Henry Cowell's short piano piece The Tides of Manaunaun is usually referred to as a "Prelude" or "Introduction." In prefacing his 1963 Folkways recording of this work, Cowell stated that it was "written as a prelude to an opera based on Irish mythology," and that it represents Manaunaun, legendary Irish god of motion whose forces caused waves in bodies of water to flow.

In Cowell's piece, Manaunaun's "waves" are represented by large, sweeping tone clusters which are played using the left forearm. The folk-like melody of the piece is stated mostly in octaves in the right hand. While the pianistic means utilized in realizing Cowell's program are simple, his results are undeniably effective, as The Tides of Manaunaun has an orchestral sweep and grandeur that has long impressed itself on hearers who are not necessarily fans of modern music. In his later years, Cowell played this avant-garde piece in the White House for American presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.

Cowell frequently programmed The Tides of Manaunaun to open his own recitals and used it as a way "in" for listeners unaccustomed to his sound and style. He often identified it as his first venture into the realm of piano tone clusters and dated it variously 1911 or 1912. The original manuscript of the work no longer exists, and Cowell may have destroyed it to protect the secret of Manaunaun's true, and somewhat later, origins. As he stipulates, The Tides of Manaunaun was conceived as a prelude to an opera based on Irish myth. This was The Building of Bamba (HC 219), best described as a "pageant" or "Mystery Play" written by John O. Varian, and presented at the headquarters of a Theosophist cult called The Temple of the People near San Luis Obispo, CA, in August 1917. Some of Cowell's friends recalled Cowell playing this piece, or some variant of it, before 1917, but apparently the score did not take shape until the composition of The Building of Bamba.

The Tides of Manaunaun was Henry Cowell's first published piece of music, having been issued as sheet music in 1922; this is the primary source for the music as it is known. His logic for attempting to backdate it may have been motivated by a desire to substantiate his claim to the tone cluster as his invention. Cowell need not have worried, as his first use of tone clusters in a notated piano piece appears in Adventures of Harmony (1913; HC 59) and is only predicted by such archetypal experimentalists as Charles Ives, Charles-Henri Alkan, and Franz Liszt. The Tides of Manaunaun virtually cries out for orchestration, and in 1940 Cowell created an orchestral version as part of the suite Four Irish Tales (also known as Tales of Our Countryside, HC 605) at the request of conductor Leopold Stokowski.

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