Students Know Cowell

I was glad to see that Mark Swed and the Bay Area pianists paid homage to Henry Cowell, one of the real pioneers of modern music (“A Long-Overdue Tribute to California Composer Cowell,” Feb. 4).

However, they or the Grateful Dead hardly discovered him. What piano student has not played his “Aeolian Harp” or the cluster pieces? They are real chestnuts.

My generation of the 1930s was brought up on Cowell’s book “New Musical Resources” and the compositions of the New Music Quarterly, whose choices were not just West Coast but truly universal. They included not only works by Ives and other American composers East and West but also compositions by Varese, Webern, Schoenberg and other modern European composers.

As a matter of fact, I first met Cowell at Schoenberg’s home in the 1940s (they were old friends), and my first copying job was a Cowell symphony dating from around 1938, when he was in San Quentin. There is a complete Cowell edition being organized by Joel Sachs of the Juilliard School faculty.

LEONARD STEIN

Los Angeles