The influence of benthic diatoms on the textures of carbonate-coated grains from a fluvial tufa spring in northern California

ABSTRACT Diatoms are common in terrestrial freshwater carbonate environments, but their influence on the resulting carbonate texture and porosity remains unquantified. This study investigates the effect of diatoms on the textural variability and syndepositional porosity of spring-associated carbonate coated grains from a freshwater spring in Henry Cowell State Park, northern California, USA. Carbonate coated grains (n = 60) were collected from the distal-most pool of the spring (∼ 300 m from the spring source) and the porosity of the 1 cm diameter fraction (n = 20) was determined using the ImageJ software by adjusting the threshold size for pores > 1000 μm2. Results reveal a strong positive correlation between the number of pores and the number of diatoms examined in each coated grain (r = 0.77). There is a moderate positive relationship between the length of the largest diatom and the minor-axis diameter of a best-fit ellipse of its corresponding pore (r = 0.60). The total pore area for pores associated with at least one diatom was significantly greater than the total pore area of pores that did not enclose diatom frustules (t = 1.80, p < 0.05). Textural observations show that fine-grained laminated textures contain fewer diatoms than the porous textures, suggesting that diatoms disrupt lamination continuity by introducing pore space. These findings have implications for the influence of diatoms on the syndepositional porosity of carbonate rocks from the Cretaceous to Recent and may help explain textural differences between modern marine carbonate microbialites and their Precambrian counterparts.

Henry Cowell and the West Coast Dance Scene

Modern dance and music for percussion are linked through the works of musicians who studied with the iconoclastic composer Henry Cowell. This chapter highlights the work of numerous artists who were involved in the dance and music scene along the West Coast of the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. Cowell’s early publishing venture New Music helped launch the careers of composers Johanna Beyer, William Russell, Lou Harrison, John Cage, and others. The latter two composers, Harrison and Cage, also studied with the Austrian American composer Arnold Schoenberg whose use of the twelve-tone technique became central to the music of the twentieth century. The chapter ends with a summary of percussion music’s development from the decades before World War I to the compositional hiatus caused by World War II.

Beat and Square Cold War Encounters

This chapter is focused on the transnational influences of Japanese music during the Cold War and on music’s role in U.S. cultural diplomacy efforts aimed at Japan. This includes examples of numerous American jazz musicians (David Brubeck, Duke Ellington, Herbie Mann) who were sent to Japan and who created musical “impressions” of their experience. A primary focus in on the 1961 Tokyo East-West Music Encounter organized by Nicolas Nabokov and attended by multiple American composers (Lou Harrison, Henry Cowell, Colin McPhee) and scholars (Robert Garfias). The chapter then details the broad influence of gagaku on European (Messiaen, Stockhausen, Xenakis) and American composers, focusing particularly on Alan Hovhaness. Experimental composers, such as Richard Teitelbaum, inspired by John Cage’s engagement with Zen also turned toward Japan. The chapter concludes with an extended discussion of the role of Japanese music and Japanese composers (particularly Toru Takemitsu) in the career of Roger Reynolds.

Japonisme and the Forging of American Musical Modernism

Japanese music played a central role in the formation of American musical modernism. This chapter focuses on the position of Japanese music in the careers of Henry Eichheim and Henry Cowell. For Eichheim, Japan had “a poetry no other country seems to possess.” Inspired by the writings of Lafcadio Hearn, Eichheim traveled to Japan between 1915 and 1928 and composed multiple pieces based on Japanese material. Japan was of central importance throughout Cowell’s life. In the 1930s Cowell studied shakuhachi with Kitaro Tamada who later wrote poignantly to Cowell from his Japanese American Internment Camp. Cowell traveled to Japan in 1957 and 1961 during the Cold War and composed several Japanese-inspired works, including for koto. Juxtaposing the musical journeys of these two composers and proselytizers highlights the roles Japanese music played for those Americans who sought to sound “ultra modern” in the twentieth century.

New Musical Resources

New Musical Resources is a book written by Henry Cowell in 1919, unpublished until 1930. In it, Cowell proposes a theory of musical relativity in which pitch, rhythm, and the progress of music history are grounded through reference to the structure of the overtone series: the "living essence from which musicality springs." Ethnomusicologist Charles Seeger encouraged a young Cowell to rationalize the compositional tools he had been developing, which ultimately led to the creation of this book. In the book’s first section, Cowell presents the development of Western harmony as progressive upward movement through the overtone series. He suggests the continuation of this same logic into chords based on the ratios beyond the minor seconds that he was using to create "cluster chords." His rhythm chapter proposes the whole-note as the basic unit of time, encouraging division beyond the standard multiples of two into the next numbers in the harmonic series—creating third-notes, fifth notes, etc. This method enables the composition of rhythmic patterns that rely on the same ratios as are present between various melodic and harmonic intervals. Many American composers—notably Conlon Nancarrow—have utilized Cowell’s concepts, which predate the development of similar ideas in integral serialism by several decades.

Afterword

This chapter discusses how a US-focused mainstream concept of American experimental music within the art music tradition was cemented in the 1950s through the work of John Cage at a moment when he established professional connections with the European avant-garde. The chapter recognizes that before this moment, composers such as Henry Cowell had thought of American experimentalism in a more hemispheric way and included the activities of composers like Carlos Chávez, Alejandro García Caturla, and Amadeo Roldán in their genealogies. Rather than arguing for a revisionist type of history to include Latin Americans in these narratives about American experimental music, the chapter’s goal is to show that taking into account historical and contemporary Latin@ and Latin American understandings of experimentalisms not only may help us in redefining the social and political meaning of what has been constructed as mainstream musical experimentalism but also may play a central role in critically rethinking post–World War II narratives about music.