Henry Cowell and Edson Hymns and Fuging Tunes

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to provide an examination of a 1960 musical composition by the American composer Henry Cowell built from postcolonial American musical sources. Cowell’s work, Edson Hymns and Fuging Tunes takes musical material from an early American tunebook that Cowell helped uncover. This tunebook, “The Social Harmonist” contains the compositions of two earlier American composers, Lewis Edson (1748-1820) and Lewis Edson Jr. (1771-1845). Cowell’s Edson Hymns and Fuging Tunes is a choral-orchestral work in the form of an expanded suite of hymns built from the work of these two Yankee Tunesmiths. The primary purpose of this study is to examine this composition so that it may be understood and performed.

The material in this study is organized in the following manner. After an introductory chapter on the genesis of the work itself, a biographical sketch of Henry Cowell is provided with an emphasis on the aspects of his life that fertilized his later interest in early American choral music. Following this chapter is an exploration of the history and musical style of the early American singing school movement utilized in this piece (1720-1820). The next section returns to the piece itself and, building on the previous chapter, provides a descriptive musical analysis of this composition. The concluding chapter commends Henry Cowell’s Edson Hymns and Fuging Tunes as a choral-orchestral work deserving to be considered and performed because of its intriguing intersection of early and twentieth-century American music.

KEYWORDS: Henry Cowell, Lewis Edson, Singing School movement, Choral, Choral-orchestral, American music, Yankee Tunesmith, Fuging Tunes