Editing Tone cluster (section)

===In the work of Henry Cowell===
[[File:Henry Cowell portrait NYPL 4002097 (cropped).jpg|thumb|right|As a composer, performer, and theorist, [[Henry Cowell]] was largely responsible for establishing the tone cluster in the lexicon of modern classical music.]]
{{Listen|type=music|filename=Cowell-Tides of Manaunaun.ogg |title=''Tides of Manaunaun'' (1917) |description=The opening of Cowell's seminal piece}}
In June 1913, a sixteen-year-old Californian with no formal musical training wrote a solo piano piece, ''Adventures in Harmony'', employing "primitive tone clusters".<ref>Nicholls (1991), p. 134.</ref> [[Henry Cowell]] would soon emerge as the seminal figure in promoting the cluster harmonic technique. Ornstein abandoned the concert stage in the early 1920s and, anyway, clusters had served him as practical harmonic devices, not as part of a larger theoretical mission. In the case of Ives, clusters comprised a relatively small part of his compositional output, much of which went unheard for years. For the intellectually ambitious Cowell—who heard Ornstein perform in New York in 1916—clusters were crucial to the future of music. He set out to explore their "overall, cumulative, and often programmatic effects".<ref>Broyles (2004), p. 342, n. 10.</ref>

''[[Dynamic Motion]]'' (1916) for solo piano, written when Cowell was nineteen, has been described as "probably the first piece anywhere using secundal chords independently for musical extension and variation."<ref>Bartók et al. (1963), p. 14 (unpaginated).</ref> Though that is not quite accurate, it does appear to be the first piece to employ chromatic clusters in such a manner. A solo piano piece Cowell wrote the following year, ''[[The Tides of Manaunaun]]'' (1917), would prove to be his most popular work and the composition most responsible for establishing the tone cluster as a significant element in Western classical music. (Cowell's early piano works are often erroneously dated; in the two cases above, as 1914 and 1912, respectively.<ref>Correct dating of Cowell's early works is per Hicks (2002), pp. 80, 85. Correct dating of Cowell's work in general is per the standard catalogue, Lichtenwanger (1986).</ref>) Assumed by some to involve an essentially random—or, more kindly, [[aleatoric music|aleatoric]]—pianistic approach, Cowell would explain that precision is required in the writing and performance of tone clusters no less than with any other musical feature:
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Tone clusters...on the piano [are] whole scales of tones used as chords, or at least three contiguous tones along a scale being used as a chord. And, at times, if these chords exceed the number of tones that you have fingers on your hand, it may be necessary to play these either with the flat of the hand or sometimes with the full forearm. This is not done from the standpoint of trying to devise a new piano technique, although it actually amounts to that, but rather because this is the only practicable method of playing such large chords. It should be obvious that these chords are exact and that one practices diligently in order to play them with the desired tone quality and to have them absolutely precise in nature.<ref>Cowell (1993), 12:16–13:14.</ref>
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Historian and critic [[Kyle Gann]] describes the broad range of ways in which Cowell constructed (and thus performed) his clusters and used them as musical textures, "sometimes with a top note brought out melodically, sometimes accompanying a left-hand melody in parallel."<ref>{{cite web|author=Gann, Kyle|url=http://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/2003/10/rosens_sins_of_american_omissi.html|title=Rosen's Sins of American Omission|work=ArtsJournal|date=2003-10-21|access-date=2007-08-18}}</ref>

Beginning in 1921, with an article serialized in ''The Freeman'', an Irish cultural journal, Cowell popularized the term ''tone cluster''.<ref>Hicks (2002), pp. 106–108.</ref> While he did not coin the phrase, as is often claimed, he appears to have been the first to use it with its current meaning.{{efn|1=See Seachrist (2003), p. 215, n. 15, for an example of a claim that the "term was invented by Henry Cowell". ''Tone cluster'' had been used with a different meaning since at least 1910 by music theorist and educator [[Percy Goetschius]] (n.d., 111): referring to an example of three-part [[counterpoint]], "there is some good chord-form at almost every accent, some harmonic tone-cluster towards which the parts unanimously lead." See also his correspondence, "Schoenberg's 'Harmony,'" in ''The New Music Review and Church Music Review'', vol. 14, no. 168 (November 1915), p. 404: "I have regretted that I did not, in revising my 'Material', lay still greater stress upon the accidental tone-clusters such as you illustrate"; "in Ex. 318, No. 5, you will find the Mozart tone-cluster which you give in your Ex. 11."}} During the 1920s and 1930s, Cowell toured widely through North America and Europe, playing his own experimental works, many built around tone clusters. In addition to ''The Tides of Manaunaun'', ''Dynamic Motion'', and [[Dynamic Motion#Five Encores to Dynamic Motion|its five "encores"]]—''What's This'' (1917), ''Amiable Conversation'' (1917), ''Advertisement'' (1917), ''Antinomy'' (1917, rev. 1959; frequently misspelled "Antimony"), and ''Time Table'' (1917)—these include ''The Voice of Lir'' (1920), ''Exultation'' (1921), ''The Harp of Life'' (1924), ''Snows of Fujiyama'' (1924), ''Lilt of the Reel'' (1930), and ''Deep Color'' (1938). ''Tiger'' (1930) has a chord of 53 notes, probably the largest ever written for a single instrument until 1969.<ref>"Other: 1. Vertical extremes" in [http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/donbyrd/CMNExtremes.htm Extremes of Conventional Music Notation] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100308113537/http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/donbyrd/CMNExtremes.htm |date=2010-03-08 }}.</ref> Along with Ives, Cowell wrote some of the first large-ensemble pieces to make extensive use of clusters. ''The Birth of Motion'' ({{circa}} 1920), his earliest such effort, combines orchestral clusters with glissando.<ref>Yunwha Rao (2004), p. 245.</ref> "Tone Cluster", the second movement of Cowell's Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1928, prem. 1978), employs a wide variety of clusters for the piano and each instrumental group ({{Audio|Cowell-Piano Concerto M1.ogg|listen}}).<ref>Zwenzner (2001), p. 13.</ref> From a quarter-century later, his Symphony No. 11 (1953) features a sliding chromatic cluster played by muted violins.<ref>Yunwha Rao (2004), p. 138.</ref>

In his theoretical work ''New Musical Resources'' (1930), a major influence on the classical avant-garde for many decades, Cowell argued that clusters should not be employed simply for color:
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In harmony it is often better for the sake of consistency to maintain a whole succession of clusters, once they are begun; since one alone, or even two, may be heard as a mere effect, rather than as an independent and significant procedure, carried with musical logic to its inevitable conclusion.<ref>Quoted in Gann (1997), p. 174.</ref>
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