Material for Biography
By Clarissa Dixon Cowell
Introduction
We live in San Francisco,
2517 Castro St. Henry remembers our country house near Stanford University
where he was born…[in 1897] when I was 45 years of age.
… He was beautiful beyond the ordinary, with an indescribable, spiritual
quality of loveliness impossible to convey in verse or to be caught in
a photograph. When he was about 6 years of age I was told that he had
been pronounced, by a member of the sketch Club, the most beautiful child
in San Francisco. He was photographed by 4 different art-photographers.
one, especially, had him in many poses and fairly covered her walls with
reproductions. I believe they were all lost in the great fire following
the earthquake.
From the very beginning Henry Cowell (1897–1965) was seen as someone
unusual, someone special. His mother, Clarissa Dixon Cowell (who dropped
the "Cowell" from her name after divorcing Henry's father), his stepmother,
Olive Thompson Cowell, and later his wife, Sidney Robertson Cowell, all
felt compelled to document the life and activities of this remarkable individual
and to insure that his ideas and his music attained a permanent place in
music history. With her notes entitled "material for biography," Clarissa
began the detailed commentary and documentation of Henry's early activities.
This task was subsequently taken up by his stepmother Olive, compiling what
is known as the "Grey Book" ("Henry Cowell: Activities and Achievements")
a chronology and vitae of Henry's accomplishments until about 1935. shortly
thereafter Cowell was arrested on a morals charge and spent four years in
San Quentin, where his fantastic story of resilience and accomplishment
is continued by his wife Sidney Robertson. Her unfinished biography and
a comprehensive oral history made by her in the 1970s completes the Cowell
story from a third point of view. All of this is preserved in the Cowell
Collection in the music Division of The New York Public Library for the
Performing Arts.
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