Mosaic

Henry Cowell
Mosaic
Mode 72/73

A recent release, Mosaic fleshes out Cowell’s cross-cultural agenda with several pieces making their appearance on disc for the first time. In particular, 26 Simultaneous Mosiacs (1963), crams dozens of musical and ethnic sytles into a unified composition for string quartet and percussion.
— Kenneth Goldsmith, Tower PULSE!, “Banging On Cans: American
Gamelans”, September 2000

Henry Cowell
Mosaic
Musicians Accord, Colorado Quartet, Tania Léon
Mode 72/73

Apart from Cowell’s own performances, this 2-CD set is the best advocacy for his music to appear on disc, with excellent notes from Carol Oja. His chamber music can now take its place beside Ives within the challenging early 20th-century repertory, well repaying the difficulties of performance. Enterprising ensembles, such as those represented here, are becoming aware of this.the chamber music here is a revelation.
— Peter Dickinson, Gramophone

Henry Cowell
Mosaic
Musicians Accord, Colorado Quartet, Tania Léon
Mode 72/73

Nobody invented American experimental music. It just grew that way, and grows. But nobody ever cared for it more than Henry Cowell. Born in Menlo Park, California in 1897, Cowell began exploring new possibilities on the piano when he was still in his midteens: gigantic clusters of notes played with the forearms on the keyboard, unusual sounds created by leaning inside the instrument and brushing a hand across the strings. After his death, in 1965, his music almost disappeared, and for a long while there were very few recordings available. That situation has changed during the last decade, but still there is probably no more complete or engaging tribute to this exploratory yet gentle musical spirit than a new double album of his chamber music, played by the Colorado String Quartet and the ensemble Musicians Accord (Mode 72/73, ****). The chamber pieces tend to be more concise than the orchestral works, and these excellent performances set new standards of care and calm in Cowell performance.

The works chosen cover pretty much the whole of the composer’s creative life, from his teenage quartets — in which he explored some of the techniques that would go into New Musical Resources, especially simultaneous combinations of unrelated rhythms — to some pieces from near the end of his life. There is a huge difference between going through different superimposed meters (as in the Quartet Romantic of 1915-17 for two flutes, viola and cello) and evoking the music of Ireland or Indonesia (both visited in the Quartet for flute, oboe, cello and harp of 1962). Certainly the latter produces a more euphonious effect. But, inanother sense, all Cowell’s work was experimental. In each piece he set up certain conditions and waited to see what would happen.

Some experiments involved dissonant harmony, though usually against the background of the Protestant hymn. Cowell’s liking for Irish folk music was similarly in his musical genes, and survived all kinds of rough handling. Other kinds of experiment had to do with learning from non-classical traditions. But whatever the case, Cowell’s demeanor was accepting, and his music is ultimately about tolerance — about cultures coexisting, about instruments getting along with each other even though they cannot agree about where the beat is, about composers not imposing themselves on performers and listeners but rather putting forward possibilities of experience.

Cowell’s respect for his fellows surely underlies his “mosaic” forms, in which separate segments of music can be put together in various ways. In his Twenty-Six Simultaneous Mosaics of 1963 he provided that number of mobile elements for a mixed quintet of instrument — some of the elements tonal (including a strikingly Bach-like dance for the cello), some atonal.

Three different takes of the piece are offered here, but perhaps the most fascinating pieces are those in which a little more order is sustained — not so much the emphatically dissonant pieces, which fall back on repetitive melodies and seem very tame alongside Schoenberg or Webern, as those that wander along different rhythmic paths at the same time. Notable among these are the exuberant Polyphonica and the weird Quartet Romantic, where the instruments seem to be perpetually astray, as if not hearing one another — though they still all vaguely remember Bach and hymns and folk music.
— Paul Griffiths,  “Nurturer of American Experimental Music,”
Classical Pulse!, July 1999