Henry Cowell - “The Banshee“ for piano strings (ALLHALLOWTIDE TRIBUTE)

In the late 1910s and early to mid-’20s, Henry Cowell made a study of extended techniques and sounds available on the piano, and incorporated these in a series of short compositions. One of these, The Banshee (1925), has become one of the composer’s best-known works; it also manifests Cowell’s longstanding interest in Irish mythology. The banshee (or banshie) is a female spirit who alerts a family to the impending death of one of its members by making a wailing sound underneath the windows of the family home. Cowell evokes this wailing sound, called “keening,“ by having the a pianist directly manipulate the strings of the instrument with his/her hands, at times scraping a fingernail along the strings to create an unearthly cry. Some have said that the result of this inside-the-piano technique is reminiscent of electronically generated sound. As was so often the case with him, Cowell returned to The Banshee in 1928-1929, rearranging it for piano and orchestra as the first movement of his