Sidney Robertson Cowell
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Sidney Robertson Cowell (born Sidney William Hawkins; June 2, 1903 – February 23, 1995) was an American ethnomusicologist, collector of
folk songs Folk music is a music genre that includes traditional folk music and the contemporary genre that evolved from the former during the 20th-century folk revival. Some types of folk music may be called world music. Traditional folk music has be ...
, and the wife of the composer Henry Cowell.


Life and career

She was born on June 2, 1903, in
San Francisco, California San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...
, the daughter of Charles Albert Hawkins and Mabel Hawkins (née Morrison). She received a BA in Romance languages and philology from Stanford University in 1924. Later that year she married Kenneth Robertson, a medical student, and they went to Europe. She enrolled in 1925 in the École Normale de Musique in Paris, where she studied piano with Alfred Cortot. Upon returning to California, she taught at the Peninsula School for Creative Education in
Menlo Park, California Menlo Park is a city at the eastern edge of San Mateo County within the San Francisco Bay Area of California in the United States. It is bordered by San Francisco Bay on the north and east; East Palo Alto, Palo Alto, and Stanford to the south ...
from 1926 to 1932. During that period, she studied counterpoint and analysis with Ernest Bloch and the music of non-European cultures with Henry Cowell at the
San Francisco Conservatory of Music The San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) is a private music conservatory in San Francisco, California. As of 2021, it had 480 students. History The San Francisco Conservatory of Music was founded in 1917 by Ada Clement and Lillian Hodg ...
. After divorcing in 1934 she moved to New York City, where she directed the Social Music Program at the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side, working with elderly Jewish immigrants. In 1936 she became an assistant to
Charles Seeger Charles Louis Seeger Jr. (December 14, 1886 – February 7, 1979) was an American musicologist, composer, teacher, and folklorist. He was the father of the American folk singers Pete Seeger (1919–2014), Peggy Seeger (b. 1935), and Mike Seeger ( ...
, technical advisor of the Music Unit of the Special Skills Division of the Resettlement Administration in Washington, D.C. (later the Farm Security Administration). In this capacity she began collecting recordings of folk music in Appalachia, the Ozarks and the Upper Midwest.Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library ...
, the
University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...
, and the
Works Progress Administration The Works Progress Administration (WPA; renamed in 1939 as the Work Projects Administration) was an American New Deal agency that employed millions of jobseekers (mostly men who were not formally educated) to carry out public works projects, i ...
of the Northern California Folk Music Project, which she directed from 1938 to 1940 with a staff of twenty. The project was one of the earliest attempts at conducting a large-scale ethnographic survey of American folk music in a defined region. In addition to 35 hours of sound recordings, the team complied 168 photographs of the musicians and their instruments and copious documentation. In 1941 she married Henry Cowell, whom she had known since her teen years in California. The following year they moved to Shady, New York, a hamlet in the city of
Woodstock Woodstock Music and Art Fair, commonly referred to as Woodstock, was a music festival held during August 15–18, 1969, on Max Yasgur's dairy farm in Bethel, New York, United States, southwest of the town of Woodstock. Billed as "an Aq ...
. During
World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...
the two traveled as cultural ambassadors for the State Department, collecting music from around the world. They collaborated on numerous publishing projects. After his death in 1965 she continued to actively promote his musical legacy. She died at her home in Shady in 1995.


References


Bibliography

* (1942) ''The Recording of Folk Music in California'' (Berkeley, Calif. : University of California Press). * (with Alan Lomax, 1942). ''American Folk Song and Folk Lore, a Regional Bibliography'' (Washington, D.C.: Progressive Education Center). * (with Henry Cowell, 1955). ''Charles Ives and His Music'' (New York : Oxford University Press).


See also


Folk Music of Wisconsin, 1937
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cowell, Sidney Robertson 1903 births 1995 deaths American ethnographers American folk-song collectors People from San Francisco Stanford University alumni 20th-century American musicians