Cowell, Varèse and the overtone series

When embarking upon the readings for this weekend, I read the articles in a seemingly strange order, but became very revealing by the end of the saga. Henry Cowell's article appeared a little to vague at first, although I do not believe his objective was to be specific about new music. Varese had a different outlook, but was more specific about his purpose and means behind his composition. Kyle Gann's chapter was very summative of all three, making sense of their compositions in a general and historical way.

I began with Cowell's article, New Music Resources, and was struck by the overwhelming idea which he presented: going back as far as the overtone series as a resource for creating the new wave of 20th century techniques.
Cowell didn't curb to the enormous pressure to "break away from tradition", but rather emphasized using 'new resources' and noise-making devices to create new music. This is why I found his emphasis on the overtone series quite ironic and striking. Does he insist that we have been neglecting or concealing the very nature by which all sounds come from in our many traditional forms of music?
Clearly from his compositional style, he did not acknowledge, blatantly reference traditional forms of the past, but that was not the point of the article.

Varese, on the other hand, developed a much more clear argument about breaking from tradition and developing one's own musical language. The dulcet pianissimo of a violin is no longer the 'norm' in music moving forward; Varese felt free enough to use new access of new sounds and technology available to him to create his musical language. In his article, he stressed the importance of music as an art-science, which I think is a wonderful description of 20th century music moving forward into the century. Technology and scientific development is a massive part of our growing musical culture, whether we like it or not, and as responsible musicians who want to further musical opportunities in the future need to acknowledge that.

With this in mind, it is pretty unbelievable that orchestras exist playing centuries old instruments, performing music written entirely by dead guys. If this case was true of other technologies or arts, we would still be using phones invented by Alexander Graham Bell himself, and riding model T's down an unpaved road.
As a quote in the Gann alluded to, Varese was not "ahead" of his time, everyone else was simply behind.
Clearly, his music supports this progressive style, reflected in the more extreme pieces such as Poeme electronique, whereas I see Hyperism as more of a reflection towards the tradition.
I honestly feel badly that Varese's music is underappreciated, and as Gann referenced, he is regarded as largely a "nihilist" composer. While he understood that his art-science music would not be accepted by all, there were still too many listeners rooted in the past. After all, who wouldn't want to snuggle up with a good book and listen to music written by this handsome man?
The idea that music is composed for personal enjoyment only can almost be stretched back to Ives' point of view, where he was grateful and appreciative of any few performances of his pieces given. The Brussells fair was a great step for Varese and his music, unfortunately it didn't step others into his current state of music that is both art and science.