Among Henry Cowell's early "tone cluster" pieces, Dynamic Motion probably elicited the most comment and controversy in its day—reaping rich rewards for the young modernist in terms of publicity. Cowell composed Dynamic Motion in November 1916 during a brief term spent enrolled in study at the Institute of Musical Art in New York. Cowell enlisted in the Army in February 1918, and it does not appear that he began to employ Dynamic Motion in public performances until his discharge in May 1919. Dynamic Motion was usually chosen to end Cowell's early recitals of "futurist" music, and is alluded to frequently by name in press coverage of his concerts.

One 1919 reporter tells us that Cowell's Dynamic Motion is "a musical impression of the New York Subway; the clamor in the subterranean darkness."

It begins with a loud series of cluster chords that build from the nucleus of an open fifth. This is followed by a series of wedge formations, with the clusters growing louder and larger as the wedges "spread out." The opening section is interrupted at points by a dissonantly stated bugle call-like figure. Then the "subway train" rolls in; a low, ominous cluster grows out of the darkness simulating the sound of the train's rumbling and its approach. This section is more frequently interrupted by the bugle call figure. When the train arrives at the platform, the bugle call figure "takes over" and is stated in huge clusters, answered by a wild confusion of showy display. When this reaches a saturation point, the piece drops down to a mysterious close, momentarily disturbed by the static chords heard during the opening.

Listening to Dynamic Motion in the twenty-first century, one is moved to imagine the effect this piece had on 1919 audiences. Indeed, the early press reports record that when Cowell played Dynamic Motion on one occasion, "three women lay in a dead faint in the aisle, and no less than ten men had refreshed themselves from the left hip." Cowell later claimed that reactions such as this inspired his undertaking the five "Encores to Dynamic Motion": What's This?, Amiable Conversation, Advertisement, Antinomy, and Time Table. However, all of these works were written shortly before Cowell entered the Army, and thus prior to his concert career.

Throughout Dynamic Motion and its five "Encores," Cowell works with a formal practice of "organizing sounds by their sounds." Mid-twentieth century scholars tended to fault this aspect of Cowell's work as a shortcoming resulting from an inexact grasp of formal development. The twenty-first century, which Cowell in his time sought to evoke as a "futurist," has come to his rescue in this regard. Looking back over more than a half century of developments in electronic music, clearly the concept of "organizing sounds by their sounds" is as natural a means of formalizing music as are pitch, harmony, or melody.

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2.What's This? (First Encore To Dynamic Motion)

American composer Henry Cowell's piano piece What's This? (HC 213/2) was composed in November 1917 as the first "encore to Dynamic Motion" (Dynamic Motion being Cowell's maverick tone cluster work of the previous year). It consists of four short phrases and takes only around a minute to play.

The opening section consists of dramatic, dissonant chords punctuating a spinning, chromatic figure. The spinning figure tops out, and Cowell briefly passes through a hilarious "wrong-note" polka fragment. Thundering clusters then underscore an angry passage stated in the middle register, and the "head" ends as the spinning figure returns, reaching to near the top of the keys and closing.

What's This? is an obviously tongue-in-cheek collection of stock gestures deriving from Cowell's own performances of tone cluster piano music. Cowell later explained the meaning of the title in the form of a "joke"; after he played Dynamic Motion, people would ask "what's that?" to which Cowell would answer "What's This?" and play the same-named work. Cowell made a stand-alone orchestration of the piece in 1920.

The 1922 published edition of What's This? seems to have problems in terms of its transmission of the piece as Cowell played it—at least if his 1963 recording of the work is to be trusted. The opening section seems to be accented incorrectly, and there are brief pauses throughout the piece, which are not indicated in the score. The repeat in the printed edition of What's This? takes it back only to the beginning of the "polka," whereas on his recording Cowell repeats the whole piece—it is so short, there is no reason not to.

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3.Amiable Conversation (Second Encore to Dynamic Motion)

Amiable Conversation (HC 213/3) was written in November 1917 as the "Second Encore" to Henry Cowell's tone cluster piano piece Dynamic Motion. Like the other four Dynamic Motion encores, this is a slice-of-life miniature drawn upon Cowell's experiences in New York City in the early 1900s. He described it as representing "a colloquy between two Cantonese in a laundry." Fashioned to evoke the cadences of Chinese speech, Cowell's pseudo-Asian (some would say Native American) melody is first heard in the left hand over insistent tone clusters in the right. The hands switch the material, and now the melody is stated in a lower range, representing the "second" conversant. The piece ends with a single loud, abrupt tone cluster, lasting under a minute.

This is the weak sister of the five encores to Dynamic Motion. By latter-day standards, Amiable Conversation is uncomfortably close to constituting caricature of a stereotypical sort. Cowell himself, in his defense, would eventually become one of the few occidental experts in Chinese music active in his day. Nonetheless, he continued to play Amiable Conversation in his personal appearances well to the end of his life, perhaps due to its relative ease and to the amusement it provided to his audiences.

Ironically, in that same year, "futurist" tone cluster composer Leo Ornstein composed a piece called À la chinoise which has a similar texture and is inspired by practically the same slice-of-life observation.

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4.Advertisement (Third Encore to Dynamic Motion)

Henry Cowell's Advertisement (HC 213/4) for piano was written in November 1917 as the "third encore" to his Dynamic Motion; it was first published as sheet music in 1922. As in Dynamic Motion, Advertisement records an impression of New York City—in this case, its flashing billboards and neon signs. Cowell described it as a "satire on repetitious advertising of a raucous nature."

After a short introduction (derived from What's This, Cowell's first encore to Dynamic Motion), Cowell launches into a passage that resembles a music hall tune gone wrong. Gradually the quirky texture explodes into a flurry of rapid-fire tone clusters played with the fists. Although these clusters are thoroughly notated in the score, Cowell's own recorded performances of Advertisement—made for CRI in 1957 and Folkways in 1963—differ radically from his printed markings; Cowell may have felt that an element of improvisation was appropriate, or perhaps the piece simply evolved over time with repeated playings.

While The Tides of Manaunaun may serve as Cowell's "signature" as pianist and composer, Advertisement acts as a more specific calling card for the tone cluster technique itself. Cowell's recordings of the piece were once included in primary-level teaching materials relating to modern music appreciation, and conductor/pianist Michael Tilson Thomas (who knows Advertisement from memory) played a few measures of it to illustrate the use of tone clusters in a CBS Television Young Peoples Concert in the 1970s. The unusually wide exposure of the piece (at least by the standards of frankly modern piano music), as well as its pictorial relevance to everyday life (who hasn't experienced a noisy day in the big city?), have made Advertisement an important watershed in the acceptance, presentation, and use of modern musical vocabulary.

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5.Antinomy (Fourth Encore to Dynamic Motion)

The early twentieth century saw the emergence of a number of brash young composers who infused their piano works with a sense of an organic connection to the instrument. Many of Charles Ives' piano works and songs fit this category, with their ham-fisted harmonies and thick textures, as do the relentless attacks on the keyboard launched by George Antheil. Arguably, however, it was Henry Cowell whose piano output exerted the most outward pressure upon the stylistic and technical boundaries of piano music. Many of his works in this vein are well-known: the mysterious sounds emanating from the stroked and plucked entrails of the piano in The Banshee (1925) or the rustic autoharp evocations of the strummed chords in The Aeolian Harp (1923). Still, these are only two of a huge body of experimental piano works that Cowell began composing as a teenager. Many of these lesser-known works are likewise remarkable for the ambitious musical ideas they explore and even more remarkable considering the tender age at which Cowell created them. Included among these pieces less-familiar but deserving attention is Cowell's Antimony, a brief but striking piece from 1917, the year of the composer's 20th birthday. From the outset, Antimony continues certain lines of thought established earlier in The Tides of Manaunaun. Well-known for its use of tone clusters (executed with palms, flat hands, and even forearms) to evoke the sound and mood of a seascape, the piece combined mimetic sounds in one hand with melodic sounds in the other. In Antimony, the two become fully integrated. While there are certainly moments of near-lucid melodic contour contrasted with indecipherable clusters of pitches, much of the piece explores the middle ground between the two. To be sure, the piece clearly has a predominant "tune," which falls within a diatonic field and appears at times without much dissonant interference (in fact, the melody was resurrected from a setting of Longfellow's Golden Legend, which Cowell undertook during his pre-teen years but never completed). This tune is set in opposition to the washes of sound in the left hand created (in the manner of Manaunaun) by blocks of contiguous pitches—the pianistic equivalent of broadband noise. The tone clusters move up and down the keyboard, carving out gestures whose general contours are clear even if the lines articulating those contours are thick and fuzzy. Approaching from the other direction, the melodic materials of the piece are sometimes rendered as groups of multiple notes rather than single ones; each note has a "wider" sonority, making it difficult to perceive the melodic shape until the clusters are heard as composite entities, drawing out melodies in broad, bold strokes.

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