Henry Cowell

Henry Cowell (1897-1965) played the piano with fists, palms and forearms and reached inside it to the strings. This first Continuum portrait sets four of those keyboard pieces beside chamber and vocal works from across his career. The New York ensemble Continuum, directed by Cheryl Seltzer and Joel Sachs, recorded the programme in April 1990 at the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Frederick J. Bashour and Jodi L. Johnson engineered, and Sachs wrote the booklet notes. Sachs plays the Piano Pieces, Deep Color, The Fairy Answer, Fabric and Tiger, the last thick with clusters for fists and arms. The Quartet for Flute, Oboe, Cello and Harpsichord of 1954 borrows from the baroque suite; Patrick C. Waller in MusicWeb International (2005) notes it was written for the harpsichordist Sylvia Marlowe. The mezzo-soprano Ellen Lang sings the Three Anti-Modernist Songs of 1938, one of them titled Who Wrote This Fiendish 'Rite of Spring'? In the six-movement Suite for Violin and Piano of 1925 the violin keeps an older melodic manner over piano clusters. The disc ends with two pieces for small orchestra, Polyphonica of 1930 and the Irish Suite, whose three movements, The Banshee, The Leprechaun and The Fairy Bells, have a string piano as soloist. Waller reports that Seltzer had to reconstruct that part and that the work was thought unperformed for sixty years before this recording. In his words, "All this music is played with great conviction by members of Continuum."

Naxos American Classics CD 8.559192, recorded in 1990 and first released on Musical Heritage Society.