Of all the early-20th century American musical revolutionaries, it is composer Henry Cowell whose influence was most vivid and far-reaching. Born in 1897 to a rural California family, Cowell began to study the violin at age five, though his parents' hopes of creating a prodigy on the instrument remained unfulfilled when the lessons had to be stopped on account of the boy's poor health. After his parents' divorce in 1903, Cowell spent several years traveling around the country visiting relatives with his mother; it was during one such journey in 1908 that he began to write his own music (his first known effort at composition being an unfinished setting of Longfellow's Golden Legend).