When this has been accomplished, self-conscious nationalism will no longer be necessary. Here as elsewhere, Cowell was the first to take his own advice, though one wonders whether he entirely foresaw the result of doing so. Later in 1933, in Modern Music , he argued that composers should draw on those materials common to the music of all the peoples of the world, to build a new music particularly related to our own century. Three of the four pieces are written for percussion and utilize a plethora of unusual instruments, both invented and imported. Pitched material, where it occurs, tends to be consonant but nondiatonic, and includes artificial modes constructed along Asian and African lines.
Drone accompaniments are the norm.
8 Cowell was not the only American composer of the 1930s to adopt such a stance. Indeed, Harry Partch had, by this time, tentatively rejected both the intonational system of modern Europe and its concert system. 9 Partch s major creative accomplishments of the decade including the Seventeen Lyrics by Li Po and the journal Bitter Music exemplify his radicalism. His frame of cultural reference ranged from hitchhiker inscriptions to Greek tragedy. More recent figures to follow in similar footsteps include Lou Harrison, Peter Garland, La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and arguably John Cage.