Henry Cowell: A Man Made of Music - Biography of American Composer & Musical Innovator | Perfect for Music Lovers, Students & Historians

A good biography can be as engrossing as any fiction and now I add Joel Sachs's "Henry Cowell: A Man Made of Music" to my short list of those that in and of themselves make for a great "read." Henri Troyat's "Tolstoy", and Robert Massie's recent "Catherine the Great" come to mind as I write. True, much like those subjects (curiously both Russian), Cowell was both a complex and a truly noble human being and his inspiring life story quite boggles the mind. But how easily its telling could have ended up as little more than fodder for academia had it not been rendered by such expert, imaginative, caring and balanced hands as Sachs, who in an unusually natural and fluid writing style, brilliantly gives palpable life not only to the composer and the wonderful cast of colorful and often historic characters (e.g. Ives, Gershwin, Percy Grainger) who figure in his exciting life, but as well to the fast-moving period in twentieth century music to which he so exuberantly and generously gave himself. In fact, I thank you Joel Sachs for not only telling this reader how much things cost and how much Cowell was paid in 1920, '40, or '60 but for taking the trouble to translate the amounts into 2010 figures that I can truly grasp their meaning ....a rare bonus that more biographers should consider, and just one of a myriad details, that, while not intruding into its flow, add authenticity and immediacy to Cowell's already extraordinary story.