New Musical Resources

Since its original publication in 1930, Henry Cowell's New Musical Resources has become recognized 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." 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.

Contemporary music makes almost universal use of materials formerly considered unusable. These materials are in some degree acceptable to almost all music-lovers, and there is a tendency on the part of critics and the sophisticated public to be somewhat bored by new music which uses only old-fashioned means.