPhee “omitted” such

accounts; only by this omission was he able to make claims about the music’s immanent

features (and non-features).74

After his return to Bali in 1936, McPhee gained a deeper understanding of the genre

distinctions, and in fact developed a disdain for kebyar which had so dazzled him before.

(It was at that point that he began work to stimulate a revival of the older style of

gamelan semar pegulingan.) Upon his second return from Bali, McPhee wrote another

article for Modern Music, in which he criticized kebyar as a corruption of true Balinese

aesthetics. Ironically, he once again framed the issue as a dichotomy of formalism versus

73
Letter to Aaron Copland, 16 February [1938], quoted in Oja, CTW, 123.
74
In 1935-36 McPhee seems to have based his ideas about Balinese aesthetics primarily on kebyar (he
would not do so in later publications). Whereas McPhee’s statements of the time framed this kebyar-based
aesthetic as essentially different from, or foreign to, the music in his own modern world, Seebass interprets
the rise of kebyar as reflective, in multiple ways, of the island’s brush with modernity with the entrance of
the Dutch early in the century. The fragmentation of materials from older genres into kebyar compositions
was reflective of the recent dissolution of the Balinese courts and with them the ceremonial functions of
court musics.

82
expressivity. While the same concepts were operative, McPhee this time swiveled in his

argument, claiming that the more emotionally characteristic genres were the truly

“formalistic” ones, while kebyar, formerly an exemplar of the “absolute” music of Bali,

now became “feverish and melodramatic” and an “aimless form of expression”:

The beauty, the strength, the artistic significance of Balinese music lay in its
formalism, in the tradition which kept it the anonymous but individual expression
of a race. Its development was slow and logical, the changes which gradually
gave it a distinct Balinese quality were imperceptible. But in the past twenty years
a new form, known as the Kebyar style, feverish and melodramatic, has suddenly
arisen out of the old. While spectacular in its brilliance and occasional
extraordinary virtuosity, this new music carries within it all the germs of decay.
Tradition has been thrown overboard, and law and order discarded for innovations
which, though at times beautiful in themselves, can in the end lead only to empty,
aimless forms of expression.75

In 1949 McPhee again described an absence of emotion in Balinese music (though at

this point he only mentioned the topic in passing). This time his anger at kebyar seems to

have softened (though by many accounts he continued to dislike the genre until the end of

his life), and he apologized for the genre and reinstated it as an exemplar of the

physicality of Balinese music:

[Balinese] music furnishes appropriate background for dance and drama, fills the air
with festive sound. It is a formal, abstract art, created for the occasion, and the
composers are unknown. It is true that in the newer music there is a dramatic
surging of crescendos and diminuendos, a constant changing of mood. But the
contrasts are like sunlight and shadow; they are the expression of the purely
physical exuberance of the group rather than the expression of any emotional
tension.76

75
McPhee, “The Decline of the East,” Modern Music 16 (1939): 160-167. In Music in Bali, published
nearly thirty years later, McPhee expressed a more tempered, but still critical view of kebyar: “Some
[kebyar compositions] are skillfully put together, showing the composer’s concern for contrast and
condensation. Others are greatly overextended, their once striking effects transformed into clichés through
constant recurrence. Many are marred by the excessive use of virtuoso cadenza-like passages which link
together the main episodes and which aim primarily at display of skill. Lacking the classic calm, the broad
melodic line, and the unity of mood of the older music, these tempestuous rhapsodies have great popular
appeal because of their novelty and excitement” (p. 342).
76
McPhee, “The Five-Tone Gamelan Music of Bali, Musical Quarterly 35, no. 2 (April 1949): 252.

83
 These reversals might be taken as an indication that the absolute music concept was

so foreign to Balinese aesthetics that its application in one way or another was practically

arbitrary. That kebyar was continuously reinterpreted so as to exemplify one side or the

other of the “absolute” versus “emotional” dichotomy, that McPhee would continue to

grasp at these concepts despite his shifting understanding of Balinese music, is an

indication of how important these concepts were to him. The more significant point here

is that in writing about Balinese music for his particular audience, these were the terms

by which he felt compelled to speak. It was as if they were the part of the playing rules by

which one was permitted to speak about non-Western music at all.

Walter Spies, another artist living in Bali at the same time as McPhee, did not belong

to the same discursive community and did not play by the same rules. Seebasss has

observed that Spies, a German, found that kebyar confirmed his expressionistic

tendencies, that it was resonant of “subjectivism” and “extravagance.” Such ideas would

of course have been, at least on the surface, totally antithetical to McPhee’s (though both

called kebyar “melodramatic,” one in praise and the other in condemnation). According

to Seebass:

There is an inner affinity and sensibility for this music in Spies as Expressionist,
hence the esthetic identity of the descriptive mode of his language and the object
described; his “expressionistische Tonkunst” (Seebass’s term). Subjectivism,
extravagance, dynamism, and, in particular, a new definition of the creative
experience as the totale Erlebnis (total experience) are the characteristics of the
literature and visual arts of the Expressionist movement. It is very striking to see a
literary scholar describing the total artistic experience of the Expressionist as a
“kaleidoskopisches Zusammenrücken von Wirklichskeitsfragmenten”
(kaleidoscopic falling together of fragments of reality). One could not find a
better description for the composition or centonization of kebyar piece.77

77
Tilman Seebass, “Change,” 85. In mentioning “kaleidoscopic falling together of fragments of
reality” Seebass is referring to Walter Muschg, Von Trakl zu Becht (Munich: Piper, 1961), 22.

84
 While McPhee’s concept of absolute music was formed in contradistinction from

German music, he also described Balinese music using language reminiscent of another

movement of German origins. This was the movement of Gebrauchsmusik, which had

taken hold in the U.S. by the time of McPhee’s 1935 return trip. McPhee described the

functionality of Bali’s music:

The primarily utilitarian nature of this music…emphasizes a conception rather

different from ours,—that music may be something which is not to be listened to in
itself. It may be marched to, danced to, or used to precipitate a state of trance by its
hypnotic power; but never will it become personal, or contain an emotion. At a
ceremony its presence is as necessary as incense, flowers and offerings. (McPhee’s
italics) (AMB, 165)

McPhee repeated again and again that Balinese music was joyously useful, stressing

that music and dance “play a most important part in the life of the people,” and that, most

of all, “what inspires the musician with wonder and envy, is the satisfactory raison d’être

of music in the community” (AMB, 163). It seems the idea that Balinese music was

Gebrauchsmusik was the one that McPhee most wanted to impress upon his readers. He

also stressed that there were no composers in Bali, that music was very much an activity

belonging to the general populous, and that the role of composers is taken up by gurus

(teachers), who ensured music’s continuation and development in the community without

becoming a wholly original creative ego. Balinese music never resembled the inactive

music of the concert hall, autonomous from life as truly lived.

Ideas of musical autonomy appear in both the Gebrauchsmusik discourse and the

absolute music discourse. This is potentially confusing, for whereas in discussions of

absolute music the stated objective was to create music “autonomous” of the

contingencies of language and history, proponents of Gebrauchsmusik insisted upon

85
turning away from or finding an alternative to music as “autonomous,” in the sense of

being isolated from everyday life and experienced passively. It was not inconsistent to be

in favor of autonomy at one moment and against it at the next, as by both one could

imply opposition to the excesses of music in the nineteenth century. The latter sense of

the term implied that new music, whether or not it had ideological or emotional content,

was to be enjoyed actively, and was to be woven into life’s fabric.

At its genesis the term Gebrauchsmusik was tied to primitivist notions. Paul Nettl, a

scholar of dance music of the 17th century, was one of the first to employ the term in

antithesis to the autonomous music that he saw as characteristic of his time. He observed

that 17th-century dance music had diverged into two strains: on the one hand was music

intended for actual dancing and on the other was an “increasing stylization” found in the

suite of mixed dance forms. Nettl described a “certain removal from popular

primordiality (Volkstümliche Ursprünglichkeit)” characteristic of the stylized suite. His

contemporary Leo Kestenberg communicated this ethic of “primordial” utility as a

concern for contemporary composers, writing in 1921 that Gebrauchsmusik ‘is

artistically as important as, and nowadays materially more promising than, concert

music.”78 For Modern Music in 1930, Hans Gutman characterized Gebrauchsmusik as a

sociological concern of “Young Germany,” again framing the issue as an aesthetic

argument with the nineteenth century:

During the nineteenth century music passed definitely into the class of luxuries
reserved for the entertainment of the upper classes, and ceased to be an integral
part in the life of the people. For the new audience which was ushered into

78
Quoted in Stephen Hinton: “Gebrauchsmusik,” Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed 3
December 2004), http://www.grovemusic.com). See also Nicolas Slonimsky, “Gebrauchsmusik and
Gemeinschaftsmusik,” in Music Since 1900 (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1938), 572-573.

86
 existence and power by the Revolution, the outmoded sociological approach to
music, handed down by the previous generation, has proved unserviceable. Hence
the birth of the new “Gebrauchsmusik,” the music for everybody, for everyday
use, which is to replace the “Luxusmusik.” Obviously these new goals can be
reached soonest in the fields now just opening up to music. Opera as well must
yield to radical change. And—by no means least important in this program of
reform—the auditor is to be roused from his lethargy, stimulated and induced to
make music himself, instead of uncomprehendingly following the conductor’s
baton.79

As with absolute music, Gebrauchsmusik simultaneously cast itself as a revolution

rolling across a Europe and America newly awake to their true modern situation, and

drew its power from the claim that it was apparent in most or all places and at most or all

time periods, except the time and place of Western concert music. Gebrauchsmusik

contended to be one of modernism’s most profound discoveries of the obvious.

According to McPhee, one reason Balinese music was ideal as both an abstract music

(without meaning or emotion) and a music suited to stimulate people from a state of

lethargy into action, was its instrumentation—it was percussion music:

The apotheosis of percussion, these orchestras consist of many forms of gongs,

large and small, cymbals, drums and a great variety of metal-keyed
instruments,—an ideal medium for the abstract but at the same time dynamic
nature of the music. (AMB, 164)

This passing statement about Balinese music’s instrumentation might have provoked the

imagination of McPhee’s readers, as in the ten years prior to the composition of Tabuh-

tabuhan there had been an explosion of interest in percussion among composers of new

music. In Cowell’s 1933 article on “neo-primitivism,” he noted this new interest and

identified it with the growing closeness of modernist musicians to “the primitive”:

Among the more radical works written by non-proletarian American composers

recently, there may not be anything so very definitely primitive in style, but there
are strong tendencies to use primitive means in creating new sorts of structures.

79
Hans Gutman, “Young Germany, 1930,” Modern Music 7, no. 2 (1930): 7-8.

87
 Up to this year, in my experience as a music publisher I have never been offered
any work for percussion instruments alone. This season I have been offered
fifteen different works for such combinations, the two most interesting being
Varese’s Ionisation, and William Russell’s Fugue for Eight Percussion
Instruments.80

In 1930 Amadeo Roldán wrote his Ritmicas V and VI for percussion ensemble, and in

1933 New York saw the premiere of Varèse’s Ionisation for 13 percussion instruments.

The next year Cowell wrote his own Ostinato Pianissimo for eight percussion

instruments, and in Australia Percy Grainer gave a series of lectures collectively titled A

Commonsense View of All Music, the eleventh of which, “Tuneful Percussion,” made

mention of “Bali bell-orchestras” and “Javanese gong-orchestras.” Following the lecture,

Grainger presented his adaptation of Debussy’s “Pagodes,” which he believed to have

been inspired by Javanese gamelan—Grainger arranged it for a percussion ensemble of

harmonium, celeste, dulcitone, three pianos (twelve hands), xylophone, ‘metal marimba,’

and wooden marimba.81 Chávez, in a 1936 Modern Music article “Revolt in Mexico,”

described how his students used indigenous percussion instruments of Mexico to develop

an original compositional technique and wean themselves of “academic” imports from

Europe82; his Sinfonía India of the same year employed, in addition to strings and winds,

a percussion menagerie including a clay rattle, a water gourd, and a string of butterfly

cocoons. John Cage and Lou Harrison also began to work with percussion in the 1930s.

80
Cowell, “Towards Neo-Primitivism,” Modern Music 10 (March-April 1933): 153. Another work for
non-pitched percussion alone, Amadeo Roldán’s Ritmicas, nos. 5 and 6, also saw its premier in 1930.
81
Grainger, “Music: a Commonsense View of All Types (Melbourne, 1934). Also see John Blacking,
“A Commonsense View of All Music”: Reflections on Percy Grainger’s Contribution to Ethnomusicology
and Music Education (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987).
82
Carlos Chávez, “Revolt in Mexico.”

88
 Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique had its New York premiere in 1927—McPhee had played

piano in it along side Aaron Copland. That performance employed six xylophones,

electric bells, two wood propellers, a metal propeller, tamtam, four bass drums, siren, ten

pianos, and pianola (electric piano). For Antheil, the piece paid homage to the modern,

“the primitive,” and the machine: to “America, Africa, and Steel.” In his 1923 Parisian

debut Antheil had presented several works of percussive pianism on these themes: Sonata

Sauvage, Mechanisms, and Airplane Sonata. He remarked, “I feel that in these few pages

I have embraced all mankind, the fear, impossible hopes, and electricity of the

unconscious from the primitive to the mind that dies in the airplane.”83

By the late 1920s percussion had two seemingly contradictory associations, one with

the jungle and the other to the increasingly motorized streets and skyscrapers of New

York. Modernists found a hard, angular, and energetic imagery and an unemotional,

brutal aesthetic common to both locations. This was not—as it was sometimes

portrayed—through “discovery” of inherent similarities between their own world and that

of “primitives.” These similitudes between the Machine Age and the Stone Age rather

came into being through mutual differentiation from the “torpidity” of romanticism’s

orchestral idiom. In the visual arts, the angular forms of skyscrapers and African masks

paralleled the crisp timbres of percussion in their anti-emotional directness.

McPhee himself saw machinery as an inspiring object. He had been the student of

Varèse at the time when the latter was writing Ionisation, and had even been labeled by a

83
In this paragraph I rely on Oja, “Ballet Mécanique and International Modernist Networks,” chap. 5 in
Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). The quote
“America, Africa, and Steel” was a publicity statement that appeared in several publications, including
“Goossens to Conduct ‘Ballet Mecanique’: Letter from Antheil Throws Light on Composer and His
Musical Credo—How He Views Himself and Europe” Musical Leader 52 (24 February 1927), 5, quoted in
Oja, 92. The statement “I feel that in these few pages,” is from a letter by Antheil to Bok, 5 April 1923,
quoted in Oja, 91. Oja remarks that Antheil, “clearly perceived primitivism as one of the pistons in his
hard-pounding hymn of praise to the machine” (p. 91).

89
critic for the New York Sun as a “young American futurist” as early as 1926.84 Just before

his departure for Bali in 1931, McPhee composed a piece titled Mechanical Principles

(now lost),85 which was performed in conjunction with a film by Ralph Steiner—

ironically, there was a mechanical failure of the projection equipment during the

showing. The next year, in a letter written from Paris after he had already lived six

months in Bali, McPhee testified that mechanical aesthetics were presently at the

forefront of his thoughts:

From [Mechanical Principles] on I have been trying to express through music an

emotion resulting from contact with daily life—its noise, rhythm, energy, and
mechanical daring. Do not think I mean program music. I have no more definite,
concrete idea in mind than the construction of logical music whose rhythms
derive from mechanics, whose tonal structure, while orderly and complete, is as
complex as the structure of a large bridge.”86

McPhee later found that aesthetic in Balinese music. In “The ‘Absolute’ Music of

Bali” he described the music as “strangely rational”: “no voice in gamelan is without its

rhythmic function” (he would later come to see it evidenced in classical genres but not in

the “decay” of kebyar.) In the 1960 program notes to Tabuh-tabuhan, he defined the title

as “a Balinese collective noun, meaning different drum rhythms, metric forms, gong

punctuations, gamelans and music essentially percussive.”87 In choosing this title and

84
Quoted in CTW, 28-29.
85
Oja (CTW, 48-51) has observed that both of McPhee’s piano compositions Kinesis (1930) and the
Invention (1926) feature odd rhythmic groupings (usually of 3) that create shifting accents over the bar.
These groupings are very similar to that which McPhee later emphasized about Balinese music, both in
Tabuh-tabuhan and in the quote from AMB below.
86
McPhee to Van Vechten, postmarked “4 [blurred] 1932, Paris,” quoted in CTW, 51-52.
87
McPhee, note to Tabuh-tabuhan: Toccata for Orchestra and 2 Pianos (New York: Associated Music
Publishers, 1960.

90
interpreting it as he did, McPhee stressed the logical, geometric, indeed mechanical

design of Balinese music and its metallic and percussive instrumentation.

McPhee’s scoring of Tabuh-tabuhan was reminiscent of the Ballet Mécanique and of

Stravinsky’s Les Noces.88 Tabuh-tabuhan’s instrumentation included a standard

symphony orchestra and a “nuclear gamelan,” consisting of two pianos, celesta,

xylophone, marimba, and glockenspiel. The scoring for multiple pianos is a particularly

noteworthy feature, as it recalled both of those earlier works, as well as Poulenc’s 1932

Concerto for Two Pianos, which had in fact alluded to Balinese gamelan. There was also

a likely Balinese inspiration for McPhee’s scoring hinted at in A House in Bali—McPhee

recalled how the Balinese gender accompaniment to the shadow play had stirred his

imagination: “Four musicians sat facing one another, and as hands moved with incredible

rapidity up and down above the keys, I could only think of four perfectly co-ordinated

little pianos” (HIB, 37). It would seem that in this way an ethnographic metaphor was

conceived and then employed: the gender wayang McPhee heard in Bali reminded him of

a current modernist genre of “perfectly co-ordinated” pianos; with Tabuh-tabuhan he

brought this association home to modernists, reminding them of their own genre with the

invocation of gender.

McPhee stated that Balinese music was perfectly coordinated, carefully structured,

and “its chief strength is its rhythm” (AMB, 166). Balinese syncopations and cross-

accented polymetric groupings acted as a kind of dissonance, taking the place of Western

music’s tonal dissonance. He argued that Balinese music’s importance for the occidental

88
On the association between Antheil and Stravinsky and the scoring of the Ballet Mécanique and Les
Noces for electric pianola, see Glenn Watkins, Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, Culture, and Collage from
Stravinsky to the Postmodernists (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard Univ. Press, 1994), 322-338.

91
was in such complexities, which far outshone the rhythmic resources available to

Western musicians. It would have been understood that this comparison was not only true

of Bali versus the West: Balinese music would have been taken by most as an exemplar

of a larger category of “primitive” musics. This attitude is reflected in Cowell’s 1933

categorical statement, “rhythm is more complex in aboriginal than in classic music.”89

McPhee described Balinese music as rational in construction to the point that it was

not only polyrhythmic at a local level, but contained elaborate polymetric structures. He

transcribed a passage of a series of gestures in five (see Ex. 1). Above the staff he

graphed a 4/4 conception of the passage, which showed that the groups of five ultimately

come to rest at the downbeat in the fourth 4/4 measure. “Often,” he wrote, “[the Balinese

orchestra] plays in unison highly syncopated passages which, although bewildering

enough at first hearing, upon analysis resolve themselves like mathematical problems”

(AMB, 168). He stated that this example was only the simplest example of its kind.

Ex. 1. “Shifting accents…that sound as though composed of units of five notes” (AMB,
168),

89
Cowell, “Towards Neo-Primitivism,” 149.

92
 McPhee saw a special affinity between rhythm in Balinese music and in many others,

including jazz, and excluding European classical music. In a later article in Modern

Music, “Eight to the Bar,” (1943), he argued that the syncopations of jazz did not

originate in Africa, but rather were a pan-Asian phenomenon. The idea that jazz had

originated in Africa was a faulty product of primitivism in its 1920s form:

The theory still survives that the syncopation peculiar to American jazz is a form
of rhythmic expression that had its birth ‘on some Negro’s dull tomtom in Africa.’
The lingering obsession is not unconnected with the feverish cult of the Negro
that flourished in the ‘twenties after the still earlier discovery of African
sculpture. The idea, of course, is dated; it belongs to an era of art-galleries
crammed with primitive carving, of Josephine Baker in Paris, the exploration of
Harlem, La Création du Monde—a period or romantic anthropology long past.90

If at this point McPhee distanced himself from the earlier primitivist movement, it is

clear that he maintained a conception of a “primitive” category of people and music. The

view he expressed here was that the syncopations found in jazz actually can be found in

many parts of the world, in India, the Middle East, to a lesser extent in China, and to a

great extent in Bali. In all these places there was music that displayed a common

tendency to subdivide the 4/4 bar into uneven divisions of three and two eighth notes.

McPhee found that the most basic and widespread manifestation of this tendency was the

following:

12312312
1 2 3 4

McPhee argued that this is a pattern of both “universality and antiquity” (p. 242). His

precise conception of the matter is hazy, for at points he suggested that the pattern spread

through cultural contact, which would seem to undercut his argument for its universality.

On the side of universality, his comments suggest an at least vaguely Freudian view. He
90
McPhee, “Eight to the Bar,” Modern Music 20, no. 4 (May-June 1943): 235.

93
stated of the phenomenon of various performers performing different subdivisions of the

4/4 bar that

This is the very essence of polyrhythm. In the brief ostinato we see a basic
rhythm, the march-step with its alternation of right-left, its relation to the heart-
beat of contract-expand, eject-draw-in, given a secondary accentuation whose
primary purpose is to negate the other, as though to conceal the weakness, deny
the implications of exhaustion and death that lie in the second beat. (p. 238)

A belief in the psychic unity of mankind, which this analysis implied, was a feature of

primitivist thought following Freud. Here, though, McPhee was not necessarily making a

primitivist argument; on an explicit level he was divesting himself of primitivism, stating

that the rhythm of interest was “a far cry from the wild tumultuous drumming of the

primitive African groups. . .” (p. 242). He was making the case that the 3 3 2 rhythm,

representative of the universal psyche, was the property of a particular segment of

humanity, which stretched through Asia, into Africa by way of the Arabs, and onward to

the Americas. To drive home this argument, he stated:

I never could get the Balinese to listen thirty seconds to any record containing
culture-music of the West. “What noise!” they would exclaim. “Like wailing!
And where is the beat?” But they would listen to one jazz record after another.
They found them grotesque but comparatively intelligible. (p. 242)

This article provides some insight into the composition of Tabuh-tabuhan, for in that

work rhythmic materials dividing the bar in this manner are densely layered. For those

not familiar with Balinese music, many sections (such as that shown in example 2) might

be rather be reminiscent of jazz.

94
Ex. 2. Syncopations of the 3 + 3 + 2 variety (movement 1 “Ostinatos,” mm. 49-52, piano

I).

Perhaps McPhee intended a double allusion to Balinese music and jazz from the time

of the work’s conception, or perhaps he observed that his Bali-inspired composition

sounded jazz-like as he was composing it. In 1936 McPhee described the work to Cowell

as “Bali-jazz-and-McPhee.”91 In 1960, McPhee would again identify the importance of

jazz in the notes to the published score:

Many of the syncopated rhythms of Balinese music have a close affinity with
those of Latin-American popular music and American jazz—a history in itself—
and these have formed the basic impulse of the work from start to finish.92

The correlation of Balinese and jazz as more-or-less equivalent influences (whether

because they shared a historical link or represented a universal instinct) upon the

modern composer had a polemical resonance. In “The ‘Absolute’ Music of Bali,”

McPhee identified Americans, not Europeans, as able to successfully assimilate jazz

91
McPhee to Cowell, written from New York City, spring 1936, quoted in CTW, 100.
92
McPhee, note to Tabuh-tabuhan (1960).

95
influences into their compositions. Americans more than Europeans were connected

to the living culture that jazz represented. Because of this, they were, by implication,

in a position to connect with other influences, which to McPhee in their rhythmic

materials and social functions were essentially the same as jazz:

Just how much, and in what manner a so-called primitive music can be utilized by
the occidental composer is a question for each individual conscience. The
difference between a pastiche and a creative work in which foreign material has
been so absorbed by the artist as to become part of his equipment is something
which has never been completely recognized. It can, however, be detected in the
variety of influences which jazz has exercised on the composers of today. By
Europeans jazz has never been convincingly assimilated or more than
superficially felt; but it has entered the blood of the Americans and become a
tonic whose stimulating virtues are well established. (AMB, 168)

McPhee did not emphasize the important of pitch and scale for Balinese music as he

did rhythm. He stated that, “Although the melodic contour is always sure and often

exceedingly beautiful, the scales, perhaps because of their strong characteristic flavor,

offer fewer possibilities to the occidental” (AMB, 169). He described Balinese music as

making nearly indiscriminate use of the notes of the scale, usually of five notes. Each

note of the scale could be used as a tonal center, thereby offering variety. He stressed

however that, “The polyphonic nature of [gamelan’s] orchestration rises spontaneously

from a musical idiom uncontaminated by any conception of harmony. A singularly aerial

sonority results. . .” (AMB, 168), and postulated that “The absence of harmony or

modulation illustrates clearly the inherent power of music to sustain itself through purity

of line and vitality of rhythm” (AMB, 169).

96
Ex. 3. “The melodic outline is generally restricted to some form or other of a pentatonic
scale. . .” (AMB, 169).

In McPhee’s application of the principle of “aerial sonority” in Tabuh-tabuhan there

is an affinity with the pan-diatonicism that was currently in use among many modernist

composers. Composer colleagues such as Copland and Chavez used the pandiatonic

sound as a pan-American signifier.93 It can be found in the opening measures of Tabuh-

tabuhan, where the seven notes of the diatonic scale were distributed into three layers

distinguished by timbre. The first in the flutes and clarinets, contained four pitches; the

second and in the piano 1 right hand contained four-pitches, three of which were the same

as those in group 1, so that together the two layers produced a 5-pitch sonority. The piano

1 left hand completed the diatonic collection, playing just the two remaining pitches. The

total diatonic sonority had a Lydian quality, and yet the first two layers, audibly distinct

through their differentiated timbres, spun out the “aerial sonorities” of a smaller pitch

group. The piano right hand was indeed characteristic of Balinese patterning as found in

McPhee’s transcriptions. The result was a sonorous effect that at once represented

Balinese scales (especially in the Piano 1 right hand) and the tonal language of

contemporary American composition.

93
Pandiatonicism was defined by Nicolos Slonimsky in 1938 as the “technique in which all seven
degrees of the diatonic scale are used freely in democratic equality.” Slonimsky wrote that
“panpentatonicism grants a similar dispensation to the five notes of the pentatonic scale. . .”, and of
panpentatonic tone cluster that “when projected against a perfect fifth in the bass, they create an attractive
sonority of a modernistic panpentatonic chinoiserie” (Music Since 1900, 4th edition [New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1971], 1474-1475).

97
Ex. 4. Flute and Piano I figuration at the opening of Tabuh-tabuhan (mvt. 1 “Ostinatos,”
mm. 1-6)

This layering of distinct small collections of four or five pitches is found throughout

Tabuh-tabuhan. In some cases, as above, the total sonority that is the aggregate of all

layers were diatonic, at other times more than 7 pitches appeared together, so that the

sonority would become quite dissonant. One of the most startling moments of

differentiated layering occurs in the second movement. This particular layering had a

programmatic significance, as it depicted a common occurrence in Bali, which he

described in “The Absolute Music of Bali”:

The festive note may even be dissonant and confused, for often four or more types
of gamelans will be assembled within the temple walls—each with its separate
idiom of music and instruments—to resound simultaneously at the climax of
ritual, in a barbaric splendor of clashing tonalities. Here a state of music is
required for a certain length of time, nothing more. (McPhee’s italics) (AMB, 165-
66)

In Tabuh-tabuhan this gave McPhee an opportunity to experiment with the sort of poly-

tonal composition in which layers of tonally and timbrally distinct material depicted a

scene in which separate musics emanated from different sources. Example 5 shows a

moment in the second movement (“Nocture”) in which two tonally and timbrally distinct

sets of materials are set in polyphony. One represents a 4-tone gamelan angklung (pitches

98
A-flat, B-flat, C, and E-flat), the other represents the flute of an Arja (sung drama)

performance (pitches E, F-sharp, G-sharp, B, and C-sharp). The two sets, while

enharmonically forming the full seven diatonic pitches of an B-major scale, retain

independence. The effect is that of two sound sources within the same environment. This

is still a phenomenon of Balinese life (especially notable in odalan ceremonies, which

mark the anniversaries of temples). The technique McPhee used was described as “full

polyphony” by Cowell (in reference to the music of Ives).94

Ex. 5. Movement 2, mm. 93-96. “A barbaric splendor of clashing tonalities”

On the topic of compositional process in Bali, McPhee referred specifically to the

kebyar genre:

The present tendency, especially in the secular music, is to break up the old
compositions and weld fragments or episodes from these into new works which,
though they may lack the unity of the older music, glow with fresh life and
vitality. (AMB, 165)95

94
Cowell referred to this technique in Ives’s music as “full polyphony.” He explained that Ives was
inspired to develop the great independence of line that this technique permitted when hearing two marching
bands pass while traveling in opposite directions. “American Composers IX: Charles Ives,” Modern Music
10, no. 1 (November-December 1932): 24-32.
95
Responding to this statement, Oja has observed that in Tabuh-tabuhan McPhee emulated a Balinese
method of composing: “Tabuh-tabuhan, then, marks the union of McPhee the composer and McPhee the
ethnomusicologist. The work draws on many of McPhee’s transcriptions from Bali and also emulates the
very process by which Balinese music is composed” (CTW, 104).

99
 A few years later McPhee would have been unlikely to have spoken this positively

about kebyar. As noted, he came to resent the Balinese tendency to break apart older

styles and paste them together again haphazardly (as he would later bitterly describe the

process). In 1935, however, he seems still to have regarded the compositional process of

kebyar as interesting,96 and this was likely because he recognized in it a similarity with

the technique of pasting together texturally dissimilar fragments that was in currency

among modernists. This rebellious manner of composing—rebellious in that it broke with

traditional demands of continuity and unity—is traceable to Stravinsky, who in 1913 was

already employing the technique in the Rite of Spring. Juxtaposition would become a

Stravinsky trademark, exemplified in works such as the Symphonies d’instruments à vent

(1920) and Les Noces (1921-23).97 Antheil, Varèse, and others had their own manners of

juxtaposing materials. Meanwhile the similar technique of montage was employed by

contemporary film makers such as the Soviet Sergei Eisenstein, and collage and

assemblage paralleled in painting and sculpture.

Tabuh-tabuhan made vivid this suggested similitude between Balinese and modernist

juxtaposition. Transcribed themes and new inventions upon Balinese pitch and rhythmic

materials succeeded each other rapidly, sometimes disjointedly. McPhee offered the

Balinese explanation for this practice in the program notes:

96
McPhee went so far as to state, “Only the most sacred and ceremonial music remains static and
archaic—a sharp contrast to the extremely energetic and colorful modern technic” (AMB, 165).
97
On the use of the technique in Symphonies of Wind Instruments, see Edward T. Cone, “Stravinsky:
The Progress of a Method” in Perspectives on Schoenberg and Stravinsky, ed. Benjamin Boretz and
Edward T. Cone (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1968) , 155-94. Cone theorizes that Symphonies
has three phases: stratification, interlock, and synthesis. McPhee’s technique in Tabuh-tabuhan seems to be
similar, though less systematic.

100
 In modern-day Bali, it is common among the youngest generation to make
compositions in a new form called kebyar, making good use of melodies and
motives chosen from the ample repertory of classical music.98

With this statement, he implied that his own use of Balinese melodies and motives

was not mere pastiche but was an engagement with Balinese music-making throughout,

to the very level of compositional process. McPhee’s audience would have heard musical

montage, with which they were by then more than familiar, and have been invited to

believe that they were hearing kebyar. The very opening of the first movement ruptures

with juxtaposition by measure 9 (ex. 6). Though both forming the same diatonic

collection, the two juxtaposed blocks have different intervallic contents. Major 2nds and

minor 3rds in the block of winds and Piano I evoke a sort of “slendro,” while minor 2nds

and major 3rds in the xylophone, Piano II, and violins, evoke “pelog.”

Ex. 6. Two juxtaposed textural blocks (Tabuh-tabuhan, movement 1, mm. 7-11)

98
McPhee, Program note for the premiere of Tabuh-tabuhan, 4 September, 1936, Orquesta Sinfónica
de México, Mexico City, reproduced in Mueller, “Bali, Tabuh-Tabuhan,” 170.

101
 As with the other metaphors that I have discussed, that implied by juxtaposition in

Tabuh-tabuhan formed a union between a technique drawn from a “primitive” culture,

and an already developed trope of modernist, primitivist composition. As such, the

persuasiveness of this union of two “present tendencies,” Bali’s and modernism’s, lay in

the seamless, un-noteworthy way in which Balinese music became refined into material

that could act as supporting evidence for modernism’s already formed view of “the

primitive,” and further of modernism’s view of its primitivist self. At the same time, such

visions of “the primitive” did not simply reinforce static concepts and styles but

contributed to the continual shifting of concepts and styles of modernism. It is in this way

that the process of influence of foreign musics upon modernism can be most clearly

understood.

For McPhee, then, it was the capacity of an observation about Balinese music, such as

kebyar, to bolster modernism’s own practices that made it worthy of mention in this

context. Other observations about Balinese music—not false but necessarily limited—

would go unmentioned. In the context of Modern Music such representations would have

not only been beside the point, but impossible.99

99
An interesting contrast to “The ‘Absolute’ Music of Bali” can be seen in McPhee’s article of one
year later, “The Balinese Wayang Koelit and Its Music,” Djåwå 16 (1936): 1-34. The latter was not written
for modernist composers, and its content is different though presumably no less allegorical.

102
Conclusions: McPhee in Retrospect

In a 1993 review of Oja’s biography of McPhee, the composer Larry Polansky100 has

questioned the importance of McPhee’s compositional legacy. Unenthusiastic about the

prospect of a McPhee revival, Polansky argues: “McPhee’s ‘marginalization’ comes from

the fact that many of his pieces are in rather strongly established styles, and his most

‘famous’ work, Tabuh-tabuhan, has often been thought of (rightly or wrongly) as an

example of how not to incorporate non-Western elements into Western art music.”101 It is

not really surprising that McPhee, who was once an arbiter of, as he said, “the right way

to utilize exotic material,” would through the vicissitudes of stylistic change in 20th-

century composition become the very cautionary example used by later arbiters. As seen,

the development of stylistic trends in 20th-century composition has been continuously

inflected with the concern to portray ever more authentically foreign musics; at the same

time, I have attempted to show that among 20th-century composers what has been said to

be the “right” or the “wrong” way to implement non-Western materials was often

determined by the speaker’s position on stylistic arguments that were internal to his/her

own Western milieu. Style and authenticity have been inextricably interdependent in the

twentieth century.

100
Polansky has an extensive training in Javanese music and is a performer of gender, a traditional
Javanese instrument. His theoretical interests “include just and experimental intonations.” See Carter
Scholz: “Polanksy, Larry” Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed 6/6/2008),
http://www.grovemusic.com.libproxy.lib.unc.edu. Also see his homepage
http://eamusic.dartmouth.edu/~larry/.
101
Larry Polansky, review of Colin McPhee: Composer in Two Worlds by Carol Oja, Ethnomusicology
37, no. 3 (Autumn 1993): 439.

103
 As an illustration I will quote two recent arbiters at length, each a critic of Tabuh-

tabuhan. First is the British composer Douglas Young,102 who praises Tabuh-tabuhan as

outstanding among compositions representing Asian musics. This is because Tabuh-

tabuhan represents the “true East,” which Young describes in terms reminiscent of the

modernists’ of the 1920s and ‘30s:

Compare McPhee’s work with another orchestral monster which purports to

be Oriental in inspiration—Messiaen’s Turangalîla (1948). Despite post-dating
Tabuh-tabuhan by more than a decade, Turangalîla looks back to an essentially
19th-century view of the East. What Messiaen offers us in an orgy of exotic
sexuality in which hallucinogenic phantoms from Wagner, Tristan, Edgar Allan
Poe, sundry Eastern Philosophies, and myriad upon myriad of oiseaux, congeal
into a pseudo-mystical union, whilst embracing little more than the flesh: the
perfect work for latter day d’Annunzios.
What Messiaen’s Hindo-Kitsch actually gives us is Western man’s (more or
less) repressed desires projected onto the East, which he then conveniently labels
‘mysterious, exotic mystical, intuitive’ etc…. So long as one talks of the East in
terms of meditation, levitation, archetypes, Yin-Yang, I-Ching, Mantra/Tantra,
Zen (‘…say it and feel New’) everyone seems perfectly cock-a-hoop. The greater
the hocus-pocus the wilder the euphoria. But if anyone dare present a different
picture of the East, woe betide them.
That is exactly what McPhee did.
Tabuh-tabuhan is the obverse of the 19th-century European view of the East:
McPhee gives us energy in place of enervation; reality, with all its brashness, in
place of ‘mysticism’; health and reason in place of a fetishism of insanity and the
extreme; ‘the lineaments of gratified desire’ rather than an exotic voyeurism.
And all this in 1936: the date is faintly shocking, as we realize how today, 50
years on, the 19th-century view of the East is if anything more pervasive than it
was then.103

Young criticizes Messiaen and others who perpetuate the “19th-century European

view of the East” for projecting onto the East images that were manufactured in the West.

Yet Young’s 1986 comments make clear that, if the “19th-century view of the East” is

102
Young has been influenced by Indonesian music; his The Listeners (1967) incorporates “gamelan
sonorities.” See Peter Hill, “Young, Douglas,” Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed 6/6/2008),
http://www.grovemusic.com.libproxy.lib.unc.edu.
103
Douglas Young, “Colin McPhee’s Music: (II) ‘Tabuh-Tabuhan’,” Tempo 159 (Dec 1986): 18.
Young has also noted that Tabuh-tabuhan makes creative use of metaphor between Balinese and Western
idioms.

104
going strong, the 1930s view of the East is alive as well. What Young stresses about the

rightness of Tabuh-tabuhan was not its faithfulness to any particular Balinese practices

(though he did offer a description of a generalized “East” to which he felt it was faithful),

but rather how it avoided the errors of other composers. McPhee had made proper

stylistic choices that would necessarily ensure his works fidelity to the “East.” Young

describes these correct stylistic choices through their distinction from false ones,

elsewhere noting that Tabuh-tabuhan was “not for flatulent Germanic orchestras.”104

Such statements can be understood in terms of how conflicting definitions of the East

serve different interests, bolstering or diminishing different stylistic legacies, and

flattering or insulting different ideological positions. Young praises McPhee for giving us

“energy,” “reality,” “health,” and “gratified desire,” and is “shocked” that such a clear

vision of the East could have been conceived as early as 1936, close as it was to the

nineteenth-century. He argued that McPhee was brave for giving us the real East, in spite

of the unpopularity of such a vision. Meanwhile, I have argued that McPhee went to great

lengths to represent Bali precisely according to the image that was popular among his

modernist colleagues in the 1930s, by whose approval McPhee would have measured his

success.

In a review of Carol Oja’s biography of McPhee, the British composer, musicologist,

and “educationist” Wilfred Mellers105 rejects Tabuh-tabuhan’s vision of Bali. Meller’s

assessment is the opposite of Young’s, and yet its approach is similar. Mellers describes

104
Young, “Colin McPhee’s Music,” 17.
105
See Leslie East and Gordon Rumson, “Mellers, Wilfrid, Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed
6/6/2008), http://www.grovemusic.com.libproxy.lib.unc.edu.

105
the work’s faults through distinction from Lou Harrison’s Piano Concerto for Keith

Jarett, another work influenced by gamelan (Javanese). For Mellers, the specific problem

was that McPhee’s work was for orchestra and pianos in twelve-tone equal temperament.

Equal temperament was not faithful to Balinese music, which Mellers suggested involved

just intonation:

…One has only to compare McPhee’s Tabuh Tabuhan with the magically
beautiful Piano Concerto written by Lou Harrison for Keith Jarrett in 1985 to
realize that McPhee’s piece founders on a deceit. For although the main reason for
the superiority of the Harrison work is that he is the better composer, there is also
a matter of principle involved. McPhee, transcribing Balinese gamelan for equal-
tempered modern instruments, destroys the music’s soul—which is inherent in its
relatively just intonation. Any system of temperament must be to a degree a fall
from grace, though some declensions are steeper than others. There is little
evidence in this book that McPhee, though he had written expertly of the
traditional tunings, was much bothered by their philosophical and even
physiological implications. This is why Tabuh Tabuhan, whatever its virtues,
remains a part of what Steve Reich called “the old exoticism trip”; whereas
Harrison’s concerto in which the piano is tuned in a subtle compromise between
East and West, is an aural revelation to, and a spiritual experience for, us divided
and distracted twentieth-century creatures.
Not [sic] is it entirely fanciful to relate this technical matter to the disastrous
story of McPhee’s life. While he intermittently exhibited a charm that beguiled
well-wishers other than his long-suffering wife, his jeremiads about the state of
the wicked world (especially in reference to his own talents), his self-absorption
and his infantile petulance prove increasingly tiresome…. Drink may have been
his craven answer to the neglect he thought he suffered from—and to the loss of
the beautiful brown boys of Bali, who were no doubt as solacing as the
tintinnabulations of their bells and gongs. Of course it wasn’t the sexually
permissive Balinese but McCarthyite WASPs who eventually drove him from his
island paradise.106

The issue of whether Harrison’s just intonation is authentic to Javanese music will be

taken up at length in chapter 4; I will only mention here that it has received serious

challenge. Mellers’s condemnation of Tabuh-tabuhan would seem to be a case in which

the authenticity—and indeed the morality—of a modernist work has been assessed a

106
Wilfrid Mellers, “On the Old Exoticism Trip,” review of Colin McPhee: Composer in Two Worlds,
by Carol Oja, Times Literary Supplement, 8 Mar. 1991.

106
priori by terms that were entirely specific to the community of composers in America and

had nothing to do with musical concerns among Balinese. Mellers favored the work of

Harrison, and his understanding of what was true about Balinese gamelan versus what

was merely fantasy “exoticism” was shaped by Harrison’s work.

Polansky also preferred the work of Harrison to McPhee. He found McPhee’s method

of transcribing Balinese music for the piano absurd, remarking that the transcriptions

“completely obliterate tempo fluctuation, timbre, tuning, dynamics, musical and cultural

context, ensemble variation, and most importantly, the musical and performance

variations of the original.” He ultimately found that McPhee transcribed little besides

“some kind of approximation of rhythms and melodic contours,” and observed that, “the

only thing [McPhee’s transcriptions] made possible for ‘the West’ was to hear these

transcriptions themselves.”107 Polansky preferred the transcriptions of Harrison, among

others.

I would argue that what McPhee’s transcriptions make it possible to hear must be

understood as a dialogical matter. Their content is located inevitably along the

ideological trajectory between himself and his audience. What his compositions say, and

what is beyond their capacity to say, can be examined as a result of the coincidence of his

own horizon and that of his audience—if McPhee’s transcriptions say less than they used

to, that is because there has been a shift in what his audiences want and are able to hear.

As will be seen, Harrison’s representations are no different.

Again, in such statements of “right” and “wrong,” even if what is preferred is based

on a sincere commitment to authenticity of representation, the way authenticity is

107
Polansky, review of Colin McPhee, 440.

107
assessed is a fact of the current science of representation in the field, which is in turn

determined by aesthetic concerns of the field, and by other internal arguments. In each of

the above critiques, assessments of the quality of McPhee’s composition were entwined

with accusations, pointed one way or the other, that somebody operating under a false

and pernicious musical aesthetic had misrepresented the Balinese. Both Young and

Mellers took the primitivist position that authentic Balinese music was the same as an

authentic human music: this was Young’s “energy,” “reality,” “health,” “reason,” and

“gratified desire” and Mellers’s just intonation. Both writers found in their respective

false representations conventions associated with Western thinking in the 19th century:

Young found depictions of the Orient as orgiastic, sensational, and mysterious and

Mellers found equal temperament. In spite of their complaints against the nineteenth

century, both of these late-20th-century writers saved their most vitriolic criticisms for

early-20th-century predecessors. Both Young and Mellers went further, mentioning

moral, especially sexual, weakness in their critiques: Young claimed that Messiaen’s

“pseudo-mysticism” actually “embraces little more than the flesh” and represents

“Western man’s (more or less) repressed desires projected onto the East,” while Mellers

commented on McPhee’s “craven” drinking and his interest in “the beautiful brown boys

of Bali.”

With the intense intellectualism of modernist composition has come a phenomenon of

aesthetic disagreements that are not merely quarrels over whose music sounds better.

Aesthetics have become intimately tied to a range of ideological issues touching upon

national and international politics, sex and sexuality, cultural representation, class

relations, and science and technology. These issues are frequently so bound together that

108
to be a composer with a style is to be a total moral being, a person with a distinct position

on truth in the world, whose professional purpose is not only to find performers of his/her

music but also to persuade others of a vision of the world.

In the following chapters we will see two examples of such total visions. Both Henry

Cowell and Lou Harrison went to great lengths in crafting their music to suit their world

and crafting their world to suit their music. And, as with McPhee and so many other 20th-

century composers, for Cowell and Harrison non-Western musics played an integral role

in the construction and maintenance of that vision. Cowell will be the focus of the next

chapter.

109
 Chapter III: Henry Cowell and the “Whole World of Music”

Difference and hybrids are good he said

And agreed that people have lived before
And not been fools because of that, and that
They’ve lived in other places too and not
Been fools because of that. No single way
Suffices now, and knowing at least one
Other music well he felt illumines
Mind and heart as Mozart thought of travel,
That it is to an artist essential.
--Lou Harrison, from “Tens on Remembering Henry Cowell”

In Beyond Exoticism Timothy Taylor argues that Henry Cowell was ideologically in

sync with the early-twentieth century impulse of cultural relativism, meaning that he

advocated an understanding of musical meaning and value as variable to cultural context.

Taylor aligns him with the anthropologist Franz Boas, “who was important in overturning

the old model of evolutionism,”108 and states that in the writing of his United Quartet

(1936) Cowell was “armed with Boasian notions of culture and cultural relativism” (p.

110). As evidence, Taylor offers quotes by Cowell that are suggestive of this relativist

attitude. In Cowell’s 1935 article “The Scientific Approach to Non-European Music,” he

stated that understanding such music, “can be reached only upon the basis of a more

extensive and profound knowledge firstly, of the technical processes and critical standard

involved, and secondly, of the role of music in the social system from which it has

108
Timothy D. Taylor, Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2007), 107.
sprung.”109 Taylor states that it was Cowell’s position “that musics should be studied not

only from the standpoint of science,” but also (now quoting Cowell):

from the point of view of the peoples themselves. An attempt should be made to
discover which element of music is most emphasized by the particular tribe in
question, and what the native conventions are with regard to it. (p. 62)

Taylor also quotes Cowell saying that the new-primitivist stylistic movement he

visualized was

not an attempt to imitate primitive music, but rather to draw on those materials
common to the music of all the peoples of the world, to build a new music
particularly related to our own century.110

I agree with Taylor’s assessment: Cowell was clearly sympathetic to the relativist

style of thinking and participated whole-heartedly in its advocacy of cultural tolerance.

And yet, looking closely at the quotations provided by Taylor, there are words that do not

seem to conform to relativism as it is commonly conceived today. For instance Cowell

claimed that a “scientific” knowledge of non-European musics could be arrived upon.

Another example is his advocacy for the consideration of which “elements” of music

were valued by particular tribes. As will be seen, in spite of his relativistic ideals, Cowell

also held notions about music as a phenomenon that might be studied objectively, and

about which understandings might be reached in terms of absolute, non-relative truths.

Cowell’s model researcher was a “scientist” investigating “elements,” which, though they

might be differently valued by different peoples, had an objectively observable existence

independent of their valuation.

109
Henry Cowell, “The Scientific Approach to Non-European Music,” Music Vanguard I (summer
1935): 62.
110
Cowell, “Towards Neo-Primitivism,” Modern Music 10 (March-April 1933): 151; quoted in Taylor,
Beyond Exoticism, 106.

111
 Also there is Cowell’s claim in the above quotation that he was not interested in

imitating “primitive” music. In spite of this disclaimer about imitation, Cowell

maintained that there was such a thing as a “primitive” person and a “primitive” music.

The notion of the “primitive” was the centerpiece of the cultural evolutionist conception

of culture, which Boas had done so much to dismantle in The Mind of Primitive Man.

Though Boas, Mead, and other anthropologists did refer to non-literate peoples as

“primitives,” as will be seen, Cowell’s use of the term was far more deeply entwined with

evolutionist notions than were theirs.111

Thus, Cowell’s views on musical difference were in two respects the very antitheses

of what is today commonly conceived of as relativism. First, his views on the variability

of musical values were founded upon and limited by strict principles that he conceived of

as scientific and absolute—in other words, not relative to culture. He presented these

views in detail in his treatises New Musical Resources and The Nature of Melody,112 and

also referred to them in piecemeal throughout his many articles. Second, he conceived of

all the musics of the world as representing different stages of a common historical

developmental line, a view that is commonly referred to as cultural evolutionism.113

Though today it is often remarked, as Taylor does, that the historical rise of cultural

111
David Paul (“From American Ethnographer to Cold War Icon: Charles Ives through the Eyes of
Henry and Sidney Cowell,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 59, no. 2 [summer 2006]: 399-
458) has argued that the influence of Boasian thinking on Cowell, at least until 1932, was minimal. In spite
of being appointed in 1930 to the faculty of the New School for Social Research, the faculty of which as a
whole pursued Boasian methods, “his correspondence bears no trace of the vibrant discourse about the
social sciences that was taking place there” (p. 423).
112
New Musical Resources (New York, London: A. A. Knopf, 1930) (hereafter cited as NMR) and The
Nature of Melody (hereafter cited as NOM), unpublished manuscript held at the Henry Cowell Collection of
the New York Public Library (hereafter referred to as Cowell Coll.).
113
Evolutionism was sometimes grounded in racialist ideas about the different capacities of different
peoples to become civilized. Cowell did not subscribe to this version of evolutionism, but rather to what
Martin refers to as the “civilization paradigm.”

112
relativism in the early to mid twentieth century represented a rejection of cultural

evolutionism, I find that in Cowell’s case the two were aspects of a single, coherent

viewpoint on music and difference.114 His evolutionist and relativist views, along with his

scientific theories, were mutually supporting.

Aspects of Cowell’s views were shared by many colleagues, and were reflective of

contemporary trends in the social sciences. A reconsideration of Cowell’s views,

alongside those of Charles Seeger, Joseph Yasser, and Joseph Schillinger, will help to

provide a more nuanced picture of the shifts in twentieth-century theories of music and

difference. It also shows that many of Cowell’s statements about non-Western musics

proceeded as much from the scientistic and evolutionist aspects of his inquiries (which

might today be held in great skepticism by ethnomusicologists) as from his relativistic

side.

This investigation of Cowell’s theories of music and difference opens up new

possibilities for the understanding of the motivations and planning of his compositions. In

this chapter, I also discuss his United Quartet (1936), in which Cowell proposed to be

moving toward a musical style transcendent of culture. I discuss how he staked this

universalist claim for the piece within his relativist, evolutionist, and positivist theories.

Through detailed consideration of the concepts that Cowell used to understand worldwide

114
Martin notes: “The culture-based paradigm came somewhat later than the other two [which were
racialist and non-racialist versions of evolutionism], and was formed partly in reaction against some of their
principles and implications. Its advocates attempted to develop a relativistic, non-ethnocentric approach,
avoiding racial essentialism and judgmental comparisons and hierarchies of any kind. The specific culture,
conceived of as an integrated unit with its own unique history, was the determinant of character,
institutions, mores, and what Westerners perceived as difference” (The Languages, 23). As will be seen,
Cowell’s point of view was in some respects characteristic of Martin’s culture-based paradigm and in some
respects characteristic of the second, non-racialist evolutionist paradigm. Even when Cowell advocated for
the rejection of hierarchies of “higher” and “lower” levels of civilizations, he continued to express his
views in evolutionist terms.

113
musical difference it becomes possible to avoid reductive assessments of the authenticity

of Cowell’s compositional influences by non-Western musics. On the one hand we need

not uncritically accept Cowell’s claims about his compositions, such as his having

achieved a universal musical style in the United Quartet, for we may critique the terms

by which Cowell claimed their truth. On the other hand, we need not dismiss Cowell’s

compositions as exoticist fantasies (or as “world music kitsch” as John Corbett has

described Cowell’s 1957 Persian Set115), for we may see that they proceeded from

earnest studies, and were, at least on the terms Cowell set out, authentic.

In this chapter I attempt to paint as completely as possible Cowell’s vision of music

and culture and of his own special role as an experimentalist composer. I will explain

what Cowell meant when he used terms such as musical “elements,” “resources,”

“experiment,” “melody,” “rhythm,” “development,” “primitive,” “Oriental,” and

“peoples.” His use of these terms was fairly consistent and reflects a tightly connected

(though not “air-tight”) set of views on music and difference. Cowell made his most

explicit statements of his theories on music and culture in his treatises, but nowhere did

he state them in as full a form as I do here. For me they have come into focus through

examination of a broad selection of his publications. It may be that some aspects of what

I describe were too fundamental to Cowell’s way of thinking for him to articulate. It may

also be that certain aspects of Cowell’s views were so broadly held in his intellectual

circles that he did not see the need to articulate them explicitly.

115
John Corbett, “Experimental Oriental: New Music and other Others,” in Western Music and Its
Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music, ed. Georgina Born and David
Hesmondhalgh (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2000), 172. “Like [Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade
or Ravel’s Bolero, the Persian Set] has an air of pastichery and world-music kitsch about it.”

114
 I will begin by describing succinctly Cowell’s views on music and difference. I will

follow this outline of Cowell’s views with thematic subsections, in each of which I will

discuss the development of these views in overlapping periods of Cowell’s career. This

chronological organization makes visible the subtle shifts in Cowell’s views. The focus

of my present study ends around 1940. After that point Cowell’s interests took a new

turn, which, even though they continued to build upon the lines traced here, raise

substantially different issues, and will require separate treatment. In the conclusion to this

chapter I will briefly discuss those later interests, and how they were elaborations upon,

rather than departures from those of his earlier career.

An Outline of Cowell’s Views on Music, Experiment, and Culture

Fairly early in Cowell’s career he fixed upon conceptions of musical materials as

“resources” and “elements.” He took on as the principal model for the composer that of

an “experimenter,” in the sense of a scientist who tests resources or examines elements,

and both creates and discovers for the material advancement of society. He held a

particular understanding of the nature of music. On the one hand, it was a complex and

creative medium with widely varying formal possibilities; on the other it was always

constructed upon certain unvarying elemental bases, the potentials and limitations of

which lay latent within them. In any particular musical piece these various resources

might be developed or not.

Besides the model of the “experimenter,” for Cowell a second way to study the

potential for development of musical resources scientifically was through study of the

world’s musical cultures. He believed that in any particular culture certain resources

115
would have been communally developed, while others would have not. For instance,

some cultures were highly sophisticated in their use of rhythm, while others were

sophisticated in harmony. This fact is critical to understanding the idiosyncratic nature of

Cowell’s relativism: he saw that the musics of different cultures were differently

valuable, not because there could be no absolute field of musical values (i.e. not because

all musical values are ultimately culturally based), but because different cultures had,

through time, developed differently within a vast but theoretically unified field of musical

possibilities. Cultures were, in a sense, workshops for the development of musical

resources, with different cultures having specialized in different “sub-fields” of musical

development (e.g. rhythm, melody, and harmony). While no single culture had advanced

beyond all the others in every area of development, it certainly could be held that some

cultures were more advanced than others in a given area. Each culture was advanced on

its own terms, and it could logically be said, given this singular field for assessing

advancement implied in Cowell’s writings, that all cultures were equally advanced.

This question of differences in cultural advancement points to another aspect of

Cowell’s relativism that may seem idiosyncratic when opposed to what was later

articulated as cultural relativism by anthropologists such as Melville Herskovitz (I will

discuss Herskovitz in the next chapter). Cowell understood all presently existing cultures

as occupying different historical positions relative to each other. The sort of advancement

a culture displayed could be taken as an indication of its position in a unilinear scheme of

worldwide cultural evolution, with the most “primitive” cultures exhibiting the greatest

advancement in rhythm, and with Western culture exhibiting greatest advancement in

116
harmony.116 To be clear, this meant that a “primitive” culture would necessarily be

historically undeveloped—meaning that it represented more-or-less a former cultural

state of now more “civilized” societies—and yet, in terms of rhythmic resources, it would

be the richest. Any culture, wherever it was located along this single historical line, could

be said to be as rich as any other in musical resources. That Cowell held these

evolutionist views may today strike readers as surprising, since it is often remarked that

cultural relativism was a movement that aimed at refuting evolutionism, and ultimately

succeeded in supplanting it.

The role of the experimental composer then was to develop resources, to improve

musical technology, and to do so either through meticulous first-hand experiment with

the elements of music or through anthropological scrutiny of the products of other

cultures, with an eye toward discovering how those products demonstrated local means of

developing elements, which were theoretically universal in applicability. This could lead

the composer in a great variety of directions, and so it followed that very different

projects by different composers ought to be regarded as equally valid: one composer

might develop certain elements and another composer different ones. This was the

116
It may seem on the surface that Cowell’s simultaneous cultural relativism and cultural evolutionism
is highly contradictory and idiosyncratic. Cultural relativism is often spoken of as being the antithesis of
and having historically replaced cultural evolutionism (e.g. this statement by James Clifford: “Rejecting
both evolutionism and the overly broad entities of race and civilization, the idea of culture posited the
existence of local, functionally integrated units.” The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century
Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1988), 273. Cowell’s understanding of
culture was pluralist in a sense, but was not designed as a repudiation of ideas of evolution and civilization,
and in fact incorporated those paradigms. It may be that Cowell’s understanding is more typical of an era of
theorists who conceived of culture as both plural and unilinear.

117
grounding for Cowell’s pluralist views on modern composition and his own incredibly

plural compositional output.117

Cowell’s theories served his modernist project that was pluralist but not exactly

relativistic as the term is conceived today. Cowell’s modernism, conceived as

experimentalism, was characterized by rather absolutist scientific values of discovery and

progress. His goals were, in a word, positivistic; he was dedicated to advancement in the

understanding of materials whose significance lay immanent within them. They were not,

however, socially disinterested. As a neutral discoverer, Cowell’s composer/scientist was

in a position to offer critiques of society and offer suggestions for social development.

Cowell could, at certain times, conceive of musical interest as dependent upon

contingent values, and at other times assume interest to be inherent to the musical

elements. He would, at certain times, take evolutionist views, at others decry evolutionist

thinking. These contradictions demonstrate both the enormous breadth of his intellect and

also, perhaps, that his knowledge was somewhat disarticulated. Here I am, however,

focusing on the logic that unified these seeming contradictions, even while respecting

that this logic cannot sufficiently explain them all.

117
Steven Johnson notes that Cowell produced “nearly one thousand compositions in a diverse array of
genres and styles. Indeed, the most consistent thing about his work is its lack of consistency. A thoroughly
abstract, dissonant piece may follow a simple diatonic one. The same piece may harbor modernist noise in
one hand and a modal folk tune in the other, or a piece built with traditional harmonic materials may
exhibit radically new formal concepts. Works based on American vernacular, baroque concerto grosso, and
Japanese gagaku traditions may appear in close proximity; and Javanese gamelan and Latin-American
dance styles may appear in the same piece at the same time.” See Johnson, “’World of Ideas’: The Music of
Henry Cowell,” in The Whole World of Music: A Henry Cowell Symposium, ed. David Nichols
(Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997), 16.

118
New Musical Resources

In 1919 Cowell finished a draft of what would be his first book, New Musical

Resources.118 It was an assemblage of ideas he had developed under the guidance of

Charles Seeger at Berkeley, and some of the ideas were Seeger’s own.119 The book also

owed much to Schönberg’s Harmonielehre, but as Cowell saw it his own book went

further in developing a rational and systematized theory of the many expanded resources

of modern musicians: “[Schönberg’s treatise] explained many moderately complex

harmonies by combining more chromatic passing tones and pointing out some well-

known primary overtone relationships; but his work fails to explain music as involved as

Schönberg’s own compositions”.120

118
New Musical Resources is considered by some to be one of the most important theoretical treatises
of the 20th century. Kyle Gann has remarked that “it is more relevant today than it has ever been before.
Whether a composer starts out reading it (and it should be required reading for undergraduate composers at
every university in America) or discovers it further on down the road, the book stands as a monumental
guidepost pointing the way to fascinating new territories of musical experience.” Gann finds that NMR
predicted the innovations of post-war composers such as Messiaen, Boulez, Stockhausen, and Babbitt,
particularly their subjection of rhythm to the same controls as pitch. Whether any of them were directly
influenced by Cowell is unknown, and none of them credited him. Gann also lists a host of living
composers who have been more directly influenced by NMR: James Tenney, Ben Johnston, La Monte
Young, Peter Garland (“perhaps Cowell’s most direct compositional descendent”), John Luther Adams,
David First, Larry Polansky, Ben Neill, Rhys Chatham, Glenn Branca, Mikel Rouse, Michael Gordon, and
Gann himself. See Gann, “Subversive Prophet: Henry Cowell as Theorist and Critic,” in The Whole World
of Music, 186-89.
119
In its division of music into these two aspects, Cowell’s treatise resembles that of Seeger, “Tradition
and Experiment in (the New) Music,” published in Charles Seeger, Studies in Musicology II, 1929-1979,
ed. Anne M. Pescatello (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1994). Their discussions also share a division
of music into two realms, one of pitch and one of rhythm, and the development of an innovative approach
to the latter (which they both considered to be relatively undeveloped) in analogy with more commonplace
theoretical treatments of the former. See also Taylor A. Greer, “The Dynamics of Dissonance in Seeger’s
Treatise and Crawford’s Quartet,” Understanding Charles Seeger, Pioneer in American Musicology
(Urbana and Chicago, Univ. of Illinois Press, 1999), 13-28. Seeger also fashioned a theory of musical
relativity after Einstein’s theory. See Bell Young, “Modern Physics to Modern Musicology, in
Understanding Charles Seeger, 172-183. Young’s description of Seeger’s theory draws from Seeger’s
writings of the 1950s and later, quite a bit after the publication of Cowell’s New Musical Resources.
120
NMR, xv. On Cowell’s instruction at Berkeley, and the influences he received from various
professors there, see Michael Hicks’s beautifully written, Henry Cowell, Bohemian (Urbana and Chicago:
Univ. of Illinois Press, 2002), 64-79 (hereafter cited as HCB). The basing of an entire system of harmony

119
 New Musical Resources articulates much of what was outlined above. The text

advanced a picture of and a model for contemporary composition whereby it could be

regarded as more-or-less scientific—or at least as having a wing, necessary to the field as

a whole, dedicated to its development along scientific lines. This involved an

understanding of music as constituted of isolatable elements that could be objectively

perceived and analyzed and usefully exploited. The observable, testable aspect of music

would exist independently of the values driving its creation and reception.

Cowell explained that through the study of overtones he had arrived at a “theory of

musical relativity”: “It is discovered that the sense of consonance, dissonance, and

discord is not fixed, so that it must be immovably applied to certain combinations, but is

relative” (NMR, xvii). The combinations of tones associated with the lower end of the

overtone series were those most readily understood as consonant. As tones of the upper

reaches of the series were added, the complexity of the sound increased, from consonance

into dissonance, and finally into discord.

and rhythm on the overtone series, which was the principal features of New Musical Resources, was an idea
that Cowell received from his professors, including Seeger.

120
Ex. 7. The Overtone Series (NMR)

The exact locations at which consonance became dissonance and dissonance became

discord were, however, a matter of how accustomed the listener was to various sounds:

121
 It is a notable fact that certain combinations accepted as satisfactory by one
listener are found to be unsatisfying to another, and this acceptance or rejection of
a given chord depends very largely upon the familiarity of the ear with the chord
in question—that is to say, upon the musical experience of the listener. The points
in the series, therefore, where consonant chords leave off and dissonance begins,
and where dissonance leaves off and discord begins, are not rigidly fixed, as was
assumed by most theorists, but depend upon the ear of the particular listener, who
is in turn influenced by the musical age in which he lives. It is this fact, proved by
the history of musical progress, in conjunction with the fact that, acoustically
speaking, there is no point at which any other than an arbitrary difference between
them can be shown, which establishes the relativity of consonance, dissonance,
and discord. (NMR, 10-11)

This “relativity” was a sort of relativism. There was no immovable point at which

music became “consonant” or “dissonant,” and therefore all degrees of dissonance could

be recognized to be valid or not only in respect to their particular historical periods. Yet,

this “relativity” was a far cry from the cultural relativism I will describe more fully in the

next chapter. It did not recognize as culturally contingent the concepts of “consonance,”

“dissonance,” and “discord,” only the contingency of the location of their boundaries.

Cowell understood the concepts themselves and that of the spectrum that organized them

(the overtone series) to reflect a scientific, immutable nature to music, and it was upon

that very absolute basis that there could be proven with certainty that there were a variety

of equally valid ways of making music. Cowell’s “relativity,” with its nod to Einstein’s

theory of relativity, was fundamentally positivist in its orientation.

At the time of the publication of New Musical Resources, Cowell’s views were also

relativistic in the sense that he understood there to be different values guiding musical

creation. He explained that his scientific theories were not meant to establish the terms by

which musics were to be regarded as valuable. “Values” as Cowell conceived of them lay

apart from, or on top of, the more objective basis of music that he considered himself to

be discovering scientifically. Cowell referred to values variably as “taste,” “fashion,” or

122
“convention”: these were aspects of music that were subject to change, being an accident

of history.121

Cowell’s framework for the understanding of music and its valuation consisted then

of 1) an aspect of intrinsic features of musical materials that were

scientifically/experimentally understandable, and 2) an aspect that was socially

conditioned. The former sort of value could be assessed in terms of its accuracy, the latter

in terms of its persuasiveness:

It is my conviction…that the finest taste and the perfect use of scientifically co-
ordinated materials go together, and that the musical resources outlined add to the
possibilities of musical expression and are therefore vital potentialities, rather
than merely cold facts. (NMR, xxi)

Significantly, according to Cowell’s model these aspects of “taste” and “science,” or

historically based versus inherent musical properties, were not aspects of a single diad as

they were in the theories of Seeger,122 but rather each existed as an independent stratum,

with the aspect of taste on top of the more fundamental and independent objective layer.

Music could be written that made no use of established conventions and appealed to no

contingent values (though Cowell did not hold that this was the single desirable goal).

121
Prior to writing the introduction to New Musical Resources, in a 1925 article titled “The Value of
Eclecticism” (The Sackbut 5, no. 9 [1925]: 264-265), Cowell preached a relativistic ideal for music
listening, stating that the listener must have the capacity to recognize different values in different
composers: “The most impossible method of getting anywhere in listening to music, is to try to fit it into
the Procrustian bed of a pre-conceived idea of what music should be like” (p. 265).
122
See Robert R. Grimes, “Form, Content, and Value: Seeger and Criticism to 1940,” in
Understanding Charles Seeger, 64-83. Grimes traces the development of Seeger’s theories of value until
1940, the approximate time at which he turned toward a more “ethnomusicological” orientation. In most of
his publications until that time, Seeger discussed musical value as an aspect of the whole musical fact,
inextricable from that dimension that might be discussed scientifically. Seeger’s orientation was distinctly
Marxist: he regarded music as existing in the form that it did in the interests of a particular class. Value
could be defined as the way that particular class interests were realized in the music. As noted, Cowell
tended to separate the scientific aspect of music from that which was the result of particular values. For
Cowell, it might be said, whether a piece of music had value (or no value) in its fundamental aspect (its
scientifically examinable aspect) was entirely determined by the development of its elements along lines
which were more or less objective. Values, understood as variable, did exist, but did not apply to this
fundamental aspect.

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Cowell’s notion of there being objectively perceivable properties to music reflected his

being well versed in contemporary social sciences literature: at the time there was a

commonplace understanding that social practices had inherent constitutions that could be

objectively observed and analyzed, much like the objects of study in the natural

sciences.123

In this vein, Cowell found that the laws of harmony as they were conventionally

taught contained “discrepancies.” It was not faulty to imagine that harmony used in

composition might be guided by natural laws, but current convention in the teaching of

harmony was based in part on “underlying science and more inevitable principles” and in

part “on the taste of a former era of music” (NMR, xviii). There was nothing wrong with

composing with such a concoction of fact and fashion, but it would be important to

recognize the conventional “laws” of harmony for what they were, mere fashion, and

rather outmoded fashion at that, and to be open to “new resources” as supplements to the

old.

Old fashions could be regarded as outmoded because there was, according to Cowell,

evidence of a natural trajectory of progress in the development of dissonance. He noted,

for instance, that modern instruments were capable of producing more overtones than

were older ones. Having familiarity with the complex sounds of modern instruments,

123
See R.F. Ellen, ed., Ethnographic Research: A Guide to General Conduct (London and Orlando:
Academic Press, 1984). Ellen notes that anthropology’s conception of its principal method of participant
observation had to shift as its conception of the nature of its subject shifted: “The importance ascribed to
observation as the main data yielding procedure (in the early 20th century phase of anthropology) derives
directly from anthropology’s ideas about the constitution of its subject matter which, like the subject matter
of natural science, should be directly observable, as well as from its insistence on empirical scholarship
characteristic of science. This notion can be traced back to Malinowsky’s (1922) requirmenet of ‘the
description of the imponderabilia of actual life’.” The idea of participant observation would gradually be
amended to put more focus on the meaning ascribed to studied practices by the subjects themselves, the
social sciences thereby becoming distinct from the natural sciences, whose objects could be studied through
direct observation.

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modern listeners were naturally more prepared to hear dissonance than were listeners of

previous eras. The evolution of tonality had moved, according to Cowell, quite

consistently along these lines:

Looking back over the history of music, it must be admitted that we have no
means of knowing exactly what was done by the very ancient peoples; there is
some evidence, however, to support the theory that in ancient Greece the great
choruses sang in unison, using no harmony whatsoever, and that the instruments
which accompanied the choruses also simply played the melody with the voices.
There are references to the lack of musicality on the part of any singer who sang
notes apart from the body of the chorus.
A melody with percussion accompaniment but no harmony is characteristic of
nearly all primitive music. (NMR, 12)124

Cowell’s views on evolutionism and their implication for his construction of a

concept of “primitive music” will be taken up at length in the next subsection. Here, I

wish to point out how Cowell’s relativism, positivism, and evolutionism all mutually

supported each other. The scientific basis of all tonality in the overtone series

(positivism) provided a framework from which to understand the history of musical

“progress” (evolutionism) as a shifting of the powers of society to apprehend greater and

greater levels of dissonance. The fact that there was this historical shift (evolutionism),

and not a fixed point that demarcated the boundaries between “consonance,”

“dissonance,” and “discord,” suggested that there were many different ways of

distinguishing the three that were equally valid (relativism). The ultimate thrust of all this

was not only to scientifically vindicate the intense dissonance of new music as “equally

124
Gann (“Subversive Prophet”) has argued that there were flaws in Cowell’s historical argument:
“While he correctly asserts that the major third was originally considered a discord and only later accepted
as a concord, he does not take into account that in the Pythagorean tuning of late medieval France the ratio
of the major third was defined as 81/64, very high up in the overtone series indeed. Getting the interval
reclassified as a consonance with a ratio of 5/4 involved not only hearing differently but overthrowing a
system of theory, as well as altering the way organ pipes and stringed instruments were tuned” (p. 178).
Gann finds that Cowell’s systematized theories of pitch based on the overtone series fall short of their
potential because he fails to make an argument for just intonation (just intonation will be discussed further
in the next chapter on Harrison).

125
valid,” but to suggest (though never to state explicitly) that it represented the pinnacle of

the harmonic practices of history.

Following these theories on pitch, with which as described Cowell had attempted to

subsume all known and possible harmonic materials into a single system based on the

overtone series, he presented his theories on rhythm. Cowell put forth a new sort of meter

that he developed in direct analogy with the ratios of tone vibrations in the overtone

series. He noted that both harmonic intervals and metrical relationships could be

expressed with numerical ratios: for instance, the ratio 2:1 might refer to a passage with

two parts an octave apart in pitch, or it could refer to a passage with one part moving in

whole notes and another part moving in half notes. From there, he noted the poverty of

conventionally employed rhythmic resources relative to those of pitch, for while pitches

commonly were employed in complex ratios such as 5:4 (“major third”), 6:5 (“minor

third”), and conceivably unlimited others, the ratios between rhythmic events tended to

be limited to powers of 2, such as 2:1, 4:1, 8:1, and so forth. He suggested that just as the

two tones of a major 3rd vibrate at a ratio of 5:4, so might a new sort of meter be created

in which rhythmic events occurred in cycles of 5:4. Any ratio might be used, and beyond

such rhythmic diads there might further be rhythmic triads, of 5:4:3 for instance, and

denser layerings. Further extending the analogy, Cowell observed that, just as harmony

tended to shift from measure to measure, so might this “metrical harmony.” He argued

that the adoption of such an expanded conception of meter was overdue, and asked the

reader to consider, “If in lieu of a melody the same note were to be repeated for an entire

work, it would be considered absurd; yet this endless repetition is just what is expected in

126
metre, in which hundreds of the same metrical units, such as measures of ¾, etc., follow

one another without change” (NMR, 69).

Ex. 8. Examples of Polymeter (NMR)

Thus it can be seen that, on the one hand, in New Musical Resources Cowell hoped

that his inquiry into the nature of musical resources would facilitate their better

exploitation for myriad compositional uses, just as a scientist who tested steel would hope

to facilitate its greater usefulness for myriad purposes in industry; on the other hand, he

hoped his discoveries would validate his own previously developed compositional

practices and those of his modernist colleagues. He attempted to procure this validation

by relativising the accomplishments of more conventional (hegemonic) Western music

(e.g. by “proving” that its harmonic language was not based on immutable laws but on

contingent fashions), and through demonstration that the compositional techniques that

he and his colleagues had arrived at intuitively turned out to have scientific validity.

127
“’Modern’ music,” he assured, “is not proceeding blindly” (NMR, xviii). Cowell

described, for instance, how through the present study he had discovered the scientific

bases of his own earlier work with tone clusters, even though he had developed them

intuitively: “namely, by sounding together a number of tones related through the higher

reaches of the overtones, in the same spacing in which they occur in the overtone series”

(NMR, xxi). The implication was that, even if modernism was not the only valuable

movement in music, it could be claimed that it was the only one that made scientific

validity an aim.125 Even with its highly controversial practices, modernism could through

Cowell’s study make a sturdy claim to legitimacy.

The theory not only had the ability to vindicate the past, but also to predict the future.

For instance, not only could the presence of microtones in works of new music be

justified, but it could be predicted which microtones would become the next accepted

additions to the common palette: “there is a strong possibility that the next development

may be to add to music the next highest overtone after the half-step, our present most

complex interval. This would not give the quarter-step, but an interval a little smaller than

a half-step” (NMR, 19). Since some time had passed between the original development of

the theory in 1919 and its publication in 1930, Cowell could at that later date already

comment on how the theory’s predictive powers had been proven in the intervening

achievements of composers such as Ruggles, Hindemith, and Schönberg: “Such progress

125
Cowell described his own role as developer and tester of musical materials for the purpose of their
general use in his later article “How Relate Music and Dance?” Dance Observer 1, no. 5 (1934): 52.
Cowell called for the use of new tones, ones especially appropriate for dance, and reported on his own fall
and winter experiments with these new tones. This is one example of how Cowell conceived of himself,
within the field of composition, as having the special role of technological innovator.

128
is encouraging and seems to give further proof that the theory as postulated has validity”

(NMR, xxiii).

Besides justifying his earlier stylistic practices, Cowell’s theories set forth in NMR

also provided the basis for some new compositions. His Quartet Romantic (an excerpt of

which is shown in ex. 9) serves as an example of his own work with polyrhythm.

Cowell’s sort of polyrhythm is found throughout, including the opening with groupings

of 6 (flute 1) 5 (flute 2) 4 (violin) and 2 (viola) beats. Later groupings such as 6 2/3 beats

2 2/3 beats emerge. His Quartet Euphometric is similar, except in its style of notation. In

that piece, rather than having continuously shifting groupings but consistent barrings, the

barrings and time signatures shift and do not align among parts.

129
Ex. 9. Quartet Romantic

130
Mr. Ch and Chinese Meter

The ideas on rhythm the Cowell expressed in New Musical Resources reappeared

later in a different form in a 1929 article describing the reaction of a respected Chinese

scholar and musician named Mr. Ch who tried to learn about Western music from

Cowell: “To my ears, alas, it is devoid of meaning.”126 Mr. Ch does not understand

harmony. Though he is a good-natured, earnest, and intelligent student, he is nevertheless

both unimanginative and ethnocentric. He cannot, even on an earnest attempt, grasp

musical values different from his own.

There was no actual Mr. Ch.127 Cowell created him as a tool for broadening his

readership’s imagination of musical difference. This was a didactic piece, like so many of

Cowell’s, intended to spread awareness that different musics had both different forms of

development and were motivated by different values (those were not precisely the same

issues in his mind), and that members of one culture often lacked the capacity to

recognize beauty that was plain to members of another. In the voice of Mr. Ch., Cowell

deployed a representation of Chinese musical values in order to likewise represent and

simultaneously make relative Western musical values.

Mr. Ch cannot understand why the orchestra needs so many instruments: “what use is

one more instrument if you cannot hear the melody it plays?” He asks slyly if they are not

merely for “pomp and show.”128 Through such remarks, the reader was given an

opportunity to recognize with shock and delight how unwieldy, and empty of (melodic)

126
“Music of the Hemispheres,” Modern Music VI, no. 3 (1929): 12-18.
127
This is indicated by Sidney Cowell in script at the bottom of a letter of inquiry about the article from
Kuo-Huang Han, April 30, 1970 (Henry Cowell Collection, New York Public Library).
128
“Music of the Hemispheres,” 13.

131
interest their own music would seem to an outsider, and presumably to become aware

that there were worlds of musical meaning that they themselves were oblivious to.

The reader was further encouraged to see Western music from a perhaps unfamiliar

angle when Mr. Ch. remarks that Bach and Schönberg “are very much alike” (p. 15). The

element of harmony, which so utterly differentiates them for the Westerner, is

undetectable by Mr. Ch. He finds Schönberg to be a bit more to his liking because it is

clearer. Chopin is his favorite because of the rhythmic independence of the lines (cross-

rhythms), which reminds him of his native art; and yet Mr. Ch finds Western music to be

generally unsatisfying in its lack of “rhythmic development,” and notes that, “were the

melodies truly independent, each would have a different metre that would change at

separate times” (pp. 15-16).

In so describing the nature of Chinese meter, Mr. Ch articulates the very sort idea of

rhythmic development Cowell had put forth in New Musical Resources. As seen,

Cowell’s ideas for this sort of development did not stem from a study of Chinese music,

but were developed logically in analogy with his the use of pitches in intervals. With

these words by Mr. Ch, it was as if Cowell had found for—in actuality granted to(!)—his

invented sort of meter the support of a native authority, which validated its viability as a

musical practice among a people, and indeed the entire theory of a truth “out-there” of

which it was a part. He did not here mention that Mr. Ch’s description of Chinese meter

was reminiscent of that he had described in New Musical Resources and as applied in the

two quartets described above.

At the end of the article Cowell made Mr. Ch a mouthpiece for the sort of cultural

relativism that I will describe at length in the next chapter as a contrast with the views of

132
Harrison. In this view, the value and meaning of a particular musical material, such as a

portamento, are not given as inhering in the materials themselves. Rather materials derive

their meaning from a body of associations that are culturally specific. Mr. Ch explains,

“Such slides or portamentos, regarded as out of taste in your music, are fundamental in

ours. They appear in our speech, we find them in the sounds of nature, the wind and the

sea, and we consider them great assets to our music” (p. 16). In his conclusion to the

article, Cowell reflected on the culture’s centricity in the apprehension of value:

For myself I realized that it would be folly to attempt a judgment on Chinese

music, our own laws being no guide thereto. But the visit of this fixed
academician of the Orient served to provide me with a refreshing if distant
glimpse of other planetary orbits of music than our own. (p. 18)

As seen in Cowell’s New Music Resources, his conception of culture-based meaning

did not necessarily conflict with his positivist views. Cowell saw that there were two

sorts of musical values: those which were culturally/historically contingent and those

which were inherent to the materials themselves (the latter sort was that respect by which

music might be interesting to listeners regardless of their historical/cultural positions).

Cowell spoke disparagingly of the contingent sort (using terms such as “fashion”) only in

cases when it seemed to him that they had become the basis for ethnocentrism and

rigidity.129

129
Cowell further discussed contingent values in an entry on “Oriental” Music in The Encyclopaedia of
the Social Sciences (New York: 1930-35.) He described a consistent concern with producing specific
emotional/sprititual states in Oriental music (which would distinguish it from the subjectivism of European
music). The means of producing these states varied from region to region, but the purpose was always the
same. Cowell described Javanese music as esoteric, with each note possessing a particular emotional
resonance, and Balinese music as being less formal, more closely tied to Indian origins, more “folk-like,”
and as having more rhythmic inventiveness. I am unsure what precisely “less formal” meant, since I have
not found the term to appear regularly in Cowell’s writings. It is also unclear to me what about Balinese
music made it seem “folk-like” to Cowell, but it is likely that this statement as well as the comment on it’s
being more rhythmically inventive tie into Cowell’s evolutionist understanding of culture: Bali would
presumably have been more “primitive” than the “cultivated” Java. Though the statement about Balinese
music being more closely tied to Indian “origins” might suggest diffusionist thinking, I have not found such

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Folk Music, “Primitive” Music, and Nations

As with other composer/ethnographers, such as McPhee and Harrison, Cowell’s

ethnographic and theoretical writings served a peculiar double function. They

simultaneously represented foreign cultures and gave directions for the compositional

field at home. For example, a 1926 trip to Moravia (in the modern Czech Republic)

piqued Cowell’s interest in folk music as a basis of a new compositional style,130 and in a

resulting article (citation) he employed this sort of hybrid rhetoric. Cowell wrote that

Moravian music included “many effects we have considered to be of recent invention in

‘modern’ music, many things not to be found in any known music new or old, and above

all, a method of procedure of its own.” The functions of this argument were

simultaneously descriptive (Moravian music is like this), prescriptive (modern music

could further develop if it followed it in this direction), and polemical (both are similarly

free of the worst failings of conventional Western music, those being this).

Cowell suggested that Moravian folk musical elements might be taken as a

foundation for a new art music. In a 1929 article titled “Hidden Irish Treasure” (Modern

Music) he similarly argued that

In this age of great harmonic development, it may prove valuable to observe

certain little known modes of melodic usage. A special style of unfamiliar
conception, not to mention actual tunes, may offer the composer the basis of a
new and individual music.131

thinking to be otherwise much evidenced in Cowell’s writings. Other entries on “Music and Musicology,”
“Primitive,” and “Occidental” were written by Charles Seeger, and Helen Roberts.
130
See David Paul, “From American Ethnographer to Cold War Icon: Charles Ives through the Eyes of
Henry and Sidney Cowell,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 59, no. 2 (summer 2006): 399-
458. Paul has argued that Cowell’s description of the possibility for Czech composers to create a new
thoroughly original style based on Moravian folk music matched what he later suggested Ives had
accomplished with New England folk music.

134
 David Paul has pointed out that here Cowell was arguing that folk materials

(“resources”) be transported across borders, and not that they be developed strictly along

national lines (as is associated with the nationalist ideals of Dvorak). I would add that this

was in part because Cowell maintained a conception of music as technology, the

development of which ought not to be limited to national borders as a style might. Here

Cowell was not arguing per se that modernist composers should draw from Irish music so

as to conjure an Irish atmosphere in their works, or in any other way to make explicit

reference to Irish culture (Cowell did do so himself in a number of his early piano

pieces). Rather, his interest was more in trans-cultural technological development.

Western composers, steeped as they were in harmonic technologies, might find it

refreshing to draw from the melodic technologies of Irish music.

In 1929 Cowell gave a concert in Cuba, and in 1931 published an article on the

Cuban son, which alluded to his concept of “the primitive” and also made reference to his

conception of musical resources as various, with different societies possessing different

resources, all of which were open to be “tapped” by composers internationally. Cowell

was interested particularly in sones among Cuban song styles, finding many others to be

“saturated with the most commonplace type of Spanish song,” and even showing “some

alarmingly poor Italian opera influence.”132 Nothing about those songs was really Cuban

“except the words and some minute distinctions of rhythm.” Yet, in the son he found a

music played by Black performers with “a whole set of unique native instruments,”

which were used in greater numbers than “is usual in purely primitive music.” “The

131
Cowell, “Hidden Irish Treasure,” Modern Music 6, no. 4 (May-June 1929): 31.
132
“The ‘Sones’ of Cuba,” Modern Music 8, no. 2 (1931): 45-47.

135
rhythms are indigenous and although the melodies and harmonic outlines are not so

unique, the whole effect of these songs is of a tonal texture utterly distinctive.” His

singular assessment: “Cuban music is really folksong with a barbaric accompaniment.”

Cowell did not define the term “barbaric,” but it would have been understood as

equivalent to “primitive.”133

Cowell also described two Cuban composers “of originality,” Alejandro Caturla and

Amadeo Roldan. Though he had positive things to say about each, he found that neither

had

tapped all the remarkable resources which the folk-music of their country
suggests. These could be utilized to build up a full-blooded, tropical style,
gigantic but unsentimental; diversified, and with less ostinato than is used by
Roldan and Caturla. Perhaps some other as yet unknown composer will come
forward and achieve the wide sweep and glory of rhythm presaged by these
Sones.134 (my italics)

Cowell’s nearly exclusive interest in that which was original (from his perspective) in

the son is indicative of both the relativist and positivist aspects of his thinking. As a

relativist, Cowell was seeking to discover new dimensions of difference that might

disrupt ethnocentrism and counter the hegemonic values of traditional Western art music,

spreading tolerance and opening the creative terrain for modernist composers. As a

positivist, Cowell was seeking to discover original musical materials as resources that

might be added to the totality of scientific knowledge of music’s potentials. Caturla and

133
In the influential evolutionist theories of Lewis Henry Morgan, as set forth in his Ancient Society:
Or, researches in the lines of human progress from savagery through barbarism to civilization (New York:
Henry Holt, 1878), all human societies were situated within one of the three evolutionary stages of
“savagery,” “barbarism,” and “civilization.” “Savagery” was the most primitive of human stages, and the
“barbarism” that followed it was characterized, in part, by the technological development of smelting iron.
There were, according to Morgan, no living “savage” tribes. The postulation of their existence was arrived
at through deductive means: Morgan extrapolated from the evidence he possessed of living cultures that
they must have been preceded by some even more primitive culture. See Martin, “Evolutionizing
Difference II: Lewis Henry Morgan and Ancient Society,” chap. 2 in The Languages.
134
“The ‘Sones’,” 47,

136
Roldan had “tapped” those resources, though not to his full satisfaction.135 It is interesting

that, besides employing a battery of descriptors typical of publications in Modern Music

during this era such as “full-blooded,” “gigantic,” and “unsentimental,” (an image of

enormous power in the synergy of the “modern” and the “primitive,” both dark and

utopian) Cowell identified the full potential of those resources as manifesting in a

“tropical” modernism (neither a specifically Cuban modernism nor an international

modernism). Cowell would not have objected to trans-national tappings of son. He was

not interested in exclusively nationalist forms of musical development. Meanwhile, more

recent concerns about the ethics of appropriating musical materials from other cultures

probably did not occur to him.

In 1933 Cowell edited a collection of essays titled American Composers on American

Music,136 his rationale for which sheds light on his views on nationalism, particularly

American nationalism, at the time. In his introduction he divided the composers currently

working in America into eight groups, and these included those who had moved to the

U.S. from Europe (such as Edgard Varèse from France and Nicolas Slonimsky from

Russia) and those who drew their primary influences from various European traditions

(such as Adolph Weiss and Wallingford Riegger, who drew from the German, and Henry

Eicheim and Virgil Thomson, who drew from the French). Only relatively few of the

composers Cowell mentioned were native-born Americans who developed “indigenous

materials” (and by indigenous materials Cowell did not seem to mean specifically “folk”

135
On Caturla and Rodlán and the subject of Cuban nationalism, see Robin Moore, Nationalizing
Blackness: Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Havana, 1920-1940 (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1997).
136
Henry Cowell, ed, American Composers on American Music, (Stanford University Press, 1933).

137
materials, but quite broadly anything, including the most experimental, dissonant

techniques, that had not been imported from Europe).

All of these classifications aimed to account for the very international, especially

European, nature of American composition. How then might it be meaningful to

assemble all of these figures under the banner of “American” music? Cowell’s answer

was that it was only meaningful as far as it won America its “independence,” freedom

from the compulsion to imitate:

Nationalism in music has no purpose as an aim in itself. Music happily transcends

political and racial boundaries and is good and bad irrespective of the nation in
which it was composed. Independence, however, is stronger than imitation. In the
hands of great men independence may result in products of permanent value.
Imitation cannot be expected to produce such significant achievements. (p. 13)

Cowell felt that, once independence had truly been achieved in all nations, “self-

conscious nationalism will no longer be necessary” (p. 13). A nationalist ideal of the

development of a distinctive national style by drawing upon the nation’s folk materials

did not seem to appeal to him at this time.137 His reference to “permanent value” can be

seen as reflective of his concept of a form a value, perhaps the most important sense of

value at this point in his career, which transcended historical limits, and was valuable by

virtue of its successful exploitation of musical elements and development of resources.

Such value ultimately transcended national boundaries, but could only be hoped to be

137
Hicks, however, describes a nationalistic tone in Cowell’s journal articles in the 1920s: “Despite the
variety of intended audiences and editorial requirements of these journals, Cowell’s prose always
maintained the celebratory, sometimes hyperbolic tone of a press release for American music…. In such
articles Cowell almost never writes about the musicality of the composers or the quality of their
compositions per se, except in an occasional generality, such as applauding the ‘never-ending sparkling
flow’ in Chavez’s music. But he does consistently gauge a composer’s worth by the logic or sheer newness
of his methods. The composers that he championed, Cowell said, ‘are together forming a gigantic
American musical culture,’ which by virtue of its diversity ‘is becoming on of the most interesting the
world has known’” (HCB, 120). Cowell’s interest in emphasizing newness and logic over quality and
musicality may reflect his understanding of the former qualities as being definable in an absolute sense,
while he understood the latter as “conventions,” definable only in historical context.

138
realized within a context of creative independence from limiting foreign models. (In 1932

Cowell wrote, “Public favor comes to those great enough to be independent. Ives is

independent and truly great.”138)

Neo-Primitivism and the Proletariat

That indigenous materials were at this time not interesting to Cowell so much as the

raw materials of distinctive national idioms, but as the raw materials for trans-national

movements, can be seen articulated in his 1933 article “Towards Neo-Primitivism.”139

“Everyone interested in modern music,” he stated, was aware that “primitives” and

modernists had a lot in common. Cowell elaborated on what the similarities between

“primitives” and modernists there already were, and, significantly, pointed out that there

were few commonalities between “primitives” and high-profile modernist composers.

“Primitive” music was simple, while these modernists strove for ever greater complexity.

Only in its increasing rhythmic complexity did their music approximate that of the

“primitive.” Cowell did not make explicit why “primitive” music, if it was so simple,

should inspire progressive composers to become primitivists.

There is at least a clue in Cowell’s reference to the releasing of “primordial

elements.” The counter movement he proposed would be “full blooded and vital.” It

would draw upon “primary music elements,” without resorting to a “supercilious

formalism of a return to the particular style of some past century” (read: neoclassicism).

It would also be based upon all the world’s musics, and therefore it would have a certain

138
“American Composers IX: Charles Ives,” Modern Music 10, no. 1 (November-December 1932): 32.
139
“Towards Neo-Primitivism,” Modern Music 10 (March-April 1933): 149-53.

139
“truth” grounded in universality (as opposed to an ethnocentric claim to truth) that early-

century modernists greatly wished to claim for their projects. In his usual style, Cowell

retroactively declared certain new musical practices as primitivist ones, including the use

of harmony in percussive ways and the use of tone clusters (his own). But he also

cautioned against the casual conception of primitive music as “something wild, confused,

with raucous cries and noisy instruments all bound together by powerful rhythm.” He

remarked that since, as it so happened, this was also the casual conception of modernist

music, it was not surprising that the popular imagination had formed a superficial link

between the two. But really, “the primitive is often soft, melodious and soothing—and

modern music is, after all, a highly organized, involved and sophisticated art.”140

Cowell took advantage of a popular image of the physicality and primalness of

certain non-Western practices, and, pointing to the difference between such practices and

those of high-brow Western Europeans, he painted the latter as contrastingly deflated and

effete, overly artful, and lacking in physicality. In this he singled out the supposed

primitivist Stravinsky, whose influence from the “primitive” he called “comparatively

slight and highly sublimated.” He also rejected both the general “over-complexity of the

earlier modern music” and the “sentimentality and pomp of later romantic music” in

favor of, respectively, the simpler values of “experiment” and “feeling” that would

characterize his primitivism. And, as noted, he rejected neoclassicism’s “supercilious

formalism” but not the use of “primary musical elements,” by which he referred to a

singable melody with little harmonic support and simple percussive accompaniment.

Cowell also identified as “primitive” the use of sliding tones, of percussive chords (rather

than chords “exploited” in a “harmonic connection”), and of tone clusters.

140
“Towards Neo-Primitivism,” 149-150.

140
 Such rhetoric linking the progressive American composers and “primitives” and

dichotomizing the two from the Western Europeans (which Cowell here associated with

the fad of neoclassicism, implying that it epitomized the failings of the bourgeoisie)

effected an ironic (though, as I discuss in the Chapter on McPhee, fully standard within

Cowell’s milieu) jumbling of more commonplace dichotomizations of civilized

EuroAmerican culture and the culture of savages, of masculine and feminine (the most

“civilized” European composers now became effete), and of high and low, all of which

were twists upon more dominant demarcations of Western and non-Western.

Cowell published these statements on neo-primitivism in Modern Music, in which

dichotomizations of Europe and America were pervasive (as discussed in the Chapter on

McPhee); as such in noting that Western Europeans did not make good primitivists he

was claiming primitivism as a national movement for America by default. He did not,

however, regard it as exclusively an American endeavor. Soviets too had developed

primitivist music of interest. It was, in fact, music composed for proletarian choruses that

Cowell found to have the most authentic claim to affinity with “primitive” music.

Cowell’s list of the most primitivist composers included Eastern Europeans, Americans,

and Hans Eisler of Germany, the only Western European.

Cowell was at this time involved with the New York Composers Collective, a group

with unofficial links to the Communist Party that was dedicated to the production of mass

songs.141 In the same year that he wrote “Towards Neo-Primitivism” he and Seeger

141
On the Composers’ Collective see for instance Barbara Zuck, A History of Musical Americanism
Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1980), and Carol Oja, “Composer with a Conscience: Elie
Siegmester in Profile,” American Music 6, no. 2 (Summer 1988): 158-80, and “”Marc Blitzstein’s ‘The
Cradle Will Rock’ and Mass-Song Style of the 1930s,” The Musical Quarterly 73, no. 4 (1989): 445-475,
and Catherine Parsons Smith, “’Harlem Renaissance Man’ Revisited: The Politics of Race and Class in
William Grant Still’s Late Career,” American Music 15, no. 3 (Autumn 1997): 381-406, and David King

141
offered a seminar for the Collective titled “Historical and Theoretical Factors in the

Composing of Workers’ Songs,” from which was produced the Workers Song Book 1.

Herein lies another key to understanding the appeal of primitivism to Cowell. The

Collective was facing philosophical challenges; for Seeger, the frustration of trying to

create an appropriately proletarian music led to a reevaluation of his views on musical

value, and was the beginning of his interest in folk song. Seeger’s dilemma was that what

he saw as radical music—involving the systematic inversion of conventions, such as

those of consonance and dissonance, exclusively considered within the context of “’Good

Music’, capital G, capital M,”142—proved distasteful to the masses and useless in

communal music-making. His political and musical progressivism, which until that point

he had understood as one, became incompatible.

For Cowell there was no such dilemma.143 He had already shed the notion that the

most progressive music was the one that systematically overturned all convention: he had

come to see conventions as plural, and in his conception the most salient sort of progress

would be the widening of tolerance for the conventions of others. Therefore what was

Dunaway, “Unsung Songs of Protest: The Composers Collective of New York,” New York Folklore 5, nos.
1-2 (1979): 1-19, and “Charles Seeger and Carl Sands: The Composers’ Collective Years,”
Ethnomusicology 24, no. 2 (1980): 159-168.
142
Seeger, interview by David K. Dunaway, in “Charles Seeger and Carl Sands: The Composers’
Collective Years,” Ethnomusicology 24, no. 2 (1980): 162. Seeger described his problematic conception of
revolutionary music: “Music doesn’t take any cognizance of the dichotomy between what is revolutionary
and what is not revolutionary. To change musical technique is not revolutionary, outside of music. I
considered myself a musical revolutionist simply by reversing old technical devices, such as the preparation
of consonance. Instead of preparing a dissonance and resolving a dissonance, I turned it upside down, and I
prepared a consonance. My first species of counterpoint was all dissonance. Well, that was musically
revolutionary, but it had no significance socially. And it wasn’t revolutionary musically; it was simply a
change, a stunt I could do” (p. 167).
143
The members of the Collective had various strategies for creating an appropriately proletarian
music. Seeger recalled in his 1976 interview with Dunaway that the other members of the collective had no
knowledge of and no interest in anything other than concert music. This was not true of Cowell. Also Marc
Blitztein was becoming interested in jazz and popular song during his years in the Collective.

142
progressive could be the unconventional implementation of the conventions of others.

Primitivism offered a solution whereby music could be both fully progressive and

because of its simple nature and peculiar conventionalism ideally suited for use by the

proletariat. Though Cowell did not explicitly say so, it is likely that in envisioning an

evolutionary logic by which particular forms of social organization and particular musical

styles could be seen to consistently correspond throughout history he would have

regarded the exclusive use of “primitive” musical elements as effecting a return to pre-

capitalist social formations. What Cowell would have really wanted musically and

socially was not a return, but a forward progression that drew wisdom from “the

primitive.”

Cowell cautioned that “primitives” should not be “lumped into one group.” This

statement may appear odd in the context of his larger argument that there may be a

“primitive” basis of new music; as such it would indeed follow that there is such a thing

as a “primitive” type of music. He was not being contradictory. By Cowell’s

understanding of culture, he could caution that there was great variety to “primitives and

their tribes” while still maintaining that they formed a cohesive category set apart from

the also varied yet cohesive “cultivated” peoples and their “nations.” Though there was

certainly variation among “primitive” musics, there were also many commonalities:

Most of it is sung to the accompaniment of percussion; melody and rhythm are

thus the main elements. Where several different voices sing together they are
either in unison or heterophonic, making a free polyphony in which each part is
quite independent except that it must come out with the others in the end. Further,
nearly all primitive music has rapid rhythmical changes, syncopations,
polyrhythms and cross-rhythms. In the melody there may be a wide range of
different sorts of pitch curves as well as straight lines of sound. The tones either
wabble back and forth or slide up or down—not carelessly, but as a vital part of
the musical scheme.144

143
“Primitives” were people who shared a particular stage of cultural evolution, and it was

therefore inevitable that they would share many practices, such as music and social

organization.

“Primitives,” Dance, and Percussion

In 1934 Cowell published an article titled “How Relate Music and Dance?” that

further explained the nature of “primitive” music. In all cases “primitives” used dance

and percussive music together.

Irrespective of geographical location, almost every primitive tribe in the world

performs ceremonials which utilize dance and sound together…. The sound is, of
course, not “interpreted” by the dancers. Yet it would seem that the sound is the
first step toward inducing the proper rhythmical urge which finally bursts into
bodily expression. For in all ceremonials the drums begin beating first. The
dancers begin after the atmosphere has been surcharged with rhythmical impulse
by the drums, and often also after singing has begun. In the most primitive places
the dancers apparently burst into movement as the surrounding waves of rhythm
beat in on them irresistibly.145

And, differentiable from these “most primitive” dances—in which the percussion

would swell, eventually taking hold of the body of the dancer from within and unleashing

its sensuous energy in an unplanned and unpredictable explosion of movement—there

were also dances of “higher primitive civilization,” in which there was some level of

planning, the dance beginning after a set number of beats. Among “primitives” there was

further variety in all this interaction of percussion and movement: in some cases non-

dancing members of the tribe would sing; in other cases the dancers themselves would

sing, or would play percussion instruments, or (in the South Seas) even perform the entire

144
“Towards Neo-Primitivism,” 152.
145
“How Relate,” 52.

144
role of the percussion through clapping. But in all cases there was dancing and

percussion, and in all cases the percussion began and the dancing followed. “Primitive”

societies shared these features that separated them from “cultivated” societies. In

“Primitive” music and dance it was also inevitable that the role of conductor would be

held by the principal percussionist, who would lead by giving all players and dancers the

beat. This practice “still holds in the cultivated music of the Orient”: “The wood-block

and gong player conducts the movement of a Chinese orchestra in operatic performances

today.” Furthermore, “The same type of beats are still preserved by our symphonic

conductors, and the Chinese orchestra is where they originated” (p. 52).

It is unclear in what sense Cowell spoke of these practices “still” holding in Chinese

and Western music: did he mean that there was direct cultural influence from one

civilization to another, or did he in fact mean that these commonalities were reflective not

of a history of cultural contact but of various societies’ retention of practices of more

primitive phases along civilization’s (singular) inevitable line of development (the very

latest phase of which being the very modernists of Cowell’s affiliation)? Furthermore, it

is unclear on what Cowell based his descriptions of “primitive” music and dance, since

he made only vague references to “higher” and “lower” primitives, not to the

particularities of any geographically located people. It is likely that his ideas about

“primitives” were at least in part developed by logical extrapolation into a totalizing

system, in which “lower primitives” represented the far extreme of a continuum. If the

“lower primitive’s” dancing was unplanned and physically inspired by rhythm, it was

only so because the most cultivated tradition (that of Cowell’s own milieu) so strongly

stressed planning and rationality. If to the 21st-century reader this seems to be an

145
illegitimate method of developing representations of others, it should be noted that the

social sciences in Cowell’s time were replete with similar theories about “primitives,”

many of which were very high profile.

These observations were intended to settle questions about the relationship of music

and dance in contemporary American choreography, specifically whether dance should

be choreographed so as to “interpret” the music. Cowell noted that recent choreography

practice was to sever the dance completely from the music, leaving them more-or-less

unrelated, so as to avoid having the dance “interpret” the music and become a mere

servant to it. Cowell’s response was that, in examination of primitive practices, it was

clear that there might be a kinetic connection between dance and music whereby the

music would inspire the body of the dancer into motion. The “primitive” dance was not in

such cases “interpreting” the music, because in actuality there were no correspondences

between the semantic content of the music and dance, nor were there any

correspondences between the formal plan of the music and dance.

I see no reason why a dancer should be afraid that he or she will be accused of
being “interpretive” (this now being in great disrepute) if he bases the dance on
some definite rhythmical flow, and this flow is given forth through the sound of
instruments, or other sonal means. If he does so he is in step with the practice of
primitives whose art of the dance is the most strongly ingrained of any which
exists in the world.146

Cowell spoke of “primitive” dance being “strongly ingrained” as if this had been

empirically observed. Whatever the extent of his experience observing all those dances

that he characterized as “primitive” and determining their physiological “ingrainment” in

each “primitive” person, the categorization of a culture as “primitive” meant that any of

its practices could be taken, a priori and whatever their actual features, as humanly

146
“How Relate,” 52.

146
authentic and as non-reflected, or “ingrained.” It was because of this that “primitives”

offered the surest illustration of “how relate music and dance.” More specifically, the

“primitive” might offer a guide to modern dance because “primitive” art was—by its very

essence and a priori as “primitive”—non-referential and unplanned. The way that Cowell

here constructed and invoked the “primitive” in order to influence contemporary

aesthetics with a special form of authority was closely paralleled with McPhee’s

statements about Balinese music being “absolute,” published in Modern Music the

following year.

In invoking the authority of “the primitive” to direct the development of modern

music and dance, Cowell was not advocating a full return to “the primitive” per se. He in

fact complained about recent projects that used only percussion with dance (in itself a

“fundamental and normal relationship”), saying that they had “simply gone back to the

primitive, adding little or nothing to the connection between the dancer and the beats,

usually less rather than more interest and varied than among primitive peoples.”147

Cowell rather advocated rediscovering the “primitive” bases of music and dance so as to

move forward from there. The task of the composer and the dancer was still to embrace

experiment and development. In the 1940 article “Drums Along the Pacific” he would

offer further clues as to what the proper relationship between the “primitive” and

innovative aspects of composition ought to be. When writing music for percussion, he

cautioned that there was not only a danger of becoming too “primitive,” but also

becoming blindly innovative and disconnected from the essential bases of percussive

music in practice:

147
“How Relate,” 52.

147
 Percussion music is not all alike, nor is it all related to one school of music. The
approach of the Italian futurists was in essence artificial, the basic idea being to
create, ready-made and without gradual development, or experience with the
instruments, a highly complex and sophisticated art-form. Varèse’s music was the
culmination of this tendency.148

According to Cowell there were two current groups of composers who were

combining the “primitive” and innovative aspects of successful composition in the

percussion medium. First, there were the Cuban composers, who “create from direct

experience; they are in close contact with the native Afro-Cuban music which is largely

based on enticing primitive percussion rhythms.” He had already discussed this group in

his 1931 article on son. Second, there was a new group: “Our newest Pacific coast

group—Cage, Green, Harrison, and Strang—have also developed their interest naturally,

as composers for the modern concert dance” (p. 48). “Natural” involvement with

percussion thus meant either being in contact with percussion’s roots in a living

“primitive” culture, or writing music for dance, which was percussion’s natural role to

accompany (or, more precisely, to induce).

“The Nature of Melody”

Cowell’s second treatise, which he finished in late 1937 while in prison,149 continued

the experimentalist theories and methods of New Music Resources. This new work, The

Nature of Melody, was an exploration of potentials of the “melodic element” of music via

148
“Drums Along the Pacific,” Modern Music 18, no. 1 (November-December 1940): 48.
149
Cowell served four years in prison after being convicted of having sex with a 17-year-old male. See
Michael Hicks, “The Imprisonment of Henry Cowell,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 44,
no. 1 (Spring 1991): 92-119. Also on the accusation, proceedings, and imprisonment and on the effects of
all these on Cowell’s career, see HCB, 134-144.

148
logical processes. It was Cowell’s stated goal to break apart the so-called “musical

fundamentals” (he applied his own quotation marks to this term) as conventionally

taught, and to build in their place a new music theory which would make the most basic

features of music—objectively observable and logically accessible—its bases: “Learning

to read the notes is essential to be sure; but what about learning something of the nature

of the notes which are to be read?” (NOM, I: 9). To this end Cowell recommended, for

instance, that a system of neums be reinstated for instruction on melody, the most basic

three of which would designate upward motion, downward motion, and non-motion.

From this very simple starting point, Cowell suggested that an entire system could be

elaborated with which to understand all “melody,” an “element” that he implied as

immanent to all music and transcendent of culture.150

In a manner similar to that of New Music Resources this treatise was not only a

proposal for a systematic and integrated approach to the study of all music, but was at the

same time, through evolutionist assumptions, a proposal for a systematic and integrated

study of the history of music, encompassing all times and with living non-Western

cultures corresponding to historical periods of Western music. This was not laid out as

the central purpose of the book. Rather Cowell made occasional references to the music

of various historical periods and non-Western cultures as illustrations of his logically

built arguments. These attributions were generally to vague traditions (e.g. “primitive,”

“Oriental,” “Christian”) and mostly appeared without evidence. Cowell would not have

150
Cowell’s discussion of units of melody focused more upon motives than neums. Gann has called
Cowell’s treatment of the subject “a disappointment,” in part because “Cowell appears to assume motivic
development is the only proper method for building up a melody, a strangely Eurocentric view for a
pioneering ethnomusicologist. (This idea, first appearing in Cowell’s writing at this point, becomes a
strange idée fixe, marring his future analyses of Ives and other composers.)” See Gann, “Subversive
Prophet,” 205.

149
understood his speaking of “primitives” in generalized terms as sloppy. By his

understanding, that which he observed “is true of primitive tribes of the same degree of

development irrespective of what part of the Globe they are from” (NOM, II: 2). For

instance, Cowell stated authoritatively that “primitive” song and speech were more-or-

less indistinguishable, and that with increasing “cultivation” came increasing distinction

between the two modes of vocal production:

[Among primitives] many sounds are used in speech which have no other
purpose than to express feelings in terms of sound; such sounds may not have any
meaning as words. Some such sounds are still left in our own speech, but they are
comparatively rare. The primitives make very frequent use of them. On the other
hand, saying the same words over again on different pitches, or repeating them
rhythmically or in sequence are devices often used by primitives to indicate a
certain meaning; while among more cultivated peoples, this is almost never a part
of speech. The primitive man will often break from speech into song, and back
again unaware that he has entered two different fields. The stronger the feeling
concerning what he is relating, the greater his tendency to marshal the forces of
rhythm and changing pitch to aid him in expression. Remnants of this may be
observed in the preaching in “revival” meetings. (NOM, II: 1-2)

Cowell’s other statements about “primitives” included that the concept of scale was

foreign to them: a “primitive melody” was simply a successions of intervals without

reference to an abstracted “scale.” In another case, seemingly in contradiction, Cowell

described one “primitive scale” as containing the octave and the fifth, plus two more

tones precisely in between each of those intervals (yielding C, E-half-flat, G, and B-half-

flat). Such contradictions may have been the result of Cowell’s various ideas about

“primitives” having been developed in isolation, each as part of a separate logical

problem, in which “the primitive” was constructed to represent the far end of a

continuum of practices. It is difficult to assess Cowell’s methods of inquiry, because, as

stated, most of this authoritatively spoken knowledge about “primitives” was offered

without citation to other authors and without direct reference to any particular “primitive”

150
person or people. It should be mentioned that, as Cowell was in jail at the time that he

wrote this book, he might not have had access to the materials that informed his study,

and therefore would have been forced into stating his arguments in vague, generalized

language. Nevertheless, the style of this treatise is not dissimilar to that of his other

publications.

Cowell here maintained his views on the separability of conventional and inherent

aspects of music, which he had previously discussed in the 1930 introduction to New

Music Resources. Yet, in this later treatise he placed new emphasis on the conventional

aspect, encouraging composition students to be aware that much of music’s interest,

specifically its capacity to convey meaning, came through play with convention (in this

respect music could be differentiated from language, which was entirely dependent on the

conventionality of sounds). “The Student should become able, as far as possible, to

decide what values in music are inherent in its own materials, and which are of value

because they are established conventions” (NOM, III: 1). Compositions could be written

without convention but the student should be advised of the effect of music without

standard meaning upon the listener. “Part of the appeal and value of music then, lies in

inherent factors, which remain the same in all music, and another part is concerned with

the language of a certain musical procedure, which differs in each musical system, and to

a more limited extent in styles within a single systems (sic)” (NOM, III: 1). Music with

inherent interest could be directed at any audience, whereas music of convention could

only be of interest to a particular audience, and the composer would have to be quite

careful in considering the likely auditory background of his listener. Cowell did not see

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the listener as bringing his/her auditory history to bear upon the entire musical

experience, only on this particular dimension of it designated as “convention.”

In one application of this argument, Cowell stated that the human body was

predisposed to respond to conjunct melodies. Psychologists had discovered that as people

listened to a melody they would flex and unflex their vocal chords as if singing it. If the

melody became very disjunct, most listeners would no longer be able to follow it and

would stop flexing their vocal chords. The point was that, for a melody to have wide

appeal, the composer would have to be prepared to write conjunctly, or else only to

present his/her work to a “cultivated” audience. While Cowell was by no means rejecting

experimental, challenging compositional styles, conventionalism was becoming

important to him by its very nature as convention (a relativist notion), as well as by its

capacity to indicate which sorts of music were most immutably human (NOM, II: 3-4).

Note that “cultivated” was the word that Cowell uses in antithesis to “primitive.” His

understanding of the shifting tastes and conventions of music was to some extent

integrated with his evolutionist views. In other words, tastes were variable among

different groups, but these shifts to some extent occurred along predictable and inevitable

lines of historical development. Rules then ought to be contingent to conventions, which

were appropriate to one’s particular phase of historical development. Rules of a past age

were not bad in and of themselves, but blind devotion to the rules of another age was

inappropriate. Some rules, still maintained in conventional harmony, simply harkened

back to particularities of historical change, and had no meaning at all in the present day.

Along these lines, Cowell argued that though there had once been significance to the

injunction against the use of parallel fifths, there was no longer any sense to it:

152
 This [rule] originated at a time in early medieval Europe when music was just
emerging from a period in which consecutive fifths were required at all times,
until everyone became bored and disgusted with them (in organum). So the rule
required that they should not be consecutive—meaning at first, probably, that
something should be inserted between them, it being expected that every other
interval would be a fifth. This rule has been retained, although no one would be
bored by consecutive fifths now, since the period in which they were so much
used is happily past. Every leading composer has shown how consecutive fifths
may be used to the greatest musical advantage. Science shows that through the
second overtone, which can plainly be heard, consecutive fifths are obtained with
every tonal succession; if there is anything wrong with them all music would have
to be eliminated, since they occur, willy-nilly! (NOM, I: 12)

Much of The Nature of Melody reads as an argument with the conventional

instruction of music theory and composition, which Cowell again and again accused of

ignorance, rigidity, lack of imagination, and absolutism. In this way, the treatise not only

set out to represent the “nature” of melody as a universal phenomenon, but also stood as a

representation of the state of contemporary music instruction in the West (Cowell painted

the dimmest picture if it). He pleaded with educators to acknowledge that there was a

great deal of variability to “good” and “bad” in terms of melody, and that their absolutist

assessments of quality were rarely made with sufficient knowledge of the whole melodic

field. Conventionally, harmony was really the only element of music that was studied at

all, and its science was faulty:

There are two main reasons why the study of harmony is generally
unsatisfactory. One is that the study has not been made into a scientific and
reasonable exposition of the subject of harmony. It is a leftover from the time
when the aim was not to know facts about harmony, but to know the conventions
of “good taste” as recommended by famous and skilled musicians.
The second reason is that harmony is only one of several musical elements.
Even a very excellent knowledge of harmony would be sure to leave a great deal
about the other important elements in doubt. Harmony is a less fundamental
element than rhythm and melody. Rhythm and melody were employed for no one
knows how many years—thousands, certainly—before anything that could be
called harmony became a part of musical art; and even today, all the music of the
world employs melody and rhythm, whereas harmony as an art is used only in the

153
 music of the European system, or music which has been adapted to the principles
of that system. (NOM, I: 7-8)

Harmony was, in fact, not a particularly fundamental musical element, but was a

“somewhat complex flowering of an already highly developed musical growth.” That

latter growth was melody, and it would therefore be necessary, prior to any but a

superficial study of harmony, to develop a scientific study of melody. Such a study was

of course what Cowell’s treatise represented. He proceeded with the understanding that

there was a single, if highly complex, melodic field the world over, which it was his aim

in the book to map. The intention of this mapping was to challenge what he saw as small-

mindedness of the common Western musical mind with the presentation of a much

broader and ultimately more logically compelling conception of the element of melody as

a world phenomenon.

What I most wish to stress is that Cowell’s challenge to limitedness and absolutism

was built upon a style of inquiry that was ultimately positivist, even if in its mood it was

reminiscent of cultural relativist critiques. The world of melody was much bigger than the

small-minded conception of it that he argued with, but it was possible to at least move

toward a full accounting of it as it “really was.” The limited capacity of a listener to

accept musics that were unfamiliar to him was to a great extent a failure to recognize the

“inherent values” of that music that would be evident to a listener who was already

familiar with it. Cultural differences were to be understood as differences of experience

within and differences of perspective upon a musical field which was ultimately unitary,

and which, to a scientist like Cowell, could theoretically be known objectively and in its

entirety. And, as stated, Cowell’s approach to knowing this field was as much a matter of

logical deduction as it was of empirical discovery.

154
 It should be noted that, while one of Cowell’s purposes in writing The Nature of

Melody was to contradict the naïve idea that the Western major and minor were the only

two scales, and to introduce the possibility of new vistas of scales that would represent

the dissolution of certain false absolutes, the book’s systematic and deductive methods

necessitated the employ of a concept of scale with it’s own absolutes, purportedly

meaningful to all melodic practices of the world. It was only with these presupposed

bases of a universal concept of scale that Cowell could state, “It is the aim here…to

indicate what fields in scale construction have been neglected in our music” (NOM, III:

54). The implication was that there was a single worldwide field of scale production, and

that all scales, with their various forms of development, exhibited the same fundamental

scalar properties.

Joseph Yasser

Nancy Yunhua Rao has demonstrated that this treatise was the child of Cowell’s

affiliation with the New York Musicological Society, the members of which included

Charles Seeger, Nicolas Slonimsky (a guest member), Joseph Schillinger, and Joseph

Yasser. Infamously, the members did not include Ruth Crawford, on whom because she

was a woman the doors of the inaugural meeting had literally been shut (she was later

allowed to attend as a “guest”). As Rao shows, there was a great deal of overlap in the

members’ (and “guests’”) concerns, with two general tendencies of the group significant

to Cowell’s book: systemization and exoticism. Like Cowell, Yasser, Schillinger, and

Slonimsky also developed theories of scale by methods that were, on the one hand,

logical and systematic—Slonimsky’s relentless method yielded 1,330 scale patterns(!)—

155
and, on the other hand, inductive in their development of theory based on study of non-

Western musics (or at least in the correlation of knowledge, arrived at deductively, with a

variety of documented musical practices). These projects also tended to be radical in their

critique of conventional Western music theory, for instance of the concept of a scale that

falls within the octave limit and is reproducible at the octave level.151

Joseph Yasser (1893-1981) had emigrated from Russia in 1923, and was one of the

founding members of the New York Musicological Society.152 His work can be taken as a

key to the problems inherent in the method they shared of developing knowledge of

151
While Nancy Yunhua Rao (“American Compositional Theory in the 1930s: Scale and Exoticism in
‘The Nature of Melody’ by Henry Cowell,” The Musical Quarterly 85, no. 4 [Summer 2001]: 595-640) has
persuasively argued for the interconnectedness of the views of the members of the New York
Musicological Society, she sees a qualitative difference between Cowell’s and the others’ interests in non-
Western musics. She finds that whereas Seeger and Yasser were interested in non-Western musics as
“others”—of value, in one way or another, because of their differentiability from Western music—Cowell
viewed non-Western musics as part of a broadly defined American tapestry. She notes that Seeger’s interest
in the other was as a foil for the hegemony for Western culture (as traditions more cultivated in terms of
taste), and that Yasser’s interest was in fitting musical others into evolutionist schemes. In contrast, she
finds that Cowell’s “reference to the Orient is of a piece with his desire to create a distinctively American
(modernist) voice, precisely because the Orient is part of America” (626). Furthermore, “much of what
would be termed an ‘Eastern’ or ‘oriental’ sound was native to Cowell’s musical imagination” (625-26).
Rao quotes Cowell:
“As a child I grew up in San Francisco, living near the Chinese and Japanese districts. Among
other music which I heard and sang was included many Chinese and Japanese tunes from my
playmates, and I was taken to hear a Chinese opera before I heard a European one, although I went at
this time to hear concerts of string quartets, etc. As a result, Oriental music has never seemed strange
to me, and I have often in composing thought quite naturally of themes in Oriental modes, or in which
Oriental and Occidental elements are integrated. Later I studied the music of North India with a
Bengali musician, and the music of Java with a Javanese” (Henry Cowell, “Influence of Oriental
Music on American Composers,” unpublished manuscript quoted in Rao, “American Compositional”
625).
(To this quote Timothy Taylor has responded: “Cowell’s strategy, however, is a familiar one. People
who have appropriated, quoted, borrowed music from other cultures frequently employ discourses of long-
time knowledge of that music as a way of inoculating themselves against charges of appropriation”
[Beyond Exoticism, 237].) Though I agree with Rao that Cowell encouraged the incorporation of non-
Western musical materials into both international and American modernist styles, what I am attempting to
demonstrate in this chapter is that Cowell shared in what she has shown to be Seeger’s relativist and
Yasser’s evolutionist thinking. All of these interests are evidenced in Cowell’s writings and were mutually
confirming. Rao’s incisive observation of Seeger and Yasser, that “Their Orients are undeniably shaped by
their particular inquiries,” applies to Cowell’s multifaceted Orient as well.
152
See Isael J. Katz, “Yasser, Joseph,” Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed 9/6/2008),
<http://www.grovemusic.com.libproxy.lib.unc.edu>.

156
music and difference (which involved research into musical practices from around the

world, the development of musical theories through logical deduction, and the fitting

together of the two). Yasser was concerned with developing a theory of the evolutionary

development of scales worldwide. He understood there to be a logic by which tonality

had progressed through history that would enable him both to place any given culture

within this scheme of progression and also, by extension, to predict how tonality would

develop in the future. He found that the diatonic scale, with its seven regular and five

auxiliary tones, had evolved out of the pentatonic scale, with its two auxiliary tones. The

next phase in the evolution of tonality would be a twelve-tone scale with seven auxiliary

tones.

Because Yasser found that there was a logical development to melody and harmony,

that melody in one part of the world might be seen as a precursor to melody in another,

he took the position that it was more important to understand any given melodic practice

within the total logic of the evolutionary scheme than according to the theories of its

practitioners. It could therefore be said that the pentatonic scale was not “the exclusive

musical appanage of a given nation or group of nations or even of an entire race, but

simply represents a certain stage of the musical development of mankind in general,”153

and that Gregorian plainchant represented roughly the same stage. Terminology derived

from one could be used in discussion of the other. He applied the term pien-tones,

borrowed from Chinese music, to Gregorian chant, with the understanding that the term

was relevant for theoretical discussions of both because the two traditions were

evolutionarily equivalent.154

153
Joseph Yasser, A Theory of Evolving Tonality (New York: Da Capo Press, 1932), 5.

157
 Meanwhile, he claimed that “the Far-Eastern nations [never] possessed a correctly

evolved theory of music which would aid them in the exploitation of the intrinsic

resources of [their own] infra-diatonic scale” (my emphasis).155 (Yasser’s term “Infra-

diatonic scale” meant “diatonic scale of a lower order”: it was the five-tone scale with

two auxiliary tones, a smaller and less evolved version of the Western diatonic scale’s

seven-tones with five auxiliary tones). Since Far Eastern theory was inadequate, the

“logical development of what is potentially involved in this material” became the subject

of one chapter of Yasser’s treatise. To Yasser, the theoretical implications of most of the

world’s music were beyond the reach of those who did not have access to his scientific,

evolutionist “big picture,” and even their musical practices could be criticized for not

conforming to its logic. It was the music, and not the scheme that purported to understand

its “resources” (conceived of as transcendent of the musicians’ use of them), that was

wrong.

It is very unlikely that statements of such arrogance would have been articulated by

Cowell, and yet it is one logical outcome of a method of inquiry that was not unlike his

own. (I imagine that Cowell would have avoided drawing such a conclusion, but would

not have objected to the thought process by which it was drawn.) In pursuing a positivist

mode of musical discovery and analysis while holding that certain cultures’ musical

practices could be seen as exemplars of that which had been derived deductively, Cowell

also left open the possibility that a gap might become apparent between a logically drawn

theory and a given cultural practice. This could lead to the “discovery” that the practice

154
Joseph Yasser, Medieval Quartal Harmony: A Plea for Restoration (New York: American Library
of Musicology, 1938).
155
Yasser, A Theory, 300.

158
was in some sense wrong, either misunderstood or improperly practiced by its own

practitioners. Cowell in fact did occasionally articulate such a view in regard to one

particular culture, that its members did not understand their own music. That was

Western culture, as seen for instance in the introduction to New Musical Resources,

where Cowell asserted that harmony (the special invention of the West) had a scientific

basis apart from its usual construal in ordinary harmony instruction. It was only Cowell’s

concept of a conventional aspect of music, which ran separately from the scientific

aspect, that saved the West from an accusation of musical malpractice.

Otherwise, the tension between deductive and inductive aspects of Cowell’s project

becomes evident at points where he remarked that possible features of melody that had

been “discovered” through deductive processes were not to be found among the world’s

peoples, and thus had no practical value. Rao has suggested that such moments are the

result of “two contradictory tendencies”: “On the one hand, Cowell eagerly embraces the

new scales; on the other hand, he relies heavily on convention to validate these new

scales, either referring to the diatonic system, or alluding to the new scales’ origin in

another culture, or emphasizing their inherent logic. Paradoxically, the newer the territory

that he explores, the more he leans on convention.”156 This tendency to view evidence

from living cultural practice as the validation for experiment (deduction) was more a

feature of this later phase of Cowell’s experimentalism. In New Musical Resources, by

contrast, he had stated that it was not important whether the materials that he had

developed logically were in actual use: “The very fact that such materials are built on the

156
Rao, “American Compositional,” 611. The “new scales” that Rao refers to are those built
deductively, such as “the six-tone scale (with unequal intervals), the eight- and nine-tone scales, the ten-
and eleven-tone scales, the overtone scale, and finally the quarter-tone scale.”

159
overtone series….shows that they probably have potential musical use and value.” At that

time, Cowell had argued confidently that if many of the resources he presented had not

yet been used, that fact only made “the field which is opened all the richer” (NMR, ix),

for now came the opportunity for composers of new music to use them.

The increased importance Cowell placed on conventions (understood as plural) for

delimiting the radical possibilities of experiment might be taken as evidence of a growing

conservatism. Yet, such a label as “conservatism,” as with so many others, attaches

awkwardly to Cowell. His increasing “conservatism” was characterized, not by nostalgia

or a return to the comfort of a simpler absolutism, but in an increasing respect for the

plural nature of values. This meant that the conventionality his compositions increasingly

exhibited (e.g. writing symphonies) was motivated by a deepening of the relativistic side

of his views, and a diminishment of the importance of absolute values that had motivated

his earlier, more radical tastes.157 This shift was seen in the 1940 discussion of new music

for percussion, “Drums Along the Pacific.” There Cowell found, on the one hand, that

experiment was still viable and valuable. Percussion could still be viewed as a new and

exciting field, and it could still be understood that the potentials of elements lay latent

within them, waiting to be discovered and converted into useful resources:

The string quartet may at times be quite boring as a combination of instruments.

Percussion alone may prove monotonous, but it is less apt to, because it is still in
a state of experiment. New tones and rhythms are constantly being discovered.
When the young experimenters have succeeded in fully exploring the field, there

157
Commentators have often described post-prison Cowell as conservative, conventional, and
increasingly timid as a public figure. Gann remarks that his “publishing activities never really ceased, even
while eh was in San Quentin…, however, [his role] was no longer so much as a theorist and prophet as a
commentator and apologist.” See Gann, “Subversive Prophet,” 195. Gann also remarks that after “his term
of imprisonment, Cowell’s articles become milder in tone, more concerned with theoretical soundness, less
direct in their attack on opposing schools of composition. Some such mellowing, of course, takes place in
the writing and attitudes of any artist. Here, though, the change is sudden and pervasive, reflecting not so
much changes in Cowell’s personal convictions as a descent in his public standing” (p. 190).

160
 will still remain the untried possibilities of combining these results with the
better-known resources of the full orchestra.158

But, on the other hand, as seen in Cowell’s critique of the Italian Futurists and Varèse,

pure experimental development of musical resources could yield results that were

“artificial.” For Cowell it was becoming clear that the legitimacy of resources discovered

through experiment would have to be checked anthropologically (i.e. through discovery

of their presence in living cultures).

The United Quartet

If at the time of writing The Nature of Melody Cowell was becoming more interested

in the conventional, variable dimension of music, he was also expressing interest in the

unity among all peoples. His student Harrison much later recalled a series of

conversations they had at the time; while in prison, Cowell spoke about his United

Quartet and the deep unity that he believed connected all humans:

He once told me that it was there [Redwood City Jail] that he wrote his beautiful
United Quartet (1936, L522) which so handsomely brings together musical ideas
from, or certainly suitable to, many musical cultures. Once, when I visited him in
San Quentin Prison, he said something which revealed his ecumenical outlook. I
had written a string quartet in which I had composed for the sounds of the body of
the instrument as well as the strings. I had not known that he had done that too,
and he told me how we were all part of an ocean of intelligence over which there
was (of course) a surface tension rather like a thin rubber sheet, and that (here he
used his index fingers) one would rise up over here and another would rise up
over there, and they would look across at one another as though separate, but that
they were all the time of one nature underneath.159

158
“Drums Along the Pacific,” 49.
159
Harrison, 1995, in The Whole Wide World of Music: A Henry Cowell Symposium, edited by David
Nichols (Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association, 1997), 166-67.

161
 Harrison’s account indicates that Cowell’s sense of clarity about human unity was not

entirely dependent upon analysis; yet, even if Cowell’s case for universalism was a

spiritual one, it was also indeed grounded in the analyses of The Nature of Melody. That

the United Quartet (Quartet No. 4) based its claim to universality on the same logically

derived findings laid out in that treatise is evidenced in Cowell’s notes to the score, in

which he remarked that this “attempt toward a more universal musical style” was “unique

in form, style and content,” and yet “easy to understand because of its use of fundamental

elements as a basis... (emphasis mine).”160 By basing a composition on “fundamental

elements” drawn from various of the world’s “peoples” (“elements” that he had imputed

upon those “peoples” in the first place), Cowell could make this special claim to

universality. The “inherent,” “non-conventional” aspects of music were understandable to

anyone, anywhere, and Cowell ensured universal comprehension by ample repetitions of

the materials.

This was one solution to a persistent problem facing composers in the 1930s. By his

very original procedure Cowell ingeniously satisfied both the demand of innovation

required in his own modernist milieu (despite the work’s theoretic universality, it was

only within the small world of new music that the work would receive attention) and that

of accessibility. Again and again he iterated this point: the work was innovative in spite

of being simple because the primary resources it drew upon were not merely those of the

European tradition, but those of the whole world:

The Quartet should not only be easy to understand, without following any known
pathway, but it should be understood equally well by Americans, Europeans,
Orientals, or higher primitives; or by anybody from a coal miner to a bank
president. The main purpose of it, of course, is not in its technique, but in the

160
Cowell, The United Quartet, note to the published score (San Francisco: New Music Edition, 1937).

162
 message, which, of course, is not suitable for expression in words. It may be said
that it concerns human and social relationships. The technique is for the purpose
of conveying the message to the widely differentiated groups who need to be
united in these relationships.161

Cowell’s statement that the message of the quartet could not be expressed in words may

reflect his view that music had a universal layer of inherent meaningfulness that underlay

all of its variable forms worldwide, whereas language was historical through-and-

through, and there were no words ever capable of being meaningful to all people.

Cowell listed the various principles he drew upon from the world’s various “peoples.”

As in the nature of melody, he referred to these “peoples” not by nation, tribe, or as

individuals, but in broadly generalized, categorical ways: “Orientals,” “primitives,”

“archaics,” “moderns” and so forth. Strikingly, through this broad categorical approach to

the understanding of musical history and anthropology, Cowell could not only claim that

he presented an intercultural work, but that he presented a comprehensively intercultural

work. “There are in it elements suggested from every place and period.” His categories, it

would seem, together spanned every corner of the history of humanity. He enumerated

some of these categories, and explained how he had made use of the principles that

exemplified them:

For example, the classical feeling is represented, not by the employment of a

classic form, but in building up a new form carefully planned. Carefully planned
form is a classic concept. Primitive music is represented, not by imitating it, nor
by taking a specific melody or rhythm from some tribe, but by using at times a
three tone scale and exhausting all the different ways the three tones can appear, a
procedure of some primitive music; and by its underlying rhythmic beats—like
primitive music, but taken from no specific instance. The Oriental is represented
by modes which are constructed as Oriental modes are constructed, without being
actual modes used in particular cultures. From Western culture, the archaic is
represented by foundational harmonic intervals of 5ths, 4ths, and octaves. The
classic is represented by the form and development of themes. The romantic is
represented by the emotional outpouring of the melodies. The modern is
161
Ibid.

163
 represented by the use of unresolved discords, by free intervals in two-part
counterpoint, and by the fact that the whole result is something new—and all that
is new is modern.162

Cowell did not specify any particular individuals, locations, and dates that might

exemplify this “classical” principle of careful formal planning. Such would have been

unnecessary, as careful formal planning was the essence of the “classical” style that he

spoke of, and as such any careful formal plan could exemplify it (we will witness a

similar mode of thinking in the next chapter on Harrison). The “classical” form of the

United Quartet indeed bore little resemblance to the form of, for instance, a Haydn

symphony; yet Cowell argued that in essence his form and theirs were the same.

In brief, Cowell built his highly planned “classical” form out of a five beat rhythmic

motive / / ˘ / ˘ (“/” being a stressed beat and “˘” being an unstressed beat). David Hall

explains that “This dynamic pattern applies to the beats of a measure, to the measures of

a phrase, and to phrases grouped in fives to form the sections. Successive movements

begin loud, loud, soft, loud, soft.”163 With careful formal planning designated as the

essence of “classical” style, Cowell might have regarded his tight micro/macro

structuring not only as “classical” but as the very height of “classicism.” This was not a

claim that he explicitly made, but it seems to be an implication of the project.

David Nichols has offered commentary on several of Cowell’s above attributions; for

instance, that when speaking of “modes which are constructed as Oriental modes are

constructed” Cowell meant a variety of non-diatonic modes. Nichols offers the example

of the quartet’s second movement (Ex. 10), in which the scale contains two non-varying

162
Ibid.
163
David Hall, introduction to Henry Cowell, Quartet No. 4 (United Quartet) (C. F. Peters).

164
notes, C and G, as well as variable pitch pairs that allowed scalar movement through the

gamut of the twelve tones. He argues that this in fact resembles the Bhairavi family of

Indian ragas: “Such a wide (and indeed, fully chromatic) collection of available pitches

might not be thought of as particularly Indian, but in fact the North Indian family of ragas

bearing the collective title Bhairavi has the basic scale C, D-flat, E-flat, F, G, A-flat, B-

flat, and C. Within this family the particular raga called Bhairavi includes the possibility

in performance of admitting D in the ascending form of the scale and alternative F and F-

sharp in both ascent and descent.”164 Nichols notes that Cowell could have conceivably

been acquainted with such ragas through his 1931 study in Berlin with Professor

Sambamoorthy from Madras.

164
David Nichols, “Henry Cowell’s United Quartet,” American Music 13, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 203.

165
Ex. 10. 2nd Movement, United Quartet

166
 Nichols’s observations, if correct, would suggest that, as with Cowell’s “classical”

designation, his “Oriental” designation involved the induction of a particular principle

from a particular observed practice (here the principle was the variability of particular

scale degrees in the course of melodic movement), and the imputation of that principle as

an essence of the music of a certain broad category of humanity (here “Orientals”). It is

also possible that this principle of “Oriental” scales was not derived through such

inductive methods but through the deductive ones which he favored in the creation of

totalizing systems (similar to Yasser’s system, in which “Oriental” scales were

understood to be logically in between “primitive” and “modern” ones). It is likely that

both forces were at work. In any case, Cowell’s further expansion upon the “Oriental”

principle, making all of the tones of the scale variable, might then have represented a

development of that “Oriental” essence to its logical and scientific limits. In this way, the

United Quartet’s scale would have been more “Oriental” than any in the Orient, just as its

form would have been more “classical” than those of any of Europe’s past. He did not,

however, explicitly make such a claim.

The Schillinger System

Cowell never abandoned his positivist mindset. He maintained, for instance, an

enduring enthusiasm for the total systematizing work of Joseph Schillinger, who had

been a fellow member of the New York Musicological Society. The Schillinger System of

Musical Composition165 (1946) had some similarities with Harrison’s Music Primer,

165
Joseph Schillinger, The Schillinger System of Musical Composition, 2 vols. (New York: Carl Fisher,
Inc., 1946). On Schillinger’s idiosyncratic brilliance and his highly successful career as a composition

167
which came later, and Cowell’s own treatises, which came before it: they all purported to

be accounts of the reality of music as a world-wide phenomenon and at the same time

guides to composition. None of them saw a necessary distinction between the two.

Schillinger’s was the most radically comprehensive and systematic. He referred to issues

of music theory as "musico-scientific problems" and used a form of graphic notation

instead of traditional staff notation. His comprehensive theory, based upon rhythm, rather

than harmony, was laid out in his composition treatise, which Cowell introduced as

representing “a lifetime of work in research, coordination and creative discovery.”166 This

was the very tripartite mode of inquiry that, as seen, had been so problematic for Yasser.

Schillinger had indeed gone further than Yasser; his system was capable (so Cowell

believed) of providing the student of composition with the analytical method appropriate

to the analysis of any material that he might come upon:

The idea behind the Schillinger system is simple and inevitable: it undertakes the
application of mathematical logic to all the materials of music and to their
functions, so that the student may know the unifying principles behind these
functions, may grasp the method of analyzing and synthesizing any musical
materials that he may find anywhere or may discover for himself, and may
perceive how to develop new materials as he feels the need for them. Thus the
Schillinger system offers possibilities, not limitations; it is a positive, not a
negative approach to the choice of musical materials.167

The reader may note a certain disconnect between Cowell’s increasing interest in the

plurality of conventions and his embrace of such a totalizing theory. Nevertheless, even

at this point the two were not necessarily contradictory. Shillinger’s system, though

totalizing, replaced the inhibiting rules of traditional composition treatises with scientific

instructor (George Gershwin numbered among his many successful students), see Warren Brodsky, “Joseph
Schillinger (1895-1943): Music Science Promethean,” American Music 21, no.1 (2003): 45-73.
166
Cowell, “The Case for a System,” New York Times March 24, 1946. Also printed as the introduction
to The Schillinger System.
167
Ibid.

168
principles, which through logical deduction might allow the composer to move creatively

in plural directions. Cowell, along with Sidney Roberts (with whom he had been married

since 1941), elsewhere argued that it was necessary for the composer to arrive at his

compositional choices using such laws and not merely raw creativity or intuition: the

composer at the keyboard differs from a playful child because the composer sets

materials “in order, organizes them in accord with some definite scheme of

relationship.”168 These plural “orders” which Cowell spoke of were not precisely things

that the composer would give to the materials, but rather were already immanent to the

materials. The composer would simply play with this internal order creatively: “The

reasons for his choice can never be more than partly objective, but the range of

possibilities offered to him may surely be entirely so” (p. 226). It was for this reason that

the true composition treatise would necessarily be a hybrid: on the one hand a study of

the natural laws of music in scientific style, on the other a manual of instruction. The

treatise would carry out each function at the same time in the very same syntactical units

and graphs.

The Cowells explained that with the Shillinger system the fundamental properties of

all musical elements had been established, charted, and set into equations for use.

Shillinger had quite literally “charted the musical range,” which meant that, as Slonimsky

had already declared, Schillinger did for music what Mendeleyev had done for chemistry:

“he has provided an exhaustive periodic chart of all its elements, making possible the

discovery of those that have not yet been used” (p. 226). This new science of music, in

establishing a single field in which all musics could be situated, excited the Cowells’

168
Sidney and Henry Cowell, “The Schillinger Case: Charting the Musical Range,” Modern Music 23,
no. 3 (1946): 226.

169
egalitarian sensibilities. Schillinger’s system had finally delivered the singular principles

by which all musics, including those of modernists (particularly Cowell himself and

Schönberg) and non-Western peoples, could be assessed as equal: “The theoretical

systems of Hindemith and Schönberg are now seen to be equally logical and find their

places within Schillinger’s organization of musical theory, along with the tonal systems

of India, Persia and Africa, sixteenth century counterpoint, classical harmony, dissonant

counterpoint, harmony based on fourths or on seconds” (p. 226)

Besides reiterating the general theme of science having vindicated both modernist

music and non-Western musics, the Cowells here returned to the specific concept of

musical relativity, a theory of which Henry had claimed to have developed in the 1930

introduction to New Musical Resources. Einstein, they now claimed, had turned reality

into a flux, the consistency of which it was impossible to have any lasting knowledge:

We cannot know what it is but only how it acts. Nature then consists of movement
and relationship, that is to say, of rhythm. Any natural phenomenon becomes an
event in this modern rhythmic conception of the universe; Einstein found that the
only objective way of studying these events was to chart their periodicities, with
their reinforcement or interference, on a graph. Schillinger believed music might
be included among the natural phenomena which can be examined in this way.
His system uses a comparatively simple form of Einstein’s graph, with its time-
space co-ordinates. (pp. 226-27)

It was a concept of “rhythm,” then, that formed the link between music as a natural

phenomenon and as a social phenomenon. To Cowell, Schillinger had successfully

demonstrated that music could be expected to replicate rhythmical processes found in

nature, namely “growth, motion, and evolution.” Toward the scientific verification of this

thesis Schillinger had examined “great works of art.” “Confirmation was dramatic, for he

actually found in works of the masters the same patterns, expressible in the same

formulas which are used to describe the formation of crystals, the ratios of curvature of

170
celestial trajectories, and the division and multiplication of cells, for instance” (p. 227).

This was an important finding, because it demonstrated that musicians, even when

composing intuitively and in ignorance of the natural rhythmic laws of their craft, were

obeying those laws through intuition. The “great” composers were in fact especially

faithful to those laws, and therefore it could be argued that the better the music, the more

natural. From there the argument could easily follow that taking a rational, scientific

approach to composition would ensure a more thorough engagement of those natural laws

than would be possible relying upon intuition alone: the best composer would be a

scientist. Cowell did not, however, explicitly state this last claim.

It was not usually Cowell’s style to hold the “great masters” up as exemplars of

musical truth; he was ordinarily more interested in relativizing their achievements so as

to get out from under them. Yet in this case Schillinger’s method permitted Cowell to

reiterate an argument similar to one he had made in New Music Resources, that inquiry

into music’s natural laws had vindicated the controversial (sometimes ridiculed)

techniques of modernists, who could retrospectively be seen to have been intuitively

abiding by those laws. Such arguments will be familiar to any alert musicologist, and

they are not really scientific. They are circular: the “greatness” of the chosen masters

proves that the given property their music exhibits represents an immutable truth of

music (incidentally, as these works tend to be long and complex, it is possible to reduce

them to illustrations of a wide variety of patterns); meanwhile that property, understood

as representing an immutable truth of music, by being present in these works validates

the composers’ status as “great.”

171
 Ultimately Cowell saw Schillinger as having dispelled the illusion that art was

somehow different or opposite from science. With The Schillinger System, art was proven

to hold position among other rational phenomena, and all domains of life were now more

susceptible to the same styles of scrutiny and categorization. The universe was rhythmic.

In the 19th century, the field of biology would have provided the models of internal

integration to which music would aspire. Cowell kept the older interest in integration but

rejected organicism and looked instead to the logic of Einstein’s physics.

Meanwhile, in his own review Seeger observed that Schillinger overshot the science

to which he aspired: “One of the basic aims of a logical handling must be to recognize its

own limitations in a field.”169 By organizing every conception of music from the known

world into a single system, and by making grandiose statements about the importance to

music (especially that of the “great musicians”) of extrinsic natural patterns (while

providing meager evidence), Schillinger had paid too little respect to the unknowable.

Schillinger was representative of a recent predilection for the total incorporation and

subsuming of the opposing traditional and radical wings of the musical discipline that had

been in battle since the start of the 20th century.

Cowell also pointed out that Schillinger had produced a synthesis of the conflicting

tendencies of his time, and he articulated the issue in terms reminiscent of his own

treatises:

Many have criticized the confusion of style and taste with “law” in music, as
being a holdover from nineteenth-century religious thinking. Schillinger felt the
trouble lay in a limited and faulty idea of what music is, which resulted in the old
anachronistic dichotomies of art and science, art and life, art and nature. Once

169
Charles Seeger, review of The Schillinger System of Musical Composition by Joseph Schillinger,
Notes 2nd Ser., 4, no. 2 (1947): 84.

172
 these sets of apparent opposites were understood to share the pattern-in-
movement, or rhythmic, nature of things, the arts fell into their natural place.170

Yet, for Seeger, in attempting to present an ecumenical and authoritative answer to these

opposing forces, the Schillingers of the world (and Seeger noted that systematizing was a

contemporary obsession all the way from “theoretical physics through the social sciences

to, lastly, the arts”) fell into their own folly of over-doing “the logical and rational.” In

his favored role as “the balancer,” Seeger here found a dialectical process at work, and by

observing that Schillinger’s work represented an extreme in need of a balancing

antithesis, he was indirectly saying the same of Cowell’s work, especially the sort of

work presented in New Musical Resources, which Cowell had originally developed

alongside Seeger, and of the milieu of the New York Musicological Society in which

they had both participated.

Conclusion

After 1940 Cowell’s thinking about cultural difference shifted. In general, after 1940

the sociological aspects of his thinking grew in importance over the positivist music-

theoretical aspects. During the Second World War Cowell was employed as a

propagandist, programming radio broadcasts for every region of the world. He used the

word “propaganda” unapologetically in his published descriptions of these activities:

“Propaganda is rather a new word, and we do not often think of it in connection with

classic music; yet any music which serves a definite purpose may be said to have some

propaganda aspect.”171 Cowell attempted to demonstrate to the world through these

170
Sidney and Henry Cowell, “The Schillinger Case,” 128.
171
“Music as Propaganda,” Bulletin of the American Musicological Society (sept. 1948): 9-11; 9.

173
programs that the United States was a pluralist society that valued music from all regions

of the world and was not controlling of musical expression as were the totalitarian

regimes it fought against.

Politics became more central to Cowell’s statements about music and difference. In

1954 he wrote, “I used to be almost totally uninterested in politics; but it becomes

increasingly clear to me that ethical individualism cannot flourish under radically

extreme political conditions.”172 As is obvious considering Cowell’s involvement in the

Composers Collective, this was not entirely true. During the war and into the Cold War,

Cowell spoke out for American style liberal democracy as a necessary first step toward

pluralist society and cultural relativist philosophy. His interest in folk music intensified,

as the antithesis to urban music, as communal rather than egocentric, and as the basis of a

(liberal and democratic) nation: “Folk music is the music of the people, as democracy is

government of the people.”173

In spite of these new inflections in Cowell’s thinking after 1940, he also continued to

iterate statements of the sort I have been describing throughout this chapter. In the course

of advocating that Americans become more actively interested in the musics of other

peoples, he made his view that musical difference was based in unilinear evolutionary

movement even more explicit. Americans would benefit from studying the musics of

other peoples, if they wished to understand the music of their own past:

Moreover, it is possible to find, living today in various parts of the world, types of
music which must have characterized earlier periods in our own musical history.
Anthropologists believe that the various elements of a given cultural complex
appear together. So if a tribe living in the 20th century may be accurately

172
“’This I Believe’….,” Music Club Magazine (Sept. 1954): 25.
173
Outline of an address for the convention of the MTNA, Cincinnati, March 1944, Cowell Coll.

174
 described as belonging to the Stone Age, it may be expected to reproduce the
music of the Stone Age just as it has reproduced the more tangible artifacts of the
Stone Age of pre-history. Therefore it is possible to say that certain very primitive
Esquimo tribes, for example, sing as men of the Stone Age probably sang
thousands of years ago.174

Cowell also used the following explicitly evolutionist logic to justify Cage’s work with

silence:

The dynamics of silence, a relativity of silence as well as of sound, expressed by

rests and extreme pianissimo, is a major concern in most of Cage’s music. This
feeling for the rhythmical pregnancy of silence seems an ultimate sophistication.
In primitive music, beats must always be actually sounded; as music becomes
more elaborately cultivated there are more and more places in which the beat,
once established, may be taken for granted. Sometimes in the improvisatory jam
session of jazz players, there will be, by agreement, at fixed intervals in the music,
a sudden two-measure silence, after which everyone comes in full tilt with gusto.
Obviously the exact duration of two measures and their division into beats must
be forcefully present in the minds of the performers during that silence. Cage
enjoys presenting longer and more complex silences in the course of his works.
Sometimes he leads one toward absolute silence by increasingly greater degrees
of softness, until one can hardly tell whether one is really hearing anything or
not.175

As these quotations show, Cowell’s later evolutionism was if anything more explicit

than in earlier years. One senses that once again the “primitive” music Cowell

represented was merely dependent upon a vaguely hypothesized continuum of practices

from most primitive to most cultivated, in this case a continuum running from no silence

to maximum silence. Cowell’s belief in history as logical unilinear development seems to

have been strong enough as to make such loosely generated theories of musical change

seem legitimate.

174
“Music Around the World,” Listen 9, no. 4 (1947): 5.
175
Cowell, “Current Chronicle,” Musical Quarterly (January 1952); quoted in David Wayne Patterson,
“Appraising the Catchwords, C. 1942-1959: John Cage’s Asian-Derived Rhetoric and the Historical
Reference of Black Mountain College,” Ph.D. diss, Columbia Univ., 1996, 176-77.

175
 As we have seen with his 1946 commentaries on The Schillinger System, Cowell

remained unwaveringly dedicated to positivist music-theoretical studies and

systematizations. His advocacy of the cultural relativist perspective, though intensifying

in ardor, continued to be idiosyncratic in its assumption that there were properties

immanent to music that might be objectively studied. It was from this basis that he

continued to argue for pluralism, as he had in New Musical Resources. Musical values

were all, ultimately and at their base, singular. Yes, it might seem as though Western

music was superior in certain regards, but “the reason for this is simply that different

cultures the world over have developed different aspects of music, so that ours is varied

where that of other peoples is monotonous, and vice versa” (p. 5). Often, he encouraged

his readers that by simply repeatedly listening to recordings of unfamiliar musics they

would gradually develop a familiarity and understanding of the music.

In maintaining this belief in objectivity into the 1950s, Cowell fell out of step with the

cultural relativist current of anthropology as exemplified by Melville Herskovits, in

which studious examination of cultural context was essential to the understanding of any

and all aspects of a given artifact. It was this latter philosophy that would become most

important to the new field of Ethnomusicology. I discuss this current at the end of the

next chapter, as a contrast to the concept of music and difference laid out by Cowell’s

devoted student Harrison. As will be seen, Harrison’s construction of a “Round World”

of non-difference was far more inventive, idiosyncratic, internally coherent, and limited

than was Cowell’s “whole world of music.”

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 Chapter IV: Lou Harrison and the “Whole Round World of Music”

Prelude: The Question of the Double Concerto

When I first encountered Lou Harrison’s Double Concerto for Violin, Cello, and

Javanese Gamelan it represented a challenge to much I had learned thus far in gamelan

rehearsal and generally as an ethnomusicologist. Having read Clifford Geertz, John

Blacking, and other prominent theorists of culture, I had gathered that it was best to talk

about non-Western musics with culture-specific terminology—such as irama and laras

for Central Javanese gamelan. These were not translations of Western concepts; they

referred to aspects of Javanese music that had no direct equivalents in Western music.

Similarly, I understood that the kepatihan (cipher notation) we used was not merely an

alternative way of expressing something that could also be expressed with staff notation.

Javanese music was something utterly different from Western music.

Through further reading in anthropological culture theory I would learn more about

the theoretical underpinnings to such choices of wording. I realized that I was both

cultivating respect for other cultures and accumulating a body of concepts by which we

could conceive of Javanese music from within. There was a history to this approach to

the study of non-Western music that was intertwined with gamelan’s very presence in the

academy. Playing gamelan was not simply making music; it was a lesson in cultural

relativism.
 With this learned, Harrison’s Double Concerto presented a conundrum. It was a piece

that seemed to belong not to one culture but to two, or perhaps to deny the difference

between them. It employed two sets of notation, one in kepatihan for the gamelan (the

“orchestra” of Harrison’s concerto) and one in staff notation for the soloists on violin and

cello. Rehearsal required the calling-out of two sets of instructions: “Soloists, start at

rehearsal 1!” and then, “gamelan, start at gong leading to irama II!” Strangely, these parts

came together elegantly, consonantly, and yet remained distinct. We seemed to be

playing two different works, produced by unrelated intelligences, which somehow fit

together perfectly.

How was this possible? As an ethnomusicologist, did I not understand music to be the

product of a single culture? Wasn’t the music of any particular culture only meaningful in

relationship to other meaningful practices of that culture? How then had Harrison created

a piece in which two groups of musicians performed their own irreconcilably different

musical practices, and yet played together as if they were doing more-or-less the same

thing, as if their musics had all along been meant for an encounter with each other? Had

Harrison discovered that, after all, these different musics, which we thought were each

connected to utterly different systems of significance, were actually only different on

their surface? Were we just looking at differences of translation after all? On the other

hand, could this piece really be considered Javanese at all, or was it just another case of

the Western imagination of the exotic? Was it merely another fantasy?

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Introduction

This whole round living world of music—the Human Music—rouses and delights
me, it stirs me to a “transethnic,” a planetary music.
Lou Harrison, Music Primer

In much of what follows in this chapter, I will temporarily leave cultural relativism aside,

and consider Harrison’s own theories of culture. It will be seen that according to

Harrison’s worldview, the Concerto for Violin, Cello, and Javanese Gamelan makes

perfect sense because it is simply a demonstration of what he saw as the truly shared

features of Western and Javanese musics. I will describe how Harrison’s vision of a

round, connected world of similitudes permitted him to compose in his manner, and I will

call his compositional method of uniting cultural practices from distant world regions

“elision.” Harrison saw himself as at a certain point having awakened to “reality,” and so

I call the view of the world that he constructed his “reality.” I do not imply that this

constructed “reality” was a fantasy. It is the object of this chapter to scrutinize his

“reality,” to understand the principles which gave it coherence and the evidence by which

it staked its claim to validity, and to suggest how Harrison’s compositions can be

understood as clear and meaningful when taken as a part of this “reality.”

By what analytical process, or by what process of rationalization, did Harrison

envision “a Whole Round World of Music” with such clarity, and as a composer how did

he have the courage to compose that world? I will begin with a brief account of how

Harrison came to his “reality,” which it seems he held from around 1960 until the end of

his life. Harrison had experienced a nervous breakdown in New York in the late 1940s,

and then entered a period of discovery of new principles, culminating in a new cohesive

worldview starting in 1960. The next two sections will be analyses of what I see as the

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two primary intellectual tendencies by which Harrison constructed and maintained this

worldview. First is a grand dualistic scheme by which all world phenomena could be

understood as in opposition. Second are the ordering schemes by which various musical

and non-musical ideas the world over could be classified.

I then examine how both aspects of this “reality” gave rational basis to some very

idiosyncratic views and a very eccentric style of relating to the world that was by turns

courageous, defiant, passionate, arrogant, and gracious. In other words, I examine how a

particular rational process led Harrison to be a non-conformist. In the final section I

return to a discussion of cultural relativism as it has guided the field of ethnomusicology

and studies of Javanese music in particular, showing how particular aspects of Harrison’s

universalism are troubled in light of those findings. Ultimately I am not interested in

championing either theory of difference, but rather in bringing them into a dialogue that

exposes the limitations in each.

As I have read Harrison’s writings after 1960 and considered his compositions in

light of them, I have become increasingly convinced that his statements are connected by

a consistent logic. Harrison seems to have successfully cultivated a personal ethos that in

both its consistency and in its expressivity is highly visible and subject to critique.

Despite the tremendous variety of materials that Harrison brought to bear in writing

music, there is a sizable portion of his body of works that display musical and ideological

consistency and integration, and to an extent are analyzable as a body of mutually

illuminating documents. Throughout his life Harrison’s knowledge of Asian musics

became ever more extensive and nuanced, and yet to a great extent his encounters with

Asian musics served to continually reinforce his worldview, and to increasingly supply

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confirmation of its foundation upon certain precepts. As such, Harrison’s writings and

compositions from the last forty to fifty years of his life can to a remarkable extent be

viewed as variations upon a single theme, which it will be my aim in the following

sections to analyze. Nevertheless, the analysis that follows should not be read as a

totalizing “reality” about Lou Harrison.176

The Dawning of a New Reality: Black Mountain College and the influence of Harry

Partch

In this section I discuss some of the conditions leading into Harrison’s construction of

a new “reality.” These include an emotional breakdown in New York in 1947 and a move

to the rural setting of Black Mountain College in the North Carolina mountains. I discuss

how Harrison was influenced by books he read while at Black Mountain College,

foremost among them Harry Partch’s Genesis of a Music. From this work and others

Harrison drew principles about how music could be understood according to trans-

cultural concepts, ultimately leading to the possibility of understanding musics from

various distant world regions as alike.

Peter Garland has described the 1940s as “the peak of Harrison’s involvement with

modern music. After studies with Schoenberg, the young composer made the then, and

176
Harrison’s various writings from 1960 onwards generally contain some material that is informative
to my analysis, and much else that falls outside of it. For instance, in his article “On Slippery Slendro,”
published near the end of his life, most of Harrison’s observations are particular to his study of gamelan
and fall outside of the present analysis. See Lou Harrison, “Thoughts about ‘Slippery Slendro’,” Selected
Reports in Ethnomusicology 6 (1985): 111-17.

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still now, ‘obligatory’ move to New York City.”177 Leta Miller has described Harrison’s

1943 move to New York as

difficult financially and socially almost from the start, and the noise level was
overwhelming. On July 9, 1943, Lou wrote to his mother: “I do not like New
York at all and I am afraid that I will not be able to write a note in the midst of
this noise and confusion.”178

Even as his success in New York grew, Harrison suffered from professional

insecurity and low self esteem. He was also having trouble finding a satisfactory

compositional voice. As he described in a publication about Carl Ruggles, Charles Ives,

and Edgard Varèse at the time, he had eclectic musical interests that included the use of

serial techniques: “Let it be said without ado that the writer is incorrigibly fond of those

American composers who have variously been called ‘primitives, naives, and

iconoclasts.’ He is equally addicted to the contemporary Austrian school of 12-tone

composition…. On rare occasions he is interested in folk music (these are quite rare) and

more frequently in cultivated Oriental musics as they are available on recordings and a

few concert performances.”179 Harrison maintained and developed some of these interests

177
Peter Garland, “The Music of Lou Harrison: Some Biographical Perspectives (A Preface),” in A Lou
Harrison Reader, ed. Peter Garland (Santa Fe: Soundings Press, 1987), 8 (A Lou Harrison Reader is
hereafter cited as LHR).
178
Leta Miller and Fredrick Lieberman, Lou Harrison: Composing a World (New York: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1998), 25 (hereafter cited as CAW); the letter is located among Harrison’s papers in Santa Cruz. I am
indebted to Miller and Lieberman’s book for much biographical information on Harrison. Also of
particularly use for the present discussion has been their “Lou Harrison and the American Gamelan,”
American Music 17, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 146-78. See also Heidi von Gunden, The Music of Lou Harrison
(Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1995).
179
“Ruggles, Ives, Varèse,” View (1945); reprinted in Garland, ed., A Lou Harrison Reader, 16-17.

182
throughout his life, but eventually moved away from many of them, including the use of

12-tone technique in his own compositions.180

When New York life finally proved untenable, Harrison’s friend John Cage

encouraged him to seek a change of scenery and a teaching position at the experimental

school Black Mountain College in rural North Carolina. In his application for a teaching

position, Harrison sent a curriculum vitae that listed, as would be expected, major

episodes of his musical training: his studies with Henry Cowell in 1935 and with Arnold

Schoenberg in 1942. Near the end, in a section headed “Miscellaneous,” was a more

unusual item: “in 1947 LOST MIND.”181

As Harrison recalled in later years, the move to Black Mountain was a turning point,

for him both emotionally and intellectually:

Black Mountain was very stimulating, much too stimulating in some ways. But I
formed habits and interests there that have persisted. For example, I can’t live in
the city anymore. I loathe it. And, uh, I’ve become completely rural minded in
that sense. And Black Mountain helped in that, and a closeness with nature which
I had recontacted again after all those… lo, those many years, ten years in
Manhattan. You know, that’s not…. Well, even dogs leave Manhattan.182

In the decade after he left New York, Harrison’s most fervent intellectual shift was

the gradual rejection of equal temperament, the division of the octave into twelve equal

tones that was by then basic to the conventional tonal idiom and to the serialism he had

practiced in New York. He rather came to embrace just intonation, an approach to tuning

that permitted various strategies of bringing intervals into precise simple ratios. Other

180
On Harrison’s 12-tone works and Schönberg’s influence, see Severine Neff, “An Unlikely Synergy:
Lou Harrison and Arnold Schoenberg,” Society for American Music 3, no. 2 (2009) (forthcoming).
181
Harrison’s CV is located in the collection of the Black Mountain Research Project, North Carolina
State Archives.
182
Harrison, interview by Marry Emma Harris, 6 March 1973, Black Mountain Research Project,
North Carolina State Archives.

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new interests followed: though he had always been interested in non-Western musics, in

the 1960s he traveled in Asia, and beginning in 1975 he became an avid student of

Javanese gamelan, spending much of his last twenty-eight years composing for the

ensemble. Harrison met his life partner Bill Colvig in 1967, and with Colvig built

instruments, most notably gamelans tuned in just intonation (the Double Concerto that I

have already described was composed for the set of instruments residing at Mills

College).

By about 1960, the teaming, dissonant world of Harrison’s New York years had

reorganized into something quieter and more melodic: “I have an advantage that many

people have not had, having to reconstruct a life—the rubble and initial vision of

realizing that what you had assumed was reality was no longer, that your assumptions

about reality were different” (italics mine).183 I will hereafter employ this term of

Harrison’s, this “reality,” which developed with remarkable coherence in the ten years

following Harrison’s breakdown. He used it to refer to the world as it really was; I use it

to refer to the world as he constructed it.

Harrison acquired a copy of Partch’s Genesis of a Music (1949) shortly after his

breakdown.184 He was most distinctly influenced by Partch’s detailed explanation of just

intonation and the historical development of the science of tuning in the West (and to a

lesser extent in China), stretching back to Zarlino and to Ptolemy and further still to

Pythagoras. Partch told the history of tuning as a story of both development and decline.

On the one hand, the science of tuning had become ever more advanced through the

183
Harrison, interview by Heidi Von Gunden, in von Gunden, The Music, 95.
184
Harry Partch, Genesis of a Music (Madison, WI: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1949) (hereafter cited as
GOM). The following discussion of Partch’s book is cursory. It is meant to introduce some ideological
commonalities between Partch and Harrison and not to provide a full account and critique of Partch’s ideas.

184
centuries—in other words, ever more sophisticated solutions were developed to handle

the difficulties that tuning in pure intervals presented—while, on the other hand, in

general practice what he viewed as the one correct practice, just intonation, had

ultimately been drowned out by the most dismal, that of equal temperament. Partch found

that in his own time the dominance of equal temperament had become so complete that

few musicians even realized that there could be an alternative, that dividing the octave

into twelve equal semitones was not in fact simply what tuning was.

Partch argued that the consonance of a musical interval was a factor of the simplicity

of the numerical ratio that represented it. The unison 1/1 would be the most consonant

interval, the octave 2/1 would be the next most consonant, the fifth 3/2 and the fourth 4/3

would follow, and then the major and minor thirds of 5/4 and 6/5. Actually, Partch only

used numerical ratios as interval terminology, doing away with terms such as “fifth,”

“fourth,” and “major and minor thirds,” as well as names for pitches such as C, E and G.

He regarded the latter symbols as arbitrary, reflective of the sloppy mindset of equal

temperament, which with such compromised intervals as its “fifth” of 433/289 (an

approximation), rather than a pure 3/2, had only an arbitrary claim to the quality of

“consonance.” To Partch it was an “anomaly that we, a mechanically talented modern

people, should insist on accuracy to the millionth part of an inch in certain precision

instruments, while we nonchalantly accept at least a seventh of an equal ‘semitone’ as an

‘inconsequential’ error in music and dismiss mathematical computations as having

‘nothing to do with music’.”185

185
GOM, 413. Partch here quotes Jules Combarieu’s Music—Its Laws and Evolution (D. Appleton and
Co., New York, 1910).

185
 Partch believed that small-number ratios and “consonance,” a musical quality

detectable by the “human ear,” were indistinguishable. This amounted to a logical

collapse of the difference between the objective mathematical properties of sounds and

their subjective apprehension. He rejected arguments that what was arithmetically pure

and what people found pleasing might be separate separate, taking the enjoyment by

some people of impure intervals not as evidence that there might be other viable

approaches to tuning, but rather of the general state of deafness and irrationality in which

the majority of humanity existed.186 In this his thinking was self-confirming and non-

contradictable. A “good” ear was one that recognized the beauty of “correct” pure

intervals and the ugliness of impure ones. The theoretical “correctness” of pure intervals

was meanwhile confirmed by their enjoyment by a person with a “good” ear.

For Partch then, composing music became a revitalization of the atrophied organ of

“the ear” and a perfect reconciliation of intuition and reason. By contrast, the majority of

the world’s musicians, from whatever tradition they came, had not revitalized their ears,

had not aligned their reason and intuition, and were ignorant of the truth of just

intonation. For Partch, there was little benefit to studying the ways musicians actually

made music, as the investigation would be like an a tour of the world under the shroud of

an endless night:

Not until we reach the musical equinox do we find the comparatively measurable,
the dominant day of precise aural quantities which can be noted in fairly precise
aural reactions—ratios, consonances, dissonances. In the dominance of night is a
more ineffable value, in which the seen and the heard are out of perspective,
distorted by untold ages of prejudice, elusive and illusory, and consequently of

186
For instance, Partch’s response to Alexander Ellis’s statement that some of the world’s musicians,
such as “the Indian,” were indifferent to arithmetic and did all their tuning based on the judgment of the ear
was that “up to a certain point, of course, arithmetic and an acute ear accomplish exactly the same results”
(GOM, 373).

186
 less ultimate concern than those qualities that can be discerned through the
intuitive faculties. (GOM, 6)

Culture, then, in taking part in the shaping of tuning practices, was nothing more than

prejudice. Culture was not at the very essence of tuning, but rather was like dust, clinging

to and obscuring pure reason. Properly, intonation would be no more a matter of

convention than was gravity. If culture was generally a force of delusion and corruption,

Western culture was particularly bad, because it had become completely enslaved to the

false ideal of twelve-tone equal temperament. In his devotion to these ideas, Partch was

both a fundamentalist and an iconoclast: his radical vision, founded on unmovable

principles, set him in fervent opposition to the musical status quo and emboldened him to

spread the “truth” by unconventional composing, instrument construction, and the writing

of his treatise.

Aside from his interest in just intonation, there was another aspect of Partch’s

thinking that was echoed in Harrison’s post-1960 thinking. This was his view of many of

the World’s musical cultures throughout history being essentially the same. According to

Partch, the “important ancient and near-ancient cultures—the Chinese, Greek, Arabian,

[and] Indian” had music of the same essential emotional quality, which was “tactile” and

“corporeal,” as opposed to the “abstract,” “disembodied” quality of most contemporary

music. The ancient Chinese had roughly the same musical values as did the ancient

Greeks 17 centuries later (“corporeal”), and again the Japanese of the 14th-century AD. In

the 1600s, Japanese Kabuki was formed as a revival of the original ideals of Noh, and

this occurred about the same time as the Tuscan or Florentine reestablishment of the

Greek ideals. These correspondences were “no mere coincidence,” but rather were proof

187
of the essential unity of human behavior when responding to like developments. Like

developments yielded further like developments (GOM, 13).

Harrison’s dualistic division of the world’s musics from 1960 onward was not based

on precisely the same principles as Partch’s, but nevertheless was likely influenced by

Partch. The latter, holding that musics alike in one way tended to be alike in many ways,

developed a history of the world’s musics as divided into these two broad categories of

“abstract” and “corporeal.” The result of this strict division of the world’s musics into

two camps was that those on each respective side were drawn into close association.

“Corporealness” became the dominant characteristic of all music on its side of the fence,

the side Partch liked and regarded as natural. While he appreciated that all these

corporeal musics had differences, he viewed those differences as mere surface variations.

In their assembled unity, the world’s corporeal musics came to exemplify a forgotten

human truth that Partch would deploy in a fierce polemic against abstract music, which

included all of the popular and high prestige music of his time.

The idea that there were trans-cultural principles by which the musics from various

civilizations could be understood to be the “same” was not new to Harrison. He had

already been exposed to Cowell’s ideas on musical difference, which I have discussed in

the previous chapter. Those views would have been corroborated in another text that

Harrison studied while at Black Mountain: Fox Strangways’s Music of Hindostan

(1914).187 Strangways’s inquiry took as its point of departure the idea that there were

inevitable processes by which music developed, and that these could be observed to have

occurred to different extents in different civilizations. He argued that the study of North

187
A. H. Fox Strangways, Music of Hindostan (Oxford: Clarenden Press, 1914).

188
Indian classical music opened a window upon European music of the past, the former

simply not having undergone certain of the processes of development that had occurred

in the West. India’s was a melodic art uninflected by any concept of harmony,

representing a stage of the history of musical development that the West had long left

behind. Since it had no concept of harmony, contemporary North Indian music could be

understood as persisting in the same state as that of ancient Greece: “here [in India] is the

living language of which in those we have only dead examples” (p. v).

Whereas Partch had reduced different musical traditions to exemplars of the qualities

of “corporeal” and “abstract,” Strangways reduced them to “melodic” and “harmonic.”188

This meant that if both ancient Greek music and modern Indian music appeared to both

be “melodic,” they could be presumed to be roughly the same in other respects as well.

The particular characteristics by which civilizations were categorized were observable,

repeatable developmental processes with their own inevitable logic: “[in Indian music] is

melody absolutely untouched by harmony, which has developed through many centuries

tendencies which have the force of laws; and the examination of these enables us to some

extent to separate the respective contributions of melody and harmony to the final effect

in our own music” (p. v).

It is worth noting that, despite these similarities between Strangways, Partch, and

later Harrison, there were also some key differences. Strangways’s evolutionist thinking,

typical of contemporary anthropology in 1914 (Boas’s historically significant challenge

to evolutionist ideas in The Mind of Primitive Man had been published only in 1911) and

reiterated by Cowell, was not reiterated by Partch or Harrison, though remnants of it can

188
For a sense of what might have been the underpinnings of Strangways’s “melodic” and “harmonic,”
see the previous chapter on Cowell. Cowell also made these two concepts central to both his trans-cultural
theory of music and his trans-cultural history of music.

189
be found in their references to “cultivated” civilizations and “primitive” peoples. To

Strangways, any music, wherever and whenever it was made, belonged somewhere along

a line of development from the most primitive forms to the most advanced (those were

Western Europe’s). Similarities among historically and geographically disconnected

musical traditions could be established by determining their equivalent position within

this single great line of development. These views were widely held among academics in

the early twentieth century (and as such did not need to be stated in detail in Music of

Hindostan), and Strangways conveyed them without particular cultural arrogance. If

European music was more advanced in an evolutionary sense, that was not to say it was

in every respect superior: as a “melodic” (pre-harmonic) art, North Indian music was

characterized by a much more sophisticated treatment of melody than was European

music, and Strangways greatly admired many other aspects of the Indian way of life as he

understood it. In contrast, Partch, while seeing a general advancement in the

sophistication of tuning technologies, did not believe in more general cultural

advancement, but was rather inclined to see history as a story of continuous degeneration.

As we shall see, Harrison also became inclined toward this pastoralist “pessimism.”

Harrison’s “Reality” Part 1: Similitudes through Dualism

The knowledge of madness (i.e., that we are Mad), & the Vision of Reason (imagination
in the light of the former)—the one is Humor, the other is Art. These are the essentials.
--Lou Harrison, Music Primer

By about 1960, and from then onwards, Harrison’s writings exhibited a dualistic style

of thinking similar to that of Partch. He developed a totalizing perspective on the

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“reasoned” and “absurd” aspects of the “reality” in which he lived and was outspoken

about each. Various forms of pre-19th-century Western music and Asian musics, in which

Harrison became intensely interested during this period, came to exemplify for him the

aspects of culture that he regarded as beautiful and sensible. Harrison understood these in

antithesis with Western culture, which had degenerated into a state of noisy, mechanized

irrationality. As with Partch’s “reality,” Harrison’s was organized into a grand symmetry,

in which everything that he held to be good and bad were configured in opposing chains.

He did not state the existence of these chains; rather what I am describing are the

tendencies of thinking that can seem to have lain in the background of Harrison’s

piecemeal statements.

As with Partch, Harrison would come to understand his world as a system of

antitheses. Where Partch’s two broad categories had been “corporeal” and “abstract,”

Harrison’s pairs of antitheses included

191
 • Reasoned Absurd

• Country City

• Quiet Noisy

• Ancient Modern

• Natural Artificial

• Hand-made Machine-made

• Just-tuned Equal-tempered

• Mind Gut

• Small-scale Corporate

• Personal Standardized

Table 2: Harrison’s Chains of Antitheses

Again, while Harrison never put forward this dualistic structuring of “reality” in an

explicit way, it remained in the background of his thinking and structured his reasoning

from behind. He noted, for instance, that to “learn to tune & recognize intervals you had

best go to a country, quiet place.”189 He did not state explicitly the reason that the country

was the setting conducive to the perception of pure intervals, but the reasoning can be

reassembled. Harrison found evidence for it in pastoral Ancient Greece, which he saw as

indeed a quiet, country setting where rational inquiry was valued and just intonation was

studied. The New York that Harrison had experienced in the 1940s represented the

antithesis: loud, irrational, and completely taken over by equal temperament. Ancient

189
Harrison, Lou Harrison’s Music Primer: Various Items About Music to 1970 (New York: C.F.
Peters Corporation, 1971), 5 (hereafter cited as MP).

192
Greece and modern New York were, in Harrison’s mind, not particular places with

cultures specific to themselves (as would be the cultural relativist view that I will discuss

later in this chapter). Rather Ancient Greece possessed timeless attributes in accord with

nature, which had merely been lost or obscured in modern New York.

Not only were the qualities possessed by Greece and New York not the two

particularities of isolated cultures, and not only were those places representative of the

antithetical properties that arched over all of existence; what’s more, each set of qualities

went together, they were each other’s preconditions. Anywhere in the world, Quiet,

characteristic of the Country, could be deduced as a condition critical in the apprehension

of just intonation, and the practice just intonation would be the natural consequent of

being in the Country, and so forth. Furthermore, each concept attributed to one side

yielded an opposing link on the other, so that any series of deductions in this process had

symmetrical effects. As Harrison had observed, New York was thoroughly taken over

with equal temperament and the various styles of composition based on it. Thus the

concept of the City arose in opposition to the Country, as the place where pure intervals

were not to be found, the place characterized by noisiness. Noisiness could be assumed

not to be conducive to just intonation, but rather to various forms of cacophony,

epitomized by equal temperament.

Harrison’s “trans-ethnic” style, his manner of combining idioms and instruments

from different parts of the world, was the fruit of this style of thinking. Through their

mutual antithesis to the absurd, various musical materials from different distant times and

places could be understood to be the same. This meant that if Javanese gamelan and

ancient Greek music were both not the same as music of modern urbanity, with its equal

193
temperament and dissonance, its noise and machines, then within the logic of the grand

binary scheme they would necessarily be understandable as the same. The generation of

such similitudes was a compositional act in which great distance and difference were

elided, and the grounds for the sort of harmonious combinations of the Double Concerto

were generated.

Harrison was well aware of and freely admitted to Partch’s influence in the

development of his “reality,” in which all good things came together in perfect accord. In

the final stanza of Harrison’s 1973 poem, “Lines 11 and 3 On Harry Partch,” he

described having learned from Partch that beauty’s singular laws were encoded with

numbers, giving form to nature and to the human body. Beauty was beauty, whether in

songs or sunlight:

He joins together our brains and ears and flesh!

He is of body sweet and slim,
And as he talks and teaches (fully absorbed)
He slightly chants his sentences.
He grasps and holds us in a sweet reminder
That yes it is our flesh that knows
All these lovely ratios, as we know also
Blooms and loves and tunes and sunlight.190

Harrison recollected that his reading of Partch while at Black Mountain was an

experience of awakening:

I began to tune up the things that Harry Partch had written about in the book.
That’s all. And I suddenly discovered that what they tell you, isn’t true. You
know, it was just one more disillusionment. And since my breakdown, anyway, I
had been sort of been systematically going back through history to find out where
we went wrong [as a civilization], or what could be preserved…. And the
sensuous, or the sensual actuality of intonation is true. There’s just no getting
around it. And once you experience it and know what it consists in, and of, and
about it, and obtain some structural visualization of the whole material, the

190
Harrison, “Lines 11 and 3 On Harry Partch,” 1973, in LHR, 64.

194
 continuum of tuning and ratios, then you can’t go back, and your whole musical
life changes.191

Harrison also recalled that at that time he had tuned the Indian scales transcribed in

Strangway’s book according to principles of just intonation detailed in Partch’s book. He

had read Virgil’s Eclogues and concluded that the countryside, and not the city, was

where such tunings would emerge naturally. He found that idyllic quality at Black

Mountain, and later he would find it again when he settled in Aptos, California. Pastoral

settings would become important locations for the proper perception of Harrison’s

reality:

To learn to tune & recognize intervals you had best go to a country, quiet place
for a while. When your ears have recovered their powers & are usable again,
begin to tune the simplest ratios on some suitable instrument…. The poet Herrick
has said, “So melt me with thy sweet numbers.” These are the numbers. (MP, 5)

Harrison admitted freely that the development of his interests in just intonation, non-

Western musics, and country life was in reaction to what he saw as the factors leading to

his breakdown in New York. Critically, he did not simply see this change in his interests

as a realignment of his activities to become more fitting with his private, personal

inclinations, but rather as a realignment to conform to absolute truths, transcendent of

himself and of his own culture. It was an awakening to the “reality” of a beautifully

ordered cosmos and to the absurdity of the actual world in which he lived, which did not

conform to its principles. Harrison’s universalist vision was in this sense a projection of

his own experiences of joy and disappointment onto the entire world; the function of the

chains of antithesis was the rationalization of his personal likes and dislikes.

191
Harrison, interview by Harris.

195
 The chains of antitheses curled outward, permitting broad historical generalizations

and allowing him to tie together things which might not otherwise be thought to be

related. For instance in the following statement he correlated the historical rise of the

burning of heretics and equal temperament: “In Christian times Europe insisted that

everyone had to believe the same religion and in the same way; indeed, burned or killed

persons not so behaving; and finally music was to have only one intonation, either ditone

diatonic, or in recent years, equal temperament.”192 Harrison continued this formulation,

in which the dogmatism behind the Christian killing of heretics was found to be

historically linked with the dogmatism of total standardization of tuning practices, with

the antithetic example of the culture of the Greeks, who, Harrison explained, had

preceded the Christians with a culture of tolerance, intellectual inquiry, and knowledge of

just intonation.

On one occasion, Harrison described Roman culture as another antithesis to the

Greeks’: “Gutty they were, the Romans, very ‘ingroup,’ and musically mindless.”193 The

“gut versus the mind” was a theme that Harrison reiterated: to compose from one’s gut

was to compose for sensual gratification and without thought. Composing with thought

implied the use of just intonation and careful formal planning. Harrison’s student Robert

Hughes has used this terminology in describing Harrison’s own compositional process:

Lou seldom starts out with a gut, sensual idea. Rather, he begins with the
scaffolding, which is usually some kind of logically rational preconceived
formula that turns loose, as he manipulates the materials into wonderfully
sensuous, forward-flowing music.194
192
Harrison, “Four Items,” in LHR, 65.
193
Harrison, “Refreshing the Auditory Perception,” in Music—East and West, (Executive Committee
for 1961 Tokyo East-West Musical Encounter), 141.
194
Hughes, interview by Miller, 12 Dec. 1994, in CAW, 206.

196
 The mind, then, was a universal that transcended culture. In the following, Harrison

spoke of a unity of reason and aesthetic listening in a manner that was reminiscent of

Partch. He preached that once the mind and the ear had been connected, it would be seen

that the beautiful in music transcended culture, represented by the gut:

It seems to me that to connect our ears with our minds is necessary to musicality,
and that very few of us have made that connection. It little matters, finally,
whether our ears are joined to our guts (as the Chinese might say), for, while that
connection assures our common group “belongings,” and while that enables us to
function in whatever ways our several ethnics permit to us, and while it makes us
practitioners of our various arts, it nowise makes us musicians—or, more
broadly—artists. I refer, in the latter honorific to the concept of an artist as a
“fixer” and transmitter of ideas—as one who “sets” or firmly and truly orders
ideas and then transmits them. That certainly requires the mind; and, to us, it
requires a connecting of the ears with the mind.195

As noted, Harrison did not associate machines with reason, but with the noisy

absurdity of modern life. Their use in any instance could be understood to demolish

beautiful values and mental clarity. Following this line of thinking (arising from the

dualistic schema at the background of all his thoughts) Harrison could state:

“Predominant practice today is for dancers to use disks and/or tapes while teaching

classes, and for accompanying concerts….This is Bad Practice—for it trains in lifeless

195
Harrison, “Refreshing,” 141. Evan Ziporyn has remarked that for Harrison theory and composition
can be understood as a performance in world unity, an injunction to experience the universe as guided by a
compassionate rationalism:
“As Harrison’s own words indicate, he is something of a happy polemicist, eager to make
connections between musics and to use them to bolster a humane and humanistic outlook on life. Since
his theories serve to generate his compositions (rather than the other way around), the “truth” of his
ideas resides in his achievement as a composer, not in the ultimate veracity of the ideas behind them.
Thus it becomes irrelevant whether or not any existing Javanese slendro scales are in fact in just
intonation: what is important is that Harrison found a way to make a viable, well tuned “quasi-slendro”
and to use it in a compelling way. Harrison’s own writings leave no doubt that that is where his
priorities lie” (Evan Ziporyn, review of The Music of Lou Harrison by Heidi von Gunden, Asian Music
30, no. 1 (1998): 192-93).
I find that Ziporyn’s eloquent assessment of the relative significance of Harrison’s composition and
theory is actually the opposite of Harrison’s own view, as is evidenced in the above quote by Harrison.
Harrison’s concern, as Ziporyn himself notes, was not merely to be musically persuasive, but to persuade
his audience to share his world view, a part of which was the existence of just-tuned slendro scales in Java.

197
(un-inter-responding) rhythm, and it increases the popular belief that Machines are

Holy.”196 Machines were the noisy, lifeless forms of the City’s landscape, and it logically

followed that lifelessness and madness would inevitably come from using them.

Harrison appreciated Asian musics in part because he found in them an alternative

from modern, industrialist absurdity and equal temperament. This sense of the difference

of Asian musics from that which disturbed him came about as much through the

reasoning by antitheses as through empirically based discovery. Through a combination

of first-hand study and idealistic projection, Harrison came to regard Asian musics as

correlated to the pastoral, quiet, just values of the cosmos. “Musical satisfaction,” he

remarked, “now lies in the Orient, no longer in the Occident.” Harrison’s attitude toward

Asian musics can be characterized as pastoralist, for he saw in Asia forms of beauty that

had once been present in the West but now were spoiled.

Harrison was, at the same time, optimistic that the West was spirited along a path

toward the rediscovery of the knowledge present in the East and in its own past. In this

field, success would come by virtue of the West’s own tradition of experimentation and

inquisitiveness, the same spirit of invention that he considered to have originally

demolished the West’s own birthright (e.g. “instruments that are simple in construction

and permit a wide range of artistic use” and similar vocal techniques). “The occidental

nineteenth century much admired engineers, and with delight accepted instruments from

them which were fully committed to the false tuning of equal temperament, and which

196
“Society, Musician, Dancer, Machine—a Set of Opinions Entirely Attributable to Lou Harrison, in
1966,” Impulse: Annual of Contemporary Dance (1966): 40, quoted in CAW, 185.

198
absolutely preclude lyric graces or any necessary subtleties of intonation or expression.

Engineers will not undo their work, so that artists must.”197

This was how Harrison saw his task as an artist: as an archeologist and a builder, who

would restore that which had been demolished. The artist’s role was to excavate the

rubble hidden under the city streets, researching the art of the pre-industrialized West and

the contemporary East and reassembling the shards. Though backwards-looking, this

vision was radical. If reason and beauty were features of the past, they belonged to such a

thoroughly distant past that their reinvigoration represented a challenge to current

conventionality and to that which was currently of high status. The history of the West

was not, as was often ethnocentrically supposed, a history of progress. On the contrary:

Our studies of the history of intonation give us a new view of music’s progress.
Instead of the standard European vision of a long, gradual development leading—
with no outside influence—up to contemporary European usages; we discover
instead—and on the basis of the richness and diversity of virtual materials—an
extraordinary “bulge of expansion” in two major periods, and regression in other
times, including our own. The reason for such a new view is, of course, that we
are considering the musical materials, not just aesthetical fashions.198

(Note that in giving weight to the examination of “musical materials” over past “aesthetic

fashions” Harrison’s tone here is reminiscent of his teacher Cowell’s.)

Harrison explained that the two major periods of richness were that of the Classic

World, ending with a thinning of richness as the “Christians emphasized subscription

over investigation,” and then that of Classic Islam. The history of the West was, largely, a

story of decline, and with this he remarked upon the achievements of various non-

197
“Creative Ideas in the Classic Music” [typescript], 1; published as “Creative Ideas in Classical
Korean Music,” Korea Journal 2, no. 11 (1962): 34-36.
198
Harrison, “Four Items,” Aptos, 1974, in LHR, 65.

199
Western cultures, which, now in distinction from the absurdity that dominated in the

West, could be grouped together among those sites of true cultural advancement:

I think that those of us with “Western” backgrounds have for some time now held
a supplementary notion that India and China and Indonesia were “lateral,”
sidewise and “static” areas flanking “real,” “marching” history. Thus at least
conjecturally granting their true existence outside the “back-to-forwards”
movement of the Judeo-Christian-Moslem dramatic pattern. A decision to reckon
value on the basis of virtual material usage quickly realigns our historic images.
(p. 65)

The sort of dualism I am identifying as characteristic of Harrison’s thinking by the

1960s was in evidence earlier as well, though not in as developed a form. It can be seen

in a letter Harrison wrote to Cowell prior to his breakdown in the late 1940s in New

York. On Cowell’s advice, Harrison had visited a therapist. Frustratingly, the therapist

told him that his music was “ivory tower,” not “connected to the forward-moving

masses,” and would benefit from psychoanalysis. Harrison wrote with bitter humor that

the therapist was a sort of person differentiable from himself and Cowell: in his arrogance

and scientism, his ideas were only a few links away from those behind the creation of the

atomic bomb:

He has never heard a note of my music either so how can he say boo about it…
well he did anyway. If he is typical, I must say that there are increasingly two
kinds of minds today and I am party to the definitely old-fashioned school of
thought, I will certainly not condone anything in a line of thinking that would lead
by any diabolical chain of immoralities to such a thing as that horrible atomic
bomb. I think science is going to either wreck us or we will get some sense into
our heads.199 (my italics)

Then Harrison’s stridency cooled, and he mused: “picture of young neurotic defending

his neurosis to the end.”

199
To Henry Cowell, undated (1945?), Cowell Coll.

200
 The logic of loose association found in this remark—whereby through certain vague

resemblances, primarily through antithesis with himself and Cowell, the therapist could

be regarded as, if not the same as, then very close to the engineer of an atomic bomb—is

the same as that which he would later more thoroughly develop into a coherent and

comfortable reality. Here, as later, Harrison linked together things that he found

distressing—a psychologist’s arrogance and that which led to the atomic bomb—so as to

more assuredly reject them. Yet, if this habit offered assurance, it might have at the same

time created additional stress by heaping negative significances onto concerns that would

have been less troubling if considered in isolation. Dualism, as such, might have not only

been the way out of Harrison’s emotional problems, but also a contributing factor to his

original breakdown.

An even earlier indication of such dualistic loose association is found in a letter

Harrison wrote to Olive Cowell in 1937, written soon after the imprisonment of Henry.

Harrison confessed the agony over his mentor’s imprisonment, and conjectured upon a

division between two sorts of people, “good” and “evil”:

The day before I left I read of Henry’s sentence, and I want to tell you how it
agonizes me. This seems not such an unjust world as totally justiceless…. I
cannot say how this whole thing has affected me, the strength of ignorance and
predjudice and the prevailing lack of balanced perception in the great mass was
never so wholly apparent to me before. It seems that all one can do to be good in
this world is to follow one’s own precepts…. If you take any but your own ideas,
corruption has begun in that very process. What irritates me more than all else is
the compromise. Those who haven’t sufficient strength of perception to carry an
idea thru to its most ridiculous conclusion, and who will go “so far” and then say
“but after all,” those are the ones who are the forces of evil as I see it.
Caution, moderation; these are the words that make the thotways [sic] of the
uncreative. These are the words that corrupt and confuse the creative world, and I
imagine that there never will be found any understanding or balance between the
productive and the unproductive types. And the tradgedy [sic] of it all is that the

201
 good, productive, penetrative, and holiest life seems by this arrangement to be
unhappy at best, almost inevitably.200

Though Harrison indicated in the letter that he did not know the precise nature of

Henry’s crime, it is likely that he knew it was a homosexual offense, and it is possible

that his anger was not only an expression of loyalty but also an expression of his own

sense of victimization by a homophobic society. It is possible that his dismissal of

intolerance in the “great mass” as a force of evil might have empowered him to expel the

force of popular opinion from himself.201 Yet, here at the age of twenty Harrison did not

explicitly identify the mass’s evil “thotways” with homophobia, or more generally with

intolerance, but rather with an unwillingness to follow an idea to its “most ridiculous

conclusion.” He was, in other words, declaring that rationalism to the point of

“ridiculousness” was good and creative.

This may seem to be an odd notion to champion, but it was indeed the style of

thinking that characterized Harrison’s later reality. And although the harshness and

woundedness of the letter to Olive Cowell would not remain characteristic, there was a

pronounced negative side to his universalist sentiments of later years. All points in

Harrison’s Round World of Music were linked only through mutual antithesis to the

forces of absurdity. Great distances of time and space, such as that dividing ancient

Greece and Indonesia, were elided into a cozy, non-differentiated proximity (rather than

severed by jagged ideological conflict), but only through dichotomization with the

overwhelming forces. The trans-cultural nature of the good gave rise to the perception of

corruption, for indeed the perceptible world did not conform to Harrison’s ideals.

200
To Olive Thompson Cowell, 21 August 1937, Cowell Coll.
201
For Harrison’s account of being gay in San Francisco during these years, see his interview with
Winston Leyland, Aptos 1973, reprinted in LHR, 70-84.

202
Meanwhile the presence of corruption was a necessary element against which to define

the good things and bring them into a seeming solidarity.

The belief that reasoned musicianship transcended culture permitted Harrison’s

intercultural manner of composing. Harrison combined materials of distant origins, with a

degree of indifference to those origins justified by the belief that at root the materials

were the same. He assembled a composition that exploited those apparent similitudes,

while allowing the different origins of the materials to remain apparent. Such elision of

culturally distant musical voices can be seen, for instance, in the titles of the movements

of the Concerto for Violin, Cello, and Javanese Gamelan (1982). First are the titles of the

outer movements, “Ladrang Epikuros” and “Gending Hephaestus.” Ladrang and gending

are both formal structures of Central Javanese karawitan (the gamelan repertory), while

Epikuros and Haphaestus are the names of a Greek philosopher and a metal-working god,

that latter perhaps chosen as an appropriate object of homage for hammer-wielding

gamelan musicians or perhaps as an allusion to the apocryphal story of Pythagoras’s

discovery of the physics of tuning on blacksmith’s hammers.

Elisions are apparent in the meter of these two movements, which in its feeling

hovers ambiguously between Western meter and Javanese karawitan (the music played

on gamelan). Indeed, the scores Harrison wrote for use by the soloists and the gamelan

orchestra are not the same: the former conveys the logic of Western meter through staff

notation, and the latter conveys the logic of karawitan through its conventional cipher

notation.

203
Ex. 11: Excerpt from Gending Epikuros, Violin Staff Notation

Ex. 12: The same excerpt, Kepatihan Notation

204
 While this sort of elision was powerful as a compositional technique, as a manner of

representing the world “out there” it could be highly problematic. Many of Harrison’s

statements were shrouded in a peculiar haze: was he describing the world as it was or was

he “composing a world” (a phrase I borrow from the title of Miller and Lieberman’s

book)? As noted, the process of elision (in part through mutual antithesis) could take on a

life of its own and produce similitudes for which there was no empirical support. Some of

these Harrison did not directly verbalize, but nevertheless they can be found implied

among other assertions which were logically founded upon them. I have not, for instance,

found Harrison to have written in the most direct manner that traditional Indonesian

music employed just intonation. He implied it, for instance, in the above statement that

“musical satisfaction now lies in the Orient”: Harrison reasoned that the composer must

turn to the Orient because of the destruction wrought in the Occident by engineers who

were “committed to the false tuning of equal temperament.” To suggest that we must

return to the Orient because of the false tuning of the Occident amounted to an attribution

of just tuning to the Orient without making the statement in the most explicit terms.

Harrison also implicitly attributed just intonation to Javanese music in a note

introducing his 1961 Concerto in Slendro, by describing his “slendro”202 with a series of

numerical ratios, and remarking that this “slendro” was in “correct ‘just intonation’.” He

did not explain in what sense the tuning was “correct.”203 Was it correct in the sense of

“authentically Javanese,” or was it correct in a more absolute sense, with the implication

that it might be even more correct than slendro found in Java? The meaning of this

202
Slendro is one of the two sorts of scales (or tunings) in Central Javanese gamelan. The other is
pelog. Ensembles will often consist of two sets of instruments, one in slendro and one in pelog.
203
Lou Harrison, Concerto in Slendro LP liner notes, New York: Desto Records DC-7144

205
statement will become clearer in the discussion of Harrison’s modes in the next section.

What is important here is that at moments Harrison’s “reality” seems to be transcendent

of the earthly reality: it was not a sticking point that his representations of other cultures

be in fact accurate, as what he was ultimately seeking to represent was something higher

and more reasoned than the pettier reality of the actual world.

The correlation between Javanese gamelan and just intonation does make sense

within Harrison’s dualistic model of similitudes and antitheses, in which just intonation

and gamelan were both not products of industrialized modernity, and their similarity was

established through their mututal antithesis to that modernity (corresponding to equal

temperament). Stated differently, Javanese music, clearly not belonging to the Western

tradition of art music or of popular music, could be classified in the alternative category

of ancient (natural) musics. Therefore it belonged to just intonation and just intonation

belonged to it. To articulate this process of reasoning probably would not have seemed

sensible to Harrison, nor would it have felt quite right to state the ultimate conclusion in

the boldest terms, as there was no direct evidence for it, but the governing dualism

permitted statements that ultimately confirmed it.204 As noted, the dualism also inspired

204
Harrison’s sort of dualism is quite like E.T.A. Hoffmann’s as described by Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea
of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1989): 43. Hoffmann’s
worldview was as perfectly (and occasionally as problematically) symmetrical as Harrison’s. According to
Dahlhaus: “Dichotomies such as ‘ancient-modern,’ ‘heathen-Christian,’ ‘natural-supernatural,’ ‘plastic-
musical,’ ‘rhythm-harmony,’ ‘melody-harmony,’ or, finally, ‘vocal music-instrumental music’ combine
into a system that, while never appearing as such, steers the arguments from the background, as it were.
Hoffmann’s concatenation of antitheses is doubtless a logically questionable enterprise. Put bluntly, the
process consists of nothing but the association of a pair of quite obvious opposites with other similar pairs
in such proximity that finally each category on one side (‘ancient,’ ‘heathen,’ ‘natural,’ ‘plastic,’ ‘rhythm,’
‘melody,’ ‘vocal music’) simply melds together with the others and may be brought into contrast with all
the categories on the other side (‘modern,’ ‘Christian,’ ‘supernatural,’ ‘artificial,’ ‘musical,’ ‘harmony,’
‘instrumental music’).”
Dahlhaus tells us that through Hoffmann’s system of dichotomies he was able to produce assertions
without ever actually asserting them: “Hoffmann alludes to the idea of associating ‘classical’ music with
the esthetic idea of the beautiful, and, in contrast, ‘romantic’ music with the sublime, without ever
expressing it in unmistakable terms.” It would seem that the trick in both cases was to speak in elaboration

206
the physical tuning of gamelans in just intonation and the creative combination of

Western and Javanese instruments into various consonances in his compositions.

Late in life Harrison expressed some uncertainty that all tuning practices world-wide

could really be understood in terms of simple ratios. This was no radical dismantling of

the reality. Yet it was a subversion: Though Harrison’s meaning is not perfectly clear to

me, it seems that in a keynote address to the Microtonal Society in 2001 he suggested that

the idea that just intonation (or was he in fact rather referring to Pythagorean tuning?)

could explain all the world’s intonations was the same sort of falsehood as the belief in

the equal-tempered scale. Such would be a refutation of a core tenet of his earlier

universalism (It is clear from this address that Harrison had not entirely abandoned his

world view, only that he was admitting a “fracturing” in it):

I am sure that each of us has a view of “what went wrong” to surround us almost
everywhere with the dull industrial gray of a global monoculture in twelve-tone
equal temperament. My own view is fractured. I have the feeling that many over
the years have hoped that somehow, if a person went far enough in cycling
fifths—actually true 3:2s—she would find that this simplest tuning pattern of all
would “transubstantiate” into all the other intervals. Pretending that such is
possible seems to me one way of entering that wish-fulfillment dream world
which now pervades music everywhere that “the West” has settled in. The West
is, of course, Northwest Asia, which is Europe and its satellite cultures. The other
part seems to me economic. Imagine being able to “mechanofacture”—for there is
little “manu” in it—rank upon rank of theoretically different instruments, tuned all
the same, and interchangeable everywhere on the planet. What a supercorporation
the whole thing implies. And, indeed, to my mind that is what it is.205

Despite the “fracturing,” this quotation exemplified the language that Harrison had

been employing for decades. He had by that time spent much of a lifetime combating the

“dull global monoculture in twelve-tone equal temperament,” against industrial

of this unarticulated, dichotomously structured “background” to the point that those correlations and those
antitheses that were left unstated were nevertheless communicated, intrinsic as they were to the whole.
205
Lou Harrison, “Microfest 2001 Keynote Address,” The Journal of the Just Intonation Network 10,
no. 4 (2001): 1.

207
modernity of the 19th and 20th centuries, as he understood it. His battle strategy was to

construct an appealing universality of everything else: of that which came before (the

pre-19th-century West), of that which existed outside (Asian cultures), and of that which

was in rebellion (certain 19th- and 20th-century artists, mostly his own modernist

colleagues). He had advocated locally made instruments and against “supercorporations”

for decades. It is unclear whether at this late point he continued to understand his own

principles as necessarily underlying such hand-made objects, different as they were from

the standardized, machine-built objects of industrialized modernity.

For the alert reader, the sorts of broad generalizations about the “East” necessary to

carry out this strategy will be suggestive of the colonialist thinking described in Edward

Said’s Orientalism. It is worth saying, however, that Harrison’s manner of thinking was

in one respect different from that described by Said. This is not because Harrison held the

East in high regard (which would not in itself set him apart), but more importantly

because Harrison’s statements were not attempts at constructing clear boundaries

between a Western “us” and an Eastern “them,” but rather in dismantling such

boundaries. Even while he deployed his own generalizations, Harrison described a reality

in which the “us” (the group with which Harrison positively self-identified) was

configured as opposed to the mainstream of Western culture but not opposed to the East.

Harrison’s mainstream “them” was absurd, omnipresent and dangerously close; his “us”

included a community of rebellious artists in the U.S. and peoples on the far end of the

globe.

In that sense Harrison’s dualism rejected rather than affirmed the sense of a

differentiable East and West. His effort at decentering the West, and indeed dissolving it

208
as a concept, is exemplified in his terminology (already witnessed in the statement to the

Microtonal Society quoted above) by which he turned Europe into “Northwest Asia” and

America into a “satellite culture” of Europe or on other occasions into “Usonia.”206

Harrison often placed “the West” in quotes, indicating that, rationally speaking, there was

no such place. Note how much Harrison’s view is like that of the Orientalists, described

by Said below, in terms of its dualistic building of opposing chains, and yet how his

divisions of its “us” and “them” fall along different lines from theirs:

One of [the historical/cultural circumstances out of which Orientalism emerged] is

the culturally sanctioned habit of deploying large generalizations by which reality
is divided into various collectives: languages, races, types, colors, mentalities,
each category being not so much a neutral designation as an evaluative
interpretation. Underlying these categories is the rigidly binomial opposition of
“ours” and theirs,” with the former always encroaching upon the latter (even to
the point of making “theirs exclusively a function of “ours”)…. “Our values were
(let us say) liberal, humane, correct; they were supported by the tradition of
belles-lettres, informed scholarship, rational inquiry; as Europeans (and white
men) “we” shared in them every time their virtues were extolled. Nevertheless the
human partnerships formed by reiterated cultural values excluded as much as they
included. For every idea about “our” art spoken for by Arnold, Ruskin, Mill,
Newman, Carlyle, Renan, Gobineau, or Comte, another link the chain binding
“us” together was formed while another outsider was banished.207

As will be seen further in the next section, division and ordering were replete in

Harrison’s schema, and yet they had nothing to do with creating divisions based on

language or race, but rather had the reverse effect of unifying diverse cultural

products under a set of trans-ethnic categories. It cannot be denied, however, that

Harrison’s strategies required him to construct an Orient that suited his own “reality,”

and in that respect he exemplified the mentality described by Said.

206
Usonian was a term invented by Frank Lloyd Wright to refer to Americans. Also Usono means
American in Esperanto.
207
Said, Orientalism, 227-228.

209
The “Reality” Part 2: The Construction of Similitudes through the Hierarchical

Ordering of Trans-National Musical Concepts

Documented in Harrison’s writings is a “reality” that, besides uniting worldwide

practices in a dualistic scheme of the “reasoned” versus the “absurd,” also united them in

a plethora of ordering schemes. These orderings were hierarchical:208 their assemblage

and classification of world-music concepts were done from the top down, proceeding

from large abstract concepts.209 The concepts, for the most part, were trans-cultural: the

exemplars of “pentatonic,” “opera,” and even “Baroque” could be found anywhere in the

world. Harrison’s biggest compendium of such orderings was the Music Primer, which I

will discuss below.

These orderings schemes functioned in part as aids for the composer. For instance, in

the Music Primer Harrison laid out a classification of melodies as “Base, Middle, &

Full,” each designating an increasing degree of completeness of a precomposed melody

and a decreasing responsibility on the part of the performer to add ornamentation (MP,

11). Elsewhere, toward a transnational ordering of contrapuntal methods, Harrison

208
Hierarchy here does not suggest that Harrison was ordering world cultures in terms of their
advancement from the most primitive state to the most cultivated states. There are, though, traces of that
way of thinking evident in Harrison’s distinction between the world’s “cultivated” and “primitive”
societies, terms reminiscent of cultural-evolutionist notions of unilinear development of human societies
from less to more civilized states.
209
My analysis in this section has been aided by Charles Seeger, “Reflection on a Given Topic: Music
in Universal Perspective,” Ethnomusicology 15, no. 3 (1971): 385-98. If I understand Seeger correctly, he
differentiates between hierarchical orderings that proceed from broad abstract concepts and systematically
subdivide into smaller units, and taxonomical orderings that proceed from individual percepts, which are
grouped into increasingly encompassing categories. Harrison’s orderings are consistently of the former
variety.

210
proposed “Formal” versus “Informal” as the uppermost categories, with subcategories of

“Imitative” versus “Non-Imitative,” and further subcategories of “Diatonic” and

“Chromatic,” and so forth on down (MP, 12). He attested that each of these kinds of

counterpoint “abounds in world musics.” Harrison suggested further that “Differentiated”

and “Non-differentiated” were useful concepts in the ordering of contrapuntal styles:

“Some Bach Chorale Preludes & Balinese Gamelan works have voices widely

Differentiated in style—a rapid, figurative voice counterpoints a slow & vocal chorale,

etc., while Palestrinian voices all move in a very similar way & are Non-differentiated”

(MP, 13).

Ex. 13: Chart from Music Primer

211
 The ordering scheme in which Bach Chorale Preludes were equated with Balinese

Gamelan can be taken as exemplary of Harrison’s manner of making practices from

opposite ends of the globe representatives of larger trans-cultural concepts (in this case

“Differentiated Counterpoint”). Harrison’s ordering schemes were based not on cultural

evolutionist theory, but on an alternative vision of the relationships of the world’s musics

in which culture and nation were in fact relatively unimportant, and cultural

“advancement” was meaningless.210 As compositional tools, aside from their explicit

function of systematically enumerating possible compositional techniques, Harrison’s

hierarchies allowed the discovery of new similitudes among the world’s musics. Whereas

dualism had permitted the discovery of similitudes through mutual antithesis, ordering

permitted their discovery through typology.

Though some of the transnational musical types yielded by these hierarchies were not

uniquely Harrison’s—he grouped many scales from around the world under the familiar

category of “pentatonic”211—in other cases the association of elements under Harrison’s

transnational concepts was inventive. He once remarked upon how certain Korean pieces

belonged to the category of “Baroque”: “Sujechun (and a few other works—Chn Peh Hyi

210
Eric von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs’s hierarchical taxonomy of instruments was another trans-
national ordering scheme that was not based on evolutionism or diffusionism. It is presented in
“Classification of Musical Instrument,” trans. Anthony Baines and Klaus P. Wachsmann, Galpin Society
Journal 14 (1961): 3-29; oringinally published as “Systematik der Musikinstrumente: Ein Versuch,”
Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 46 (1914): 553-590. René Lysloff and Jim Matson have critiqued the principle of
hierarchical taxonomy upon which the Systematik is based, and upon which they argue all subsequent
systems for organizing instruments have been based. See their “A New Approach to the Classification of
Sound-Producing Instruments,” in Musical Processes, Resources and Technologies, ed. Kay Kaufman
Shelemay (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1990), 213-236.
211
The universality of pentatonic scales has been seriously considered among ethnomusicologists as
well. See Van Khê Tran, “Is the Pentatonic Universal? A few Reflections on Pentatonicism,” World of
Music: Journal of the Department of Ethnomusicology, Otto-Friedrich University of Bamberg 19, nos. 1-2
(1977): 76-91.

212
Mun, and Hae Ryong among them)” employed an antiphonal use of contrasting

instrumental groups and could thus be categorized with the orchestral groups of the

Concerto Grosso form. “Actually, Sujechum is a Baroque work, aesthetically, and a very

great one—a splendid expression in Korea of that last true aesthetic of mankind (which

was world-wide).”212

Even Harrison’s pentatonic classifications were eccentric. He adopted the Javanese

words “slendro” and “pelog” as pentatonic categories referring, not specifically to modes

from Indonesia, but rather generally to anhemitonic and hemitonic modes respectively

(modes without and with half-step intervals).213 In the Primer Harrison represented

various “slendro” and “pelog” modes through the ratios of just intonation. More than

simply borrowing the terms “slendro” and “pelog” for his system, Harrison implied that

the Javanese theory behind the terminology was the same as his own:

Crossing the Pacific on a freighter I began a little list of pentatonic modes, some
of them already known to me and some of them noted as possibilities for future
investigation. I suddenly realized that European music theory lacks any usable
classification or naming system for penta-modes—an astonishing lack, I think.
During the same trip I also composed a little Violin Concerto for a friend. This I
wrote in “anhemitonic pentatonic,” modes (only two of them), and, since
Indonesians use the term “Slendro” to mean “anhemitonic pentatonics,” and, that
term being shorter and lovelier, I called the piece “Concerto in Slendro.” (MP, 26-
27

For Harrison, it was clear that the Javanese concept of “slendro” was the same as his

own concept of anhemitonic pentatonics, and, seeing his own concept as of trans-cultural

applicability, he saw no reason not to likewise use the term “slendro” as a trans-cultural

212
“Creative Ideas,” 3.
213
It may be that Harrison preferred not to use the terms “hemitonic” and “anhemitonic” because, in
making the semitone integral to their definition, they perpetuated a bias toward equal temperament.

213
descriptor. Though the reasonableness of this was obvious to Harrison, the critics of

Concerto in Slendro (1960) did not understand:

Well—the “Western” critics wrote that my piece was composed in “Exotic

Indonesian Modes.” Since the two modes concerned are the simplest and most
widespread modes on the planet, two things were clear: 1) Some critics are deaf.
2) “Westerners” do not regard it as really possible (or if possible, then fair) for
other than Europeans to invent or already to have invented good clear theory &/or
terminology about anything except maybe about religion. (Europeans have never
invented a major religion.) (MP, 27)

In Harrison’s ordering, all pentatonic scales were represented as varieties of one of

four categories: “Prime Pentatonic,” “Slendro,” “Pelog,” and “Mixed.” All were

expressed via numerical ratios; for instance, one version of the “Prime Pentatonic” was

written 6/5 10/9 9/8 6/5 10/9, each ratio designating a consecutive interval (he also

provided the ratios between each of the ascending notes and the fundamental, in this case

1/1 6/5 4/3 3/2 9/5 2/1).214 Harrison called this manner of representing modes via just

intonation “the only sure demonstration” (MP, 27). His meaning in this statement, as with

others of its kind, is unclear. Was it that through these simple ratios one was sure of

getting the most accurate representation of the pentatonics of various cultures, or that one

was sure of getting a cornucopia of “correct” pentatonics, rather than what might

characterize actual practice? I believe that Harrison was vague because the point

remained ambiguous in his own mind, as either a matter of “reality” as it was or (and) as

he composed it.

In the realm of Harrison’s compositions, this ambiguity was simultaneously important

and irrelevant. It was important because in a work like the Double Concerto instruments

214
Besides expressing the Prime Pentatonic (“The Human Song”) with ratios, Harrison wrote scale
degrees. In one version, it was 1 flat-3 4 5 flat-7 1. In other versions it was 1 2 flat-3 5 flat-6 1 and 1 3 4 5 7
1. “Slendro,” “Pelog,” and “Mixed” modes were not written with scale degrees, only ratios.

214
of different cultural origins were apparently made to truly play a single pentatonic scale

together in tune, the sort of thing that would be possible if the world’s musicians were in

fact conforming to Harrison’s pentatonic ordering scheme. It was irrelevant because in

Harrison’s compositions he himself created both the theory and the music itself, and so

his ideas on the similarity among different musics, though cloudy in their relation to the

world’s various musical practices, became a cloudless representation of the fact. The

Double Concerto premiered on the Mills College gamelan, which Harrison and Colvig

themselves created and tuned in pure intervals. This, in a sense, settled the issue of

whether gamelans are tuned with pure intervals, for indeed at Mills College there was

one.

Harrison did not specify whether this catalogue of modes, which he said “constitute

every human’s most important tonal inheritance” (MP, 27), had been discovered via

observation (field work) and then organized inductively into categories or if they had

been developed by mathematical deduction and then attributed to various cultures after

the fact. I suspect it was a combination of the two, with more of the latter than the former.

What is certain is that Harrison was not interested in the theories behind intonational

practices other than his own. It would have been out of character for him to have called

non-Western understandings of intonation “irrational,” but he nevertheless did voice his

indifference on the subject. In front of a mixed assembly of Asian and Western musicians

at the 1961 Tokyo East-West Conference, he announced his disinterest in local,

“magical” understandings of intonation:

Now the Westerner will tell you that the notes are C, D and E. The Indian says,
“the cry of the peacock and the trumpet of the elephant” (or some such): the
Chinese indicates the “tones of the Emperor and his Prime Minister”—or
whatever. All alike are magical names, they give no information. But when

215
 Ptolemy said, for Syntonon Diatonon, 10/9-9/8-16/15-9/8-10/9-9/8-7/15 [sic], he
gave an analog of the true events—and so we may tune this tuning precisely as he
did then in Alexandria, as it sounded through the beautiful museum there.215

As seen, similarly with Harrison’s dualistic reality, in which two things that might

seem to be separated by a great chasm of difference could be collapsed together via a

mutual antithesis, Harrison’s ordered reality connected dissimilar concepts by placing

them in a common category. This led to some highly original forms of argument. In one

case, Harrison put this logic to a pragmatic end in a plea for preservation and expansion

of the Chinese opera in the U.S.. On a large, elaborately calligraphied sheet of paper, he

called for greater financial support for the suffering art form. Chinese opera was one of

two of the world’s operatic traditions, and as such to allow the art, presently struggling, to

die because of financial troubles in the richest nation in the world would be worse than

criminal: it would be “nonsense.” Integral to Harrison’s argument was the art form’s

status as Opera, a category that transcended nationality. Harrison reasoned that Opera had

two sub-categories, “Chinese” and “Western,” and since both were practiced in the U.S.

both could legitimately be called American. American Opera in all its forms must be

supported.216

A few ordering schemes not already described include nine ways of varying a motive;

two ways of handling intervallic content (“Strict Style” and “Free Style”); three varieties

of rhythmic modes (Hindu, Islamic, and European medieval); a catalogue of forms

(especially dance forms); four motivations for composition (voluntary, suggested,

requested, and commissioned); and three ways of using the Fibonacci sequence. Chinese

215
Harrison, “Refreshing,” 142.
216
This plea appears among Harrison’s papers at the University of California at Santa Cruz without
date.

216
opera was the world’s most “complete musical theatre,” because it fulfilled every sort of

text-musical relationship: “Plain speech, unaccompanied. Plain speech accompanied.

Rhythmitized speech unaccompanied. Rhythmitized speech accompanied. Song

unaccompanied, etc., up to & including Chorus accompanied” (MP, 27)

Harrison’s organizational impulse at one point led him to propose a world center for

world music. At the 1961 East-West Conference in Tokyo, he drafted a description (not

published in the proceedings) of a rather large building that would house musicians from

all the world’s traditions, particularly the “civilized” ones. The problem to be addressed

was that these groups were, at the present moment, metaphorically divided into “four

large music rooms,” meaning that, “Although the musicians from the Sino-Japanese, the

European, the Hindu, and the Islamic rooms are indeed on speaking terms, still, each

knows only a bit about the knowledge and the traditions of the others.” Harrison’s

institute would break up these cultural divisions, and instead would reorganize the

civilized world’s musical knowledge into “1) a Mode Room, 2) a Library (for books,

printed music, and sound-recordings), 3) a Workshop—for theory, techniques, and the

entire instrumentality--, 4) a print shop-for the spreading of the knowledge of the

institute, and by those knowledges to help the less evolved musical cultures towards their

natural flowering, if they would want that.”217

Later, Harrison described his idea for the mode room in greater detail. It would be a

place where one could study “all the various musical modes that mankind has made in the

course of history” in an ordered way, as if all peoples in world history had been

collaborating in a single great project of mode construction. The mode room would be

217
Virgil Thomson archives at Yale University, quoted in Von Gunden, The Music, 164-65.

217
“the most important thing musically” he would ever do, and would function in the

following way:

What I had in mind was a set of drawers. For example, you could pull a drawer
and there would be Ptolemy’s intense diatonic. Then you would have bars, or
tuning forks, for an octave. Somewhere in the room there should be a harp or a
large instrument which you could tune up over many octaves to really study its
characteristics and be able to compose on it. Then there should be a big book
which should tell you when the mode was first written down, or where it was first
discovered, or what its history in diffusion among people was.218

There were varying degrees of clarity as to the derivation and intent of these

orderings. Was Harrison prescribing the rigors whereby a good composition and a good

compositional career might be fashioned? Was he logically determining the already set

rules by which Nature governed the world of music, or at least would if human

irrationality didn’t intervene? Was he representing practices that were plainly observable

in the real world, facts gathered through fieldwork? Generally he kept such distinctions in

a haze. Indeed Harrison’s thinking maintained little differentiation between the

prescription of correct action, the deduction of rational truths, and the empirical

observation of an “out there” reality. These orderings were presented both as fruitful

approaches for the composer to get a methodical hold of his resources and also as logical

orderings of the world of music, representations of a musical reality that was “out there,”

ultimately as demonstration of the rationality that governed that reality and made music

into a bond among humans.

218
Harrison, interview by Leyland, reprinted in LHR, 77.

218
Rational Eccentricity

“Music is emotional mathematics. As a matter of fact, it is rational intervals that grip you
and emotionally stir you, not the surds of equal temperament, which are from deafness.”
--Lou Harrison, from interview with RK

As he had sworn to Olive Cowell when he was twenty, Harrison had indeed

unwaveringly followed his “own precepts,” carrying many “thru to its most ridiculous

conclusion.” His inventive understandings of the world of music, besides lending a

particular illumination to various things musical and providing the similitudes that

permitted his method of musical composition, also severed him from established modes

of thought and granted him creative freedom. It enabled a wholesale rebuke of

conventionality that maintained such absurd values as, for instance, that of technological

advancement. Harrison had rationally and thoroughly remodeled “reality,” and in doing

so had turned the concept of “advancement” on its head. He had also made nonsense out

of such an idea as the superiority of European classical music, having shown that the

high-status music of the concert hall was mostly absurd, and that anyway there really was

no such place as “Europe,” only Northwest Asia.

Standardization, mass production, and equal temperament, while themselves

components of an ideology of hyper-organization, had no position within Harrison’s

system and were understood as features of the absurdity that saturated and dominated the

modern world. For all of its regulation, modern society and city life in particular became

merely a jumble of irrational numbers, or “surds”: “From the Latin, ‘Surd’=’Deaf’” (MP,

7). This label of “Surd,” as a designation of absurdity in both the field of mathematics (an

irrational number) and of perception (deafness) became the most searing criticism in

219
Harrison’s vocabulary. It signified not only how maddened mainstream culture was but

also how insignificant.

The Music Primer is both Harrison’s richest compilation of orderings and a testament

to his eccentricity in its fullest flower (it presents most of the ordering schemes I have

described so far). Harrison’s anticonventionalism is apparent in its very production. The

calligraphied text has no table of contents, no introduction, and all together little apparent

organization (even the treatises of other bohemian composers such as Partch and Cowell

were conventional in their layout and tone). The lack of organization is perhaps

surprising given Harrison’s love of ordering, and given the many orderings that the

Primer sets forth, yet it seems that, having established the ordered coherence of so many

musical concepts, the Primer itself was free to express a delight in disorder. Rather than

offering a succession of linearly developing ideas, the Primer offered a series of

seemingly unconnected (though in Harrison’s “reality” deeply connected) “Items,” the

flowerings of his “wild civility.”219 Harrison declined to exclude ideas that might be seen

as ideas irrelevant to a compositional treatise, and he declined to divide types of

knowledge into conventional categories. The Primer is rather an assortment of vaguely

relating compositional methods, observations about transnational music practices, and

gracious reflections on life and art.

Among the Primer’s items are an observation that children studying fractions in

school ought to be helped to tune them (page 5); that composers ought to write a version

of every vocal work in the international language of Esperanto (page 22); brief but

detailed instructions for the owner of a copy of the Music Primer on how to color in the

219
Here I allude to Robert Herrick’s “Delight in Disorder,” a poem Harrison quoted from in the Music
Primer.

220
boxes that precede each item—including suggestions on the possible order of colors and

the choice of paints (pages 38-39); an observation that “’Modern life’ is high-decibel

chaos, in smog” (page 44); and a list of 19th-century geniuses that included many social

renegades who created their ideas and materials from scratch, but no composers: “Morris,

Blake, Zamenhof, Whitman & maybe Dolmetsch—Darwin too, & Thoreau” (page 41).220

In one glowingly gracious reflection Harrison, rather than describing the qualities of

beautiful music, marveled at the blessing that there was music at all:

The miracle is not that so much music exists, nor that so much of it is beautiful—
but, rather, that it exists at all. Most music is produced by some fluke of nature—
harpsichord jacks just barely pluck & then repass the string, bows just barely pull
the strings & then proceed, the plucked string may balk or buzz, even vocal
chords grow hoarse & raw. Reeds may or may not vibrate, flutes may wheeze or
refuse, lips lapse infirm! Thank heavens that anything works when it does—& the
musicians too! (MP, 19-20)

In another passage, which I can only imagine to be partially tongue-in-cheek, Harrison

gave an idiosyncratic explanation of twelve-tone technique. First, he declared that

twelve-tone was a method of composing with “but a single neume (or melodicle).”221

Melodicles were one of Harrison’s early terminological inventions, similar to the concept

of neums that he may have received from Cowell. One used melodicles as fragments that

build melody through their transposition, retrograde, inversion, and so forth. This

statement suggests that at the time he wrote the Primer, Harrison had elided his old

concept of “melodicle” with “neume” and “twelve-tone row.”

220
That the 19th century was a sort of Dark Ages to Harrison is attested to by this list of iconoclast
poets and craftsmen and anti-industrialists, whose relationship to the prevailing attitudes of their age was
one of antagonism. The fact that he was not opposed to science, even if he was opposed to modern
technology, is attested to by his inclusion of the intellectual maverick Charles Darwin.
221
MP, 15. He had earlier explained that melodicles were “the oldest known method of musical
composition, probably deriving from Mesopotamia & Egypt” (1). For an explanation of Harrison’s
melodicle technique, see von Gunden, The Music. Also, on melodicles, neums, Harrison’s relationship to
Schönberg and his own earlier serialist compositions, see Neff, “An Unlikely Synergy.”

221
 Then, with mischief perhaps, Harrison made a more startling assertion about

serialism:

Mr. Schoenberg’s excellent ear early informed him that there is no tonality in
equal temperament (only the octave is a good interval). Being a European, &
sharing in Europe’s heavy investment in equal temperament, it did not seriously
occur to him simply to retune. He invented instead a way of putting some order
into an essentially chaotic affair by arranging an order of succession through the
unrelated pitches (while systematically avoiding the only related ones—the
octaves). Thus, he substituted an order of succession for a hierarchy of
relationships. If one is going to have to cope with twelve tones in equal
temperament then his method is one very good way of doing so. (MP, 15)

This account of the motivation for the twelve-tone technique was clearly quite unlike

Schoenberg’s own conception and different from that likely held by any twelve-tone

composer. Harrison creatively departed from the traditional, insider (he had himself been

an insider once) conception of serialism, offering instead a reworking of the idea within

his own “reality.” He employed his own terminology, so that the tone row became a

“melodicle,” and the complex motivations for serialism’s invention became a simple

combination of dissatisfaction with tonality under equal temperament and a typically

European failure of vision. This statement serves as demonstration of how distorting and

inventive were Harrison’s configurations of others’ practices. I believe that Harrison felt

sincere admiration for Schönberg, that he intended nothing back-handed about the above

description of his former-teacher’s technique. As we have seen, he could be similarly

respectful and yet uncompromising in his representations of Asian musics.

Another “Reality” from Cultural Relativism

Contrasting with Harrison’s way of viewing the world’s musics, in which all were

understandable according to certain trans-cultural concepts, is another paradigm that has

222
emerged in cultural thinking in the twentieth century and been of great importance for the

field of ethnomusicology. I will call that paradigm cultural relativism and will define it

here in such a way as to serve my present purpose. This is not the cultural relativism that

I discussed in the previous chapter on Cowell, which was actually shaped by positivist

and evolutionist ideas. Cultural relativism as I define it here has been more influential in

ethnomusicology since the field’s formal creation in the mid-1950s and as will be seen it

continues to be evidenced in ethnomusicological publications.

Corresponding to the “cultural” and “relativism” parts of its name, there are two

principal aspects to this cultural relativism that are only fully coherent when considered

together. First is the concept of “a culture” as a group with members and usually a

location. Culture in this sense is both integrated, meaning that its various forms of

expression are understood as part of a larger unity, and bounded, meaning that its

members’ forms of expression differ from those living outside of the cultural area.

Roughly, this cultural relativism regards people within the cultural area as the same as

one another and differentiable from those outside of it.

Second is the notion that for members of the cultural group the meaning of cultural

practices is constituted exclusively in relation to other practices of the same culture, and

that cultural practices have no meaning beyond this internal constitution. This aspect

carries implications for both research methodology and values. In terms of methodology,

the researcher is challenged with drawing the operative concepts for the interpretation of

meaning of a given practice or product (such as music) from within the culture itself,

rather than from any external source. In terms of values, the “goodness” or “badness” of

any cultural practice or product is to be understood according to modes of evaluation

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native to the culture itself. This aspect of cultural relativism has been especially

controversial, as it relates to ethical values (is Nazism to be understood as valid within

the context of German culture?) At the same time, the relativity of aesthetic values to

culture has been largely accepted among ethnomusicologists (at least in print). It is this

latter sense of the relative nature of values that has been most significant for

ethnomusicology.

The development of various versions of cultural relativism and its centricity in

modern anthropological thought is often attributed to Franz Boas and his students,

including Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Melville Herskovitz. Herskovitz was one

of the first to give formal articulation to cultural relativism.222 Writing in the first decades

after World War II, he championed the principle at a moment when it was both becoming

highly influential in the field of anthropology (and in the new discipline of

ethnomusicology) and was coming under attack as morally permissive in the aftermath of

the Holocaust. In this climate Herskovitz attempted to make clear what cultural relativism

was and was not. To him it was methodological: Anthropologists were to be aware of

their own cultural biases in conducting field work. It was not moral: Cultural relativism

did not command the tolerance of any action as “good” if it only conformed to the

definition of “good” within its cultural context.

222
See James W. Fernandez, “Tolerance in a Repugnant World and Other Dilemmas in the Cultural
Relativism of Melville J. Herskovits,” Ethos 18, no. 2 (June 1990): 140-164. In the 1950s there was
considerable debate on the merits of cultural relativism as a theory and as a basis for ethical and scientific
judgments. Arguing against cultural relativism, Frank Hartung stated that “it claims to be empirical but is
illogical; it claims to be objective but is surreptitiously moral; it claims to be reasonable but elevates
irrationalism; it claims to be scientific but prevents the development of an experimental science of
sociocultural conduct.” See Hartung, “Cultural Relativity and Moral Judgments,” Philosophy of Science 21,
no. 2 (April 1954): 118-126. Herskovits’s defenses of the theory include “Tender- and Tough-Minded
Antrhopolgy and the Study of Values in Culture,” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 7 (1951): 22-31;
and “Some Further Comments on Cultural Relativism, American Anthropologist 60, no. 2 (April 1958):
266-273, 1958. For a more recent discussion of cultural relativism and multiculturalism as bases for
government policy, see Amy Gutmann, “The Challenge of Multiculturalism in Political Ethics,” Philosophy
and Public Affairs 22, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 171-206.

224
 Similarly to Harrison’s brand of universalism, Herskovits’s cultural relativism

opposed evolutionist hierarchy, and was intended to deepen capacities of tolerance. There

the similarities ended. With the methodology of cultural relativism, the anthropologist

was to be aware that he/she too belonged to a culture, and therefore would inevitably

bring his/her own cultural biases into the understanding of other cultures. Above all, the

anthropologist would have to be extremely cautious in the declaration of universals,

which Herskovits argued often turned out to actually be absolutes—not ideas and

preferences everywhere held, but rather the projections of the Western researcher. In fact,

according to Herskovits, it was not only ideas and values but even sensory perceptions of

reality that were influenced by culture, and therefore even a simple empirical observation

by the researcher might not match that made by his research subjects. Culture went so far

as to affect seemingly fundamental experiences of taste, color, pain, and time. While the

search for universals was key to the Herskovits’s anthropological project, he held that

more often than not the pronouncement of universals was ethnocentric.

From the cultural relativist perspective, Chinese opera has everything to do with

Chinese culture, and Western opera has everything to do with Western culture. While the

two may become unified for convenience by the term “opera,” they cannot be

meaningfully understood as of a common type. There is no transcultural

musical/theatrical category of activity to which they both belong. Neither is there a

transcendent, non-culturally defined field of musical values by which they can both be

appreciated. In considering foreign objects and practices, it is culture that must be

prioritized, not “universal” concepts that, in fact being of Western origin, function to

conceal the fundamental differences among cultures.

225
 Once, when pressed in an interview to give a definition of world music, Harrison

responded, “well, music is music, no matter where you find it.”223 Perhaps the most

radical conceptual revision arrived at by cultural relativism in Ethnomusicology has been

the antithesis of Harrison’s view. It has been argued that when studying non-Western

musics the very concept of “music” must be considered an external imposition on

disparate practices that can only be properly defined from within their individual cultural

contexts. In other words, not only are particular musical aesthetics culturally contingent,

but the very thing we call music is a concept contingent to, invented by, Western culture,

and its recognition in the practices of other parts of the world is at best a case of mistaken

identity. Judith Becker, for instance, has argued that the organization of both musical

time and melody in Javanese music are best understood in relation to other Javanese

organization principles, such as those of the calendrical system, and not according to

conventional understandings of “tune” that the Western researcher is likely to bring to the

field. She herself arrived at this insight only after years of careful and focused study of

gamelan “in its own culture”:

Only after several years of performance of Javanese gamelan music, and research
into gamelan music, did I begin to suspect that the underlying assumptions of this
music, the way this music is conceptualized, have little in common with the
concepts underlying the music I grew up with. I had always assumed that “music
was music,” anywhere in the world, that musicians were musicians all over the
world, and that in spite of surface differences in tone, texture, rhythm, meter,
melodic contour, etc., all music derived from common sources, that musicians all
over the world used the same kinds of mental processes to produce their melodies.
I now feel quite sure that this is not the case, that there is not an abstract “universe
of music” which becomes manifest in different ways in different cultures, and the

223
Maria Cizmic, “Composing the Pacific: Interviews with Lou Harrison,” Aptos, CA, 1995,
http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/echo/Volume1-Issue1/cizmic/cizmic-interview.html.

226
 term music is a rather sloppy cover term applied to acoustic phenomena which are
the result of any number of different mental processes and conceptualizations.224

In ethnomusicology, the introduction of cultural-relativist knowledge has often

functioned in critique of concepts held to be universal. Becker’s challenge to the

universal concept of music is one example. Another, of much significance here, is Mark

Perlman’s critique of the notion that just intonation is a natural tuning system and that it

guides the tuning of gamelans in Java. Perlman presented his argument in an article titled

“American Gamelan in the Garden of Eden.” By this title I understand him to mean that

in the hands of certain modernist composers, foremost among them Lou Harrison,

gamelan had been woven into a Western pastoral mythology that had nothing whatsoever

to do with its role in Java.225

Harrison had given us gamelans in just intonation, by constructing them, composing

for them, and making statements suggesting, though never in the most direct terms, that

just intonation is a proper characteristic of gamelan. In response, Perlman, who has

interviewed musicians and gamelan makers in Central Java, asks us to examine the

principle of just intonation alongside another intonational principle, the Javanese embat.

He tells us that it is embat that properly accounts for Javanese tuning, and not the

Western, supposedly trans-cultural principle of just intonation. Whereas just intonation

proposes a single intonational ideal based on numeric ratios, embat proposes valuing the

unique intervallic contour possessed by each set of instruments. Any given gamelan’s

embat is particular and irreproducible. While embat is certainly not the same as equal
224
Judith Becker, “Time and Tune in Java,” in The Imagination of Reality: Essays in Southeast Asian
Coherence Systems, ed. A.L. Becker and Aram Yengoyan (Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corp., 1979),
98.
225
Mark Perlman, “American Gamelan in the Garden of Eden: Intonation in a Cross-Cultural
Encounter,” The Musical Quarterly 78, no. 3 (Autumn 1994): 510-555. Perlman also mentions David Doty
and Daniel Schmitt as members of the American gamelan scene who are committed to just intonation.

227
temperament, neither does it function as the antithesis of equal temperament in the way

that Harrison viewed just intonation.

Perlman’s contrasting of just intonation with the individuality-oriented embat makes

the former comes to seem rigid (as rigid as the equal temperament Harrison rebels

against). One might conclude that, whereas just intonation is founded on a single

principle (the use of the simplest ratios intervals possible), the aesthetic underlying

Javanese embat is without principles, similar to personality.226 Personality is unique to

each individual, and that uniqueness is one of the positive things about personality. It can

be said that some personalities are more pleasant than others, and yet there could never be

a single principle that defines the goodness or badness of personalities, nor a formula

from which good personalities could be derived, for such would run counter to

personality’s very essence as unique. In Java, then, each gamelan could be said to have a

personality, the uniqueness of which is valued and which cannot be understood or derived

through any formulaic method, including that of just intonation.227

Cultural relativism, as I have described it, is important to Perlman’s articulation of the

case. In relativizing Harrison’s values on intonation by contrasting them with embat, his

stated purpose is not to refute just intonation but to show how in each case the “discourse

226
What among gamelan musicians is called watak. On one occasion during my 2007 field study in
Central Java, my teacher Sudarsono explained to me that the bonang’s (an instrument of gongs arranged
horizontally on a rack, on which he was currently giving me a lesson) watak is to play behind the beat. He
explained this by way of encouraging me to be more relaxed and not rush as I practiced. According to Marc
Benamou (“Rasa in Javanese Musical Aesthetics,” Ph.D. diss. [Univ. of Michigan, 1998]), watak is
primarily the inborn aspect of personality. Unlike other aspects of identity which can be developed or
refined, a person’s watak cannot be changed or erased. It is therefore that which most deeply characterizes
a person. Ghending (musical pieces in the gamelan tradition) are also said to have watak.
227
Benamou describes two embat associated with slendro, both of which are named for female
characters of the Mahabarata. One, Larasati, was “branyak (brash but not crude) of character,” while the
other, Sundari, was “luruh (humble) of character.” There is little agreement among gamelan musicians as to
what precisely in terms of tuning gives these two embat their qualities, but “all agree that embat Sundari is
calm and refined…and embat larasati is coquettish or spritely” (“Rasa,” 302-304).

228
of intonation can be shown to embody the preoccupations of the culture that produced it.”

Discourses, Perlman explains, “reflect wider themes of each society.” Perlman argues

that, though Harrison might seem to some to be a dissident of Western culture, he was

actually “clinging tenaciously to ideas deeply embedded in Western music history (read:

as opposed to values evident on the culture’s surface)” 228 and was merely projecting

those ideas onto Javanese gamelan.

Perlman’s primary aim is to show how the “juxtaposition of elements from two

radically different music-cultures throws the deepest presuppositions of each into bold

relief.” He does not argue that composers such as Harrison are wrong to create gamelans

in just intonation, only that we must understand that they are doing something that is

“Western” and not “Javanese”:

As a student of traditional Javanese gamelan music (karawitan), I find this

[association of just intonation with the gamelan] an odd superposition of musical
concerns. Music in Java has nothing to do with just intonation—not in its interval
usage, not in its theory, not in its intellectual context. By impressing just intervals
into their gamelan, American composers, consciously or not, have infused a
Western soul into a Javanese substance.229

Leaving aside the question of whether just intonation is in any sense appropriate for

gamelan, I would like to turn to another absolute held by Harrison that could be similarly

relativized. That is Harrison’s belief in “quiet” as an absolute good, and “noise” as an

absolute bad, which led him into what Leta Miller has termed a “battle against noise

pollution.”230 The questions of what sorts of noises are desirable and what are not, what

228
Perlman, “American Gamelan,” 511.
229
Perlman, “American Gamelan,” 513.
230
I rely in the following analysis upon information provided in Miller and Lieberman’s (Lou
Harrison) account of Harrison’s attitude toward noise pollution.

229
decibel levels are desirable, in what locations, and to what extent one person ought to put

up with the noise of another person, are of quite broad societal concern compared with

the issue of which system of intonation is the best. With noises generated by machinery

and amplified music defining the modern soundscape, the notion of there being such a

thing as “noise pollution” has become widespread in the U.S.. Can “peace and quiet” be

regarded as a universal good? Do our aural environments need protection from noise in

the same sense that a river needs protection from man-made pollutants? Do we have a

right to peace and quiet, or conversely a right to be noisy?

I do not really seek to answer these complicated questions, only to suggest how

research informed by cultural relativism may be used in critique of Harrison’s views. His

notion of Quiet as an absolute good can be understood as of a piece with his belief that

the pleasantness or unpleasantness of musical experiences was dependent purely upon the

sound itself, not upon the person listening. Subjectivity was not important to the

apprehension of beauty: once everyone had “linked their minds and their ears,” all would

perceive beauty, intrinsic to sounds themselves, in the same way. Beauty was a feature of

sound, and “the ear” was merely a tool of that intrinsic beauty’s perception. Such an

idealized human ear in its natural and healthy state would be attuned to receive pleasure

only from rational sounds.

Just as cultural knowledge and individual personality were not factors in the

determination of good intonation, neither were they factors in the determination of good

volume. The following, from an interview in 1994 with Miller, is Harrison’s description

of the displeasure that he and Colvig experienced when attending a loud concert:

I concluded that people who live in cities now are deaf. We’re country boys; we
don’t need that. The anxiety aroused by that amount of sound was such that I

230
 could no longer have the kinetic response. I could see that there were humans on
the stage, and they were doing things, but my body did not respond. The ear was
cut in two. Such loud-tech nonsense represents the contemporary way of
impressing one with the establishment. All the corporate power is there. I don’t
need it.231

Harrison needed to make little distinction between his private, momentary experience at

the event (“anxiety,” no “kinetic response,” “my body did not respond”), his enduring

personal preferences (“We’re country boys; we don’t need that”; “I don’t need it”), and

external realities (“people who live in cities are deaf” and “loud-tech nonsense”

represents “corporate power”), as the three had no effective difference within Harrison’s

internally logical “reality.” The most interesting utterance in the above quotation is “The

ear was cut in two,” for in its very grammar, the addition of the direct article “the,” it

conflates the personal and the universal. Taken it in the context of Harrison’s reality, we

may understand that there was no logical distinction between his ear and “the” universal

ear, and as such his momentary experience and that of everyone (or at least everyone with

a sensible ear; remember that “deafness” and “absurdity” were the same to Harrison) was

logically the same.232

Given Harrison’s love of Javanese gamelan and his view of Quiet as an absolute

good, it is perhaps ironic that anthropologists and ethnomusicologists working in Java

have found a cultivated aesthetic of “noisiness,” and indeed interpreted that aesthetic as

important to gamelan. They have described a Javanese love of noise that, far from having

been introduced with modernization or corporatization, is actually an aspect of traditional

231
Harrison, interview by Miller, 13 Jan. 1994, in CAW, 185.
232
In his keynote for Microfest 2001, Harrison made a similar comment about loud music. He
described the difficulty he had with the workers constructing his home in Aptos, who chose to play loud
music while they worked: “It turns out that they are quite incapable now of doing their work without this
sound constantly in the background. They must apparently be connected with the great electric umbilicus.
So much for that state of affairs” (“Microfest 2001,” 8).

231
culture. They have observed that the Javanese have long tolerated and even valued a level

of noisiness and busyness that exceeds that of normal Western social boundaries, that

Javanese communities, whether in cities or villages, have a tradition of cultivated

noisiness.233

This Javanese concept of ramé, or, in a word, lively noise, presents a challenge to the

idea that the extent of tolerance for and enjoyment of noise and loudness is universal.

Sarah Weiss describes ramé as a value evident in both the most modern and traditional

forms of Javanese expression:

The cacophony of the Javanese world can be overwhelming to some, yet it is

highly valued by most Javanese people. The aural atmosphere of the preparation
for any kind of celebratory event should be ramé, or bustling and lively (in
Javanese). Multiple sound sources are integral to the creation of the keraméan
(keramaian, Indonesian) of the moment, including the combined airing of heavily
amplified radio or cassette music—often from several sources—impromptu
speeches, the sounds of hawkers, the increasingly organized sounds of multiple
groups of musicians as they prepare to perform. Traditional Javanese gamelan
music, or karawitan, is itself aurally ramé in the sense that there are many musical
events happening simultaneously in the texture of the music. The listener’s ear is
not drawn primarily to one predominant melody and then to the
accompaniment.234

Based on his observations while doing fieldwork in Java, R. Anderson Sutton has argued

that in the playing of digital and analogue recordings it is not just desirable volume that is

culturally relative, but also desirable distortion. He describes how, whereas as a

Westerner he had once assumed the absence of distortion was an absolute value for

233
See Geertz, The Religion of Java (New York: The Free Press, 1960), 49; and Alton Becker, “Text
Building, Epistemology, and Aesthetics in Javanese Shadow Theater,” in The Imagination of Reality:
Essays in Southeast Asian Coherence Systems, ed. A.L. Becker and Aram Yengoyan (Norwood, NJ: Ablex
Publishing Corp., 1979), 211-43.
234
Sarah Weiss, Listening to an Earlier Java: Aesthetics, Gender, and the Meaning of Wayang in
Central Java (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2006), 4.

232
recordings, in fact in Java he came to see that both the ability to perceive distortion and

the valuing of it were culturally determined:

But is “distortion” a culturally relative notion? To some extent, I believe it is.

Without having conducted controlled experiments myself, I am unable to present
statistical evidence in support of my belief. However, on a number of occasions
Javanese friends commented to me on the “good” (apik, bagus) or “clean” (resik)
quality of cassette recordings that I judged to be somewhat distorted—although
less so than many other recording I heard in Java. The threshold of distortion
perception—and certainly the threshold of distortion tolerance—would seem, then
to be variable in human experience, conditioned by various environmental and
cultural factors. Even if one accepts the notion of such variability, however, it is
clear that the degree to which high volume settings alter sound quality in Java is
unquestionably noticed by most Javanese listeners, and yet it does not appear to
bother most listeners.235

As seen in the above quotation by Weiss, ramé has been used to give a larger cultural

frame to the extreme polyphonic floridness of Central Javanese gamelan: gamelan is one

phenomenon of noisiness among others, including hawkers, impromptu speeches, and,

most significantly here, “heavily amplified” music. Sutton associates gamelan aesthetics

with the “busy” patterns of batik cloths, and again with heavily amplified music, often

from multiple sources.236 The music of Central Javanese gamelan is, from within this

frame, not an expression of Harrison’s quiet, regular, pastoral values, but rather of the

noisy, teaming chaos (so it can seem to a visitor) characteristic of a Javanese marketplace

or festival. From this angle, it would seem that gamelan in Java is performed with the

same spirit as the blasting of recorded music for an entire neighborhood.

235
R. Anderson Sutton, “Interpreting Electronic Sound Technology in the Contemporary Javanese
Soundscape,” Ethnomusicology 40, no. 2 (1996): 253.
236
Sutton, “Interpreting,” 258.

233
Conclusions

As a theory of culture, cultural relativism ought to be able to account for a cultural

phenomenon such as Harrison’s Double Concerto. Yet, cultural relativism’s view of

meaning as constituted within the integrated and bounded context of “a culture” makes

conceiving of the piece quite difficult. First, there is the problem of Harrison’s being

influenced by ideas from “outside” of his culture, most obviously in his use of Javanese

gamelan. Cross-cultural influence as such is difficult to account for coming from the

cultural-relativist viewpoint that I have described. Second, Harrison seems to have

worked vigorously to sever himself from many of the practices of his own culture, such

as its dominant preference for equal temperament. The idea that a member of a culture

might not exhibit the tendencies of the culture is also difficult to conceive of from the

cultural-relativist perspective, sometimes forcing an interpretation of the individual’s

ideas as either idiosyncratic or, as Perlman argues, as actually exemplary of those of their

culture on a more “deeply embedded” level than is obvious.

Though in this chapter I have focused my critique upon Harrison’s reality, I hope also

to have at least suggested that his Double Concerto presents something of a challenge to

cultural relativism. As a theory of difference, cultural relativism has its own limitations

based on its way of organizing difference and non-difference. Whereas Harrison had

severed musics into two types depending on their positive or negative relationship to

certain absolute values, cultural relativism divides all cultures from one another, and

views any given music as in some way integrated into the whole of a single culture (or

else is left with regarding it as idiosyncratic). This is one reason I find Harrison’s hybrid

compositions such as the Double Concerto to be so interesting, and for me it is an aspect

234
of their beauty. Not only do they present a challenge to myopic ethnocentrism by

introducing non-Western idioms into concert music settings; pieces like the Double

Concerto also challenge our supposedly more objective cultural relativism.

It is also worth observing the extent to which Harrison’s universalism and cultural

relativism have had the same goals. Both combat ethnocentrism, though by quite different

means. Harrison’s universalism diminished the significance of ethnic difference: It

demonstrated that ethnocentrism was a mistake because the ethnic differences that it

supposed were in fact mere surface variations, ripples upon an ocean of unity. Meanwhile

cultural relativism has combated ethnocentrism by amplifying the importance of

difference, insisting that values are culturally contingent and thereby removing the

grounds for passing absolute judgment on the practices of others. (Nor, argues Renteln,

does cultural relativism imply all cultures’ values to be “equally valid,” for to claim so

would necessitate that there be a scale for assessing value that lies outside of culture.)

From Harrison’s view, cross-cultural respect was established through recognition of

similitude, the fundamental positive regularities that connect all humans. Meanwhile, for

cultural relativism respect may come through recognition of previously unrecognized

terms by which people of different cultures make their claims to dignity. Finally, as

Harrison’s reality enabled examination, critique, and even a personal break from values

he felt to be oppressive, so has cultural relativism been often employed in challenges to

hegemony.

It must finally be restated that, though I have argued that Harrison created his own

“reality,” I do not think he was living a fantasy. Harrison’s reality was no more a fantasy

than the next person’s. It was a good-faith attempt at coming to terms with a complex

235
world, of which he had an unusual broad knowledge. Rather than holding Harrison’s

worldview up to impossible standards of objectivity, it may be best to assess it in terms of

its effects. What can be said here is that, as Harrison’s reality was not backed by

significant institutional power, the force it did have was counter-cultural. On a personal

level for him it was liberating and productive. It was exceptional not in its deviation from

objective truth, but in the extent to which it carried through on its own terms of

coherence, seamlessly coordinating every aspect of Harrison’s knowledge, whether

musical, ethical, scientific, or political. Harrison’s enormous body of creative works was

the “reality’s” outpourings, which communicated it and became material evidence for it.

It is thanks to this legacy, Harrison’s poems, calligraphied treatises, aluminum gamelans,

and his compositions, that we can so clearly hear his world of integrated and perfected

reason and intuition, his “Whole Round World,” as if through his own ears.

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 Chapter V: Conclusions: Reflections upon Modernism as a Peculiar Style of
Concern with Difference
Throughout this dissertation I have used certain terms that were also used by these

composers, though sometimes not in precisely the same ways. One is modernist. All of

the composers I have studied identified at one point or another, in one way or another,

with this label. All of them, for instance, published in the journal Modern Music. They

might not have agreed, however, with my definition of the term and might have resented

my choice to label them with it. I have used modernism in reference to what I have found

to be the sparse but distinctive ideological features that unite these composers and

distinguish them from other discourse communities. My use of the term has arisen from

the specific materials I have studied, and as such may not correspond precisely to other

modernisms, defined by other scholars in light of other materials.

In particular, my understanding of modernism differs from those that prioritize style

as definitional to the movement, counting as modernists, for instance, only those

composers who worked in a dissonant idiom. All three of the composers of this study

worked with intense dissonance only at times, and in particular Harrison—whose

medium from about 1960 onward tended to be consonant and backward-looking to the

euphoniousness of past centuries—has been championed as having “moved beyond”

modernism into postmodernism or into some other, broader worldview. I have prioritized

ideology in my definition of modernism, and the result has been a quite broad net that

captures both dissonant and non-dissonant styles indifferently, and even captures the
outward-looking and backward-looking Harrison. The advantage of this approach is that

it has allowed me to observe ideological agreement between composers who conceived of

themselves—and continue to be conceived of by commentators—as bitterly opposed.

Accounts of modernist ideology often list among its attributes scientism and progress-

orientation. For instance, noting that serialism came to dominate in institutions of

composition following the Second World War, Born and Hesmondhalgh contrast the

rising ideological flavor of this modernist movement with the one that preceded it: “The

earlier modernist (or proto-postmodernist) experiments with representations of others—

whether exotic, nationalistic, or populist—gave way to an increasingly abstract,

scientistic, and rationalist formalism based still on the near or total negation of

tonality.”237 Born argues that postwar high modernism asserted musical autonomy in the

deliberate exclusion of the representation of non-Western music, and denied that it was

limited by ethnicity. “The lineage that became institutionally and ideologically dominant

in musical modernism—serialism and its aftermath—and which is defined as an absolute

and autonomous aesthetic development, won out over the eclecticism of other early

modernist experiments, including the various forms of aesthetic reference to other

musics” (p. 18).

As a study of Cowell and Harrison, my project is an examination of the

experimentalist tradition that Born/Hesmondhalgh and others have defined in distinction

from the serialist/”high modernist” vein of modernist composition.238 Without wishing to

237
Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh, eds., Western Music and its Others: Difference,
Representation, and Appropriation in Music (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2000), 18.
238
It is important for my present purpose of suggesting continuities between the rationalism and
scientism of Cowell-style experimentalism and “high modernism” to distinguish between the
experiementalism of Cowell (and his followers) with that of Cage (and his followers). On the matter of
what each understood “experiment” to be—in terms of its salient aspects for the purposes of a composer—,

238
deny the many important distinctions between, for instance, a Harrison and a Boulez, I

have found that, in certain regards, these experimentalists were not as different from the

high modernists of Born/Hesmondhalgh’s description as it might seem. In particular, the

rationalism and scientism with which those authors characterize high modernism

characterize Cowell and Harrison as well (we have seen that Harrison’s views on science

were highly idiosyncratic, but he nevertheless claimed that a science-based certainty

underlay his endeavors). Musical autonomy, as we have seen, was a key concept in

McPhee’s representation of “the absolute music of Bali.” And while these composers can

justifiably be called “eclectic” (and perhaps, in Cowell’s case, “relativist”), they held

their interests in ethnic differences to a great extent in hopes of developing a relationship

with musical materials that would be transcendent of ethnicity (in other words, in search

of a truer, less ethnocentric musical autonomy).

Intellectual individualism was a tendency of these composers. This does not imply

isolationism. As we have seen, McPhee, Cowell, and Harrison, though driven to develop

highly personalized forms of expression, did not work in vacuums. Far from it;

individualism was a collective value (though, it would seem, it gave rise to the modernist

myth of isolation that some composers cultivated and has been cultivated on their

behalf—notably Ives239). By intellectual individualism, I mean the drive to see the world

they were utterly dissimilar. Cowell’s experiementalism was a rationalistic endeavor intended to uncover
through experimental processes scientifically verifiable truths of music that would yield material
advancements in musical technology. Cage’s experimentalism was meanwhile conceived as a cultivation of
equanimious consciousness in relation to musical results, in the manner in which a scientist was charged
with developing equanimious receptivity to the results of experimentation. In brief, Cowell was interested
in the products of experiment, while Cage was interested in its processes. While the two attitudes were not
necessarily mutually exclusive (and perhaps were not exclusionary in the minds of all experimental
composers), for the present purposes, only the experimentalism of the Cowell school is significant.
239
For instance, Cowell wrote in 1932: “While he was developing his materials and style, Ives attended
practically no concerts, certainly none in which “modern” usages were shown. Yet in some of his work,

239
afresh, distinct from all other visions, and to develop a unique aesthetic and moral

position towards the world. The composers of this study expressed their unique visions

through writings and compositions. They were influenced by colleagues and sometimes

gave credit, but each of the modernist composers I have studied was ultimately

determined to find an utterly distinctive angle upon art, and to develop for himself a voice

never heard before. (Colin McPhee was impressed with the less individualistic method of

composition among the Balinese, perhaps out of discontent with the individualism

required of him in the modernist milieu).

This modernist individualism has placed a special demand upon me as researcher. As

I noted in the Introduction, I have had to devote very careful study to each individual’s

conception of difference, because each was a new creation. Perhaps I have needed to

employ a more microscopic lens than I would have were I critiquing the writings of

academics, for whereas academics tend find reward in innovating within well established

paradigms, these artists claimed their fame through developing idiosyncratic, even

eccentric personal visions. Harrison in particular went to lengths to reinvent his entire

“reality,” to an extent that probably would have been untenable had he been an academic.

All three composers brought their modernist compositional imperative to create

products of radical originality into their cultural thinking, and the result was that, though

each devoted himself to very careful study, at times he may have felt legitimized in

crafting styles of knowledge that were “creative,” but, by academic standards,

“problematic.” This tension can be seen in the treatises of Harrison and Cowell, devoted

equally to the task of giving guidance to young composers and to representing the “truth

Ives with his innovations precedes his famous European contemporaries, Schönberg and Stravinsky”
(“American Composers IX: Charles Ives,” Modern Music 10, no. 1 [November-December 1932]: 29).

240
of music.” A dual function of prescription and representation—in guiding others in

regards to what was “good” of music on the one hand, and what was “true” of music on

the other—would not have been likely to motivate anthropological treatises, which are

conventionally only dedicated to the task of (cultural) representation.240 If these

composers’ representations of the differences “out there” in the world of music are

problematic, this fact may be understood as an outcome of the peculiar dual purpose that

they served.

All three composers shared a view that there was a “nature” of music: that music was

not simply a blanket term applied to things invented, performed, and lived with and

through, but was indeed something “out there” with inherent properties, which it was the

task of the composer (at least one of any worth) to understand in an innovative way. (All

three of these composers also allowed for relativism in their own ways.) Cowell based his

musical truth upon the overtone series and a variety of other systematic manipulations

and expansions upon the science with which he was familiar. Harrison’s musical truth

included an interest in just intonation. McPhee used his studies in Bali to discover the

immanent features of music (emotional expression was not one). In this way, it became

possible for these three composers to not only make evaluations of the musics of others in

240
Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western
Civilization (New York: W. Morrow & Company, 1928.) offers an interesting comparison, because it was
an ethnography that, while serving the function of representing Samoan culture, also explicitly functioned
as a prescription for American society (see Martin), based upon her findings in Samoa. In terms of its
representation of Samoan culture, Mead’s book has come under intense criticism. Whatever Mead’s legacy
to anthropology, positive or negative, it may be said that if her representation was problematic, it was so
largely because, like the composers I have studied, she created her object of study in order suit a purpose
other than neutral representation—what she saw as the positive development of American culture. See
Martin, “Relativism and the Reflexiveness of Interpretation: Margaret Mead and Coming of Age in Samoa,”
chap. 8 in The Languages, 212-233.

241
terms of whether they were “good” or “bad,” but further to arrive at evaluations of their

“truth” or “falsehood.”

Cowell at one point reflected upon this trend of composers becoming increasingly

interested in allowing their compositional decisions to be guided by notions of what

music “really was”: “There is an ever-widening interest among musicians and music-

lovers concerning the nature of what is being played, as well as how it is being played”

(NOM, I: 1). And further, “the study [of harmony] is generally unsatisfactory. [It] has not

been made into a scientific and reasonable exposition of the subject of harmony. It is a

leftover from the time when the aim was not to know facts about harmony, but to know

the conventions of ‘good taste’ as recommended by famous and skilled musicians”

(NOM, I: 7).

For each of these composers—in very different and dramatic ways—their inquiries

into the absolute nature of music were part of a struggle for personal, musical freedom.

This means that all of these developed theories of the “true” nature of music, were,

explicitly or not, strategic moves in a battle with other approaches to music-making

(often dominant and uncompromising approaches). Harrison, for instance, in arguing for

just intonation and against equal temperament, was claiming the freedom to compose as

he liked, not simply because he like it, but because it was, after all, “right.” Cowell was

similar, with his grounding of tone clusters and complex polyrhythms in a single

scientific system, and his denigration of conventional harmony instruction as haphazard:

“The conventional study of harmony is neither a science, giving impartial facts

concerning chords and their connection, nor is it a technique which can be followed in

order to reach a style in which any composer would wish to write music at the present

242
time” (NOM, I: 10). Conventional harmony instruction had arrogantly represented itself

as scientific, and it was therefore incumbent upon Cowell to develop a “true” harmonic

science in order to debunk it and free the student from its many “do nots.” The science of

non-conventionalism was, it seems, the only weapon for battling the science of

conventionalism.

Resentment was a consistent motivating force for these modernists, and adversarial

concerns gave shape to their ideas through-and-through. All three composers displayed

marked resentment towards specific dominating musical ideas and styles, and with every

breath and tone they committed to representing non-Western musical ideas and styles it

was simultaneously their objective to represent, define, and repute those former ideas and

styles, which were, in a burdensome sense, “theirs.” Although the object of each

composer’s resentment was inevitably constructed, those objects were certainly no more

a fantasy than were the foreign musics that these composers constructed in antithesis to

them and in confirmation of the validity of their own projects.

There has perhaps not been anything wholly radical about this dissertation, but in a

few respects I hope it will offer new analytical perspectives to historical musicology and

ethnomusicology. I hope to have provided a suggestion of possible ways to extend upon

the way musicologists examine composers who have composed “interculturally” and

represented non-Western musics.241 I have striven in this project to avoid either of two

extremes: on the one hand to uncritically accept these composers’ representations of non-

241
There is already an abundance of musicological studies on the broad topic of cultural difference.
Musicological essay collections on the topic include Jonathan Bellman, ed., The Exotic in Western Music
(Boston: Northeastern University Press: 1998); Born and Hesmondhalgh. eds. Western Music and its
Others; Yayoi Uno Everett and Frederick Lau, eds., Locating East Asia in Western Art Music (Middletown,
Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2004); Radano, Ronald and Philip V. Bohlman, eds., Music and the
Racial Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

243
Western music, on the other to dismiss their representations as mere exoticism, as a mere

manipulation of Orientalist tropes rather than as significant engagements with their

objects worthy of thoughtful consideration. As I discussed in the chapter on McPhee, the

tendency of some scholarship to move toward one of these extremes or the other—

finding the virtue of authenticity in one composer and vice of exoticism in another—has

sometimes arisen from external stylistic and ideological issues, which run independently

from the question of authenticity itself. This said, it is certainly the case that some

composers have given a great deal of care to their cultural representations, while others

have approached the matter with frivolity and ethnocentrism, and that scholars have had

an understandable desire to bring each of these treatments to their readership’s attention.

This project has focused on three composers who, like many other modernists, could

not be accused of having simply invented exoticist fantasies. Each devoted careful study

to their chosen non-Western topics, and each was supremely committed to fidelity, as he

imagined it might be achieved. The question I have ultimately hoped to have addressed is

not whether the representations of each composer were true or false, but by what means

they staked their claim to truth. I have not critiqued these composers’ representations by

rejecting them in favor of another truth about “the Orient,” or any particular culture.

I hope that what I have presented may be of interest to ethnomusicologists who are

giving thought to the epistemological concerns of their field. Like many

ethnomusicologists, I take the position that the analytical methods for arriving at “pure”

and “unproblematic” cultural representation do not now exist, and are not likely to exist

in the foreseeable future. In particular, although I have introduced knowledge developed

within ethnomusicology’s long-dominant cultural relativist epistemology as a contrast

244
with certain aspects of the knowledges of McPhee, Cowell, and in particular Harrison (I

also have aimed to suggest that there are continuities between all three and current

ethnomusicology), I have not done so with the intention of replacing the latter with the

former. This dissertation presents fragments of ethnomusicology’s ideological heritage

from the mouths of these composers, and suggests ways in which ethnomusicology can

become increasingly critical of its own limited modes of understanding difference.

As I have noted, I began this project with the hope of developing a method of

analyzing hybrid compositions. In the end I have analyzed the terms by which each

composer constructed a world in which hybrids could exist. We can know that these were

not fantasy worlds: in McPhee’s Tabuh-tabuhan, Cowell’s United Quartet, and

Harrison’s Double Concerto we can hear the “reality” of each.

245
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