Henry Cowell, Bohemian (Music in American Life)

"In this first full-length study of Henry Cowell, Michael Hicks shows how the maverick composer, writer, teacher, and performer built his career on the intellectual and aesthetic foundations of his parents, community, and teachers - and exemplified the essence of bohemian California.". "Henry Cowell, Bohemian traces the venerated experimentalist's radical ideas back to his teachers, induding Charles Seeger, Samuel Seward, and E. G. Stricklen, the tight-knit artistic communities in the San Francisco Bay area where he grew up and first started composing, and the immeasurable influence of his parents. Mining the published and unpublished writings of Cowell's mother, a politically motivated novelist from the Midwest who carefully monitored the pulse of her son's creativity from birth, Hicks provides insight into the composer's heritage, artistic inclinations, and childhood.". "Hicks focuses on Cowell's formative and most prolific years, from his birth in 1897 through his incarceration on a morals conviction in the 1930s. The author also examines the philosophical fervor that drove Cowell's whirlwind compositions and tracks the ways the composer's irrepressible bohemian spirit helped foster an appreciation in the United States and Europe for a new brand of American music."--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.