Cowell's Sliding Tone and the American Ultramodernist Tradition

Abstract

That Cowell's use of has not received much attention is curious, considering that Banshee (1925), the quintessential example of Cowell's sonic innovation, is best known for its fantastic slides on piano strings. slide has a structural role in others of his works, including A Composition for Piano and Ensemble (1925), the seven-voice counterpoint of vocal wailing and glissando strings in Atlantis (1926-30), the Mosaic Quartet (1935), the colossal design of intricately woven instrumental slides in Symphony No. 11 (1953), and the cells of slides that dominate the sixth movement of Trio in Nine Short Movements (1965). Cowell's theoretical writing also attests to his fascination with tones. In New Musical Resources, a work that was written between 1916 and 1919 and later revised in 1929, he discusses sliding tones in three different dimensions-tone, tempo, and dynamic. In his unpublished treatise, The Nature of Melody, written between 1936 and 1937, he devotes