Bad Boy at 60

Early in World War II the Shah of Iran wrote to his friend Franklin Roosevelt and asked him to recommend a composer who could set Walter Camp's "Daily Dozen" physical exercises to Persian rhythms for use by the Iranian army. The U.S. State Department knew just the man: Composer Henry Cowell, then doing a stint as music editor of OWI. Cowell polished off the job in a few days, saw thousands of his records pressed and shipped off to Iran to ease the deep, daily kneebends practiced by the Shah's sturdy troops.

All through his career, Modernist Cowell has written music on request with a facility that astonishes and appalls some of his less prolific contemporaries: he has more than 800 compositions to his credit, including a dozen symphonies. Just back from a twelve-month world tour, Composer Cowell, now 60, shows not the slightest sign of slowing up. Last week his melodic, folksy Music for Orchestra 1957 was premiered in Athens by Conductor Antal Dorati (who commissioned it) and the Minneapolis Symphony, at the opening concert of the orchestra's Middle East tour.

Scored for Tar. The Minneapolis will also premiere Cowell's Persian Set, a haunting, eastern-flavored piece originally scored for twelve instruments, including the three-stringed Persian tar. Cowell was also able, in the past year, to work on a 13th symphony, write a two-movement piece with a "Japanese feel" titled Ongaku (music), and compose, on commission, a national anthem for the new state of Malay (it was rejected, along with entries by Benjamin Britten and others, in favor of a Malayan folk tune named Bright Moonlight).

Cowell's globe-girdling tour began as a sabbatical, but before he got through, he found himself lecturing in a dozen Eastern cities, endowing a Cowell cup at the Madras Academy of Music, giving piano-lecture recitals on modern American music. In Damascus, his planned arrival was announced by leaflets dusted over the city by low-flying planes.

Passion for Sounds. At home Cowell now leads a life far quieter than in his keyboard-slamming "tone-cluster" days of the '20s and early '30s, when a New York newspaper sent a sportswriter to one of his piano recitals and featured it as a fight between "Kid Knabe and Battling Cowell." Apart from teaching stints at Columbia and the New School for Social Research, he spends most of his time in a peeling, starkly furnished yellow clapboard house in Shady, N.Y., surrounded by instruments that testify to his lifelong passion for sounds: Persian drums, Oriental flutes, a set of four resonant Pyrex bowls that he used in his Symphony No. 11 ("When my wife and I are out shopping," says Cowell, "we always strike things speculatively").

He composes steadily every morning, and the wonder is that Cowell is as experimental now as he was when he was famed as a bad boy of U.S. music. "Every composition," he says, "is a fresh experiment, a mixture of the familiar and the new. I have more ideas now than I can ever use."

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