Charivaris, Cowbellions, and Sheet Iron Bands: Nineteenth-Century Rough Music in New Orleans

By Nancy Yunhwa Rao

That cowell's use of sliding tones has not received much attention is curious, considering that The Banshee (1925), the quintessential example of Cowell's sonic innovation, is best known for its fantastic slides on piano strings. The 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 sliding 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 In his unpublished treatise, "The Nature of Melody," written between 1936 and 1937, he devotes a complete chapter to codifying the properties of slides and their notations. His unpublished essays, such as "Musical curves of Sound," document the use of slides in various musical cultures. The limited accessibility of cowell's work has, however, hindered the understanding of the significance of sliding tone in his work. For example, Atlantis and "The Nature of Melody" remain unpublished. Most important, the sliding tone is often viewed as merely a way of embellishing a surface to create a certain effect rather than as having the power to generate a total musical structure. also, the aspects of music that scholars have in varying degrees isolated, discussed, and systematized in past decades—pitch, contour, timbre, and rhythm—do not lend themselves to the analysis of Cowell's slide.