The Cowell—Ives Relationship: A New Look at Cowell's Prison Years

By Leta E. Miller and Rob Collins

On May 21, 1936, the Juvenile Officer of San Mateo County brought an arrest warrant to Henry Cowell's cottage in Menlo Park, California, charging Cowell with a single violation of section 288a of the California Penal Code. The events that followed have been told and retold in a series of sympathetic (and some not-so-sympathetic) accounts: the revelations about Cowell's sexual activities with a group of boys at the pool behind his home, his guilty plea, and the four years he spent in San Quentin Prison. Cowell's remarkable productivity during his prison term has been noted by many scholars. He organized a thriving music department at San Quentin, which offered ten classes; he studied Spanish and Japanese, learned to play various transverse and end-blown flutes, wrote fourteen articles and a treatise on melody, and composed about sixty works.