Henry Cowell and the Joys of Noise

#LibraryOfCongress; #HenryCowell;

The following is a guest post from Archives Processing Technician, Emily Baumgart.

The Music Division has recently published a finding aid that brings together many of the Henry Cowell music manuscripts held at the Library of Congress, revealing a wealth of holograph scores spanning his entire compositional career.

Cowell’s musical aesthetic changed throughout his life from ultra modernism in the 1920s and 1930s to open form and the use of folk-inspired elements in the post-war period…