American composer Henry Cowell wrote one of his first surviving piano pieces, Dynamic Motion (HC 213), in 1916. It is known as one of the first pieces in the history of music to utilize violent tone clusters for the keyboard. It requires the performer to use various limbs to play massive secundal chords, and calls for keys to be held down without sounding to extend its dissonant cluster overtones via sympathetic resonance. Some of the clusters outlined in this piece are those written for fists, palms, and forearms. The piece is also noted for its extended use of tuplets, featuring triplets, quintuplets, and sextuplets in the melody line.

While still a teenager and studying at the University of California, Berkeley, Cowell wrote the piano piece Dynamic Motion, his first important work to explore the possibilities of the tone cluster. He first presented the piece to his composition teacher, Charles Seeger. This glimpse at Henry's music struck Seeger with great force; he would say Cowell used, "commonplace materials in some compositions and new or unusual materials in others," and appreciated the piece's "superfluous title". They both knew he would have to deal with a hostile or apathetic audience if he were to perform the piece publicly, however. "We spent no small amount of time in planning assaults, in the form of concerts, upon New York, Paris, and Berlin, in which elbows, string-plucking, and fantastic titles figured largely."

He would later give the piece a futurist-infused programmatic meaning in future concerts, saying:

Dynamic Motion is a musical impression of the New York subway. The clamor in the subterranean darkness, the wireless-like crossing of many minds huddled together, and rushing along insanely under the earth, a touch of horror and jagged suspense, and then the far light in the tunnel and the dizzying jerk at the end. The subject of Dynamic Motion spreads like a disease through the music...

The following year, in 1917, Cowell wrote five encores for the piece to be played during his various concert tours.

Both Dynamic Motion and its encores have elicited outrage, confusion, and outright violence at his various concerts, with several notable incidents.

On March 31, 1922, Cowell appeared as a guest in Carl Ruggles's lecture on modern music at the Whitney Studio Club in Greenwich Village, New York City. Louise Vermont, writing in the Greenwich Villager, contributed this account:

Then [Ruggles] introduced an American composer, who, according to Mr. Ruggles, "had something original to say with guts in it," Mr. Henry Cowell. Cowell said it with a wallop. One piano sounded like six of them. People stood up and watched this little fellow while the rolling sound wrapped them round and overwhelmed them with its dynamic force. For a closing number Cowell played one of his amazing compositions which he calls Dynamic Motion. At the finish of it three women lay in a dead faint in the aisle and no less than ten men had refreshed themselves from the left hip.