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RTé Lyric fm (Ireland): a documentary on composer Henry Cowell’s Irish roots. Broadcast date: January 21, 2018.

 

 

 

The American composer Henry Cowell was one of the most inventive composers of the early 20th century. His life and his music career were eventful and, at times, controversial, and he had strong connections with Ireland and Irish music.

‘The Banshee and The Tiger’ tells the story of the life and work of the ground-breaking American composer Henry Cowell (1897-1965), who produced dozens of compositions influenced by his Irish heritage and by Irish music and folklore.

As well as leading the way in composition, Cowell was also an ardent support of ‘world music’, long before that term was ever used, and he travelled the globe collecting music. The programme includes rare recordings, never, so far as we are aware, previously broadcast in Ireland, which Cowell made with singers who appeared in the 1934 landmark documentary ‘Man of Aran’.

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Details

This program is presented by Guy Livingston, an experienced radio presenter and musician who has performed Cowell’s piano works internationally. Other contributors are musicians as well, and experts on aspects of Henry Cowell’s life  and speak entertainingly and with authority on their subject.

Biographer Joel Sachs tells us that in addition to his parents, another strong Irish influence on the young Henry was the Irish poet John Varian, the leader of a theosophist community in Halcyon, California. The Theosophical Society had been founded in the 1870s and was a spiritual movement rooted in the ancient world and non-Western cultures.

Cowell composed wildly and feverishly in his early teen years and was only 15 years old when John Varian invited him to write music for a musical play. He had come up with a plan to write musical plays based on Irish legends, including one called ‘The Building of Banba’. Henry wrote the music, but the only part that survives is the prelude, called ‘The Tides of Manaunaun’. It was to become one of his best-known pieces and the one which introduced the world to his ‘tone clusters’.

Throughout his career, Cowell continued to be influenced by Irish tunes. Then in 1955, Henry and his wife Sidney went to Europe to collect more recordings of folk music, while Henry had a series of performances. But first, they headed to Ireland and to the Aran Islands for a holiday.

We are lucky to have as an interviewee Deirdre Ní Chonghaile, Irish ethnomusicologist and recent Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress. As she explains, Sidney and Henry stayed with her grandparents, who at the time ran a guest house on the Aran Islands. Henry was delighted to be re-acquainted with Maggie Dirrane, who he had first met and recorded in New York in 1934 on the publicity tour for ‘Man of Aran’.

Sidney’s first efforts to record overseas were in Ireland. In the summers of 1955 and 1956, she created up to 11 hours of recordings, extensive notes and photographs in the west of Ireland, specifically in the Aran Islands and in Connemara. According to Ní Chonghaile, her Irish work forms a significant part of Mrs. Cowell’s field recordings and writings.

 

Why did Sidney go to Ireland? In 1955, she and her husband wanted to reconnect with Maggie Dirrane, the star of the movie “Man of Aran,” whom Henry had met in New York in 1934 during the Broadway premiere of the film. The Cowells arrived in the largest island of Inis Mór and stayed in the guesthouse of Ní Chonghaile’s grandparents. They soon discovered that Dirrane’s son, John, and others had never been recorded. Within a week, Cowell had borrowed an EMI tape recorder from the BBC.