Henry Cowell

This volume presents for the first time a generous selection from the more than 200 essays and articles written by one of the most original American composers and musical theorists of the twentieth century. There are articles on harmony, melody, notation and music history; essays on vocal innovation, folk music, and the intersection of music with other arts; reviews of concerts and recordings by contemporaries; notes on several of his own works, and several pieces on his life and experiences as a composer. Henry Cowell may be best known as a creator of "tone cluster" compositions, which he began writing while in his early teens, but his influence has been far broader and much deeper. As founder in 1925 of the New Music Society, he became a concert impresario for works by, among others, Carl Ruggles, Arnold Schoenberg, Charles Ives and Leo Ornstein; and publisher from 1927 to 1958 of New Music: A Quarterly of Musical Compositio

Since its original publication in 1930, Henry Cowell’s New Musical Resources has become recognised as one of the few seminal technical studies to be written by a twentieth-century composer. In 1971, Virgil Thomson hailed it as ‘a classic’. Cowell aimed to ‘point out the influence the overtone series has exerted on music throughout its history, how many musical materials of all ages are related to it, and how … a large palette of musical materials can be assembled’. In this respect Cowell was anticipating many of the ideas to be realized in electronic music by Stockhausen and others. For this new edition, David Nicholls has provided an explanatory essay and annotations to Cowell’s text. The essay traces the sources for the book and attempts to place Cowell’s theories in the broader context of musical modernism.