ABSTRACT
As a boy Henry Cowell once paid a visit to Sergei Rakhmaninov, who was living near Cowell in Menlo Park, California. The older composer agreed to look at just one of several hundred (!) pieces the boy had brought along. Rakhmaninov, Cowell recalled, “examined it through an eyeglass for just two hours without saying anything whatsoever. Then he got out a small red pencil and he put a tiny red circle around 41 notes in these two pages, and he handed it to me with a smile and with great courtesy, said, ‘There are 41 wrong notes in your composition.” When Cowell asked what was wrong with them, Rakhmaninov explained, “They are not within the rules of harmony.” The boy asked if composers should still follow such rules and Rakhmaninov replied, “Oh, yes, these are divine rules” (Cowell 1962c, pp. 64–65).
