Varèse, Edgard

(1883–1965)

The catalogue of Varèse’s works contains only twelve pieces, which could be performed in their entirety during the course of two average-length concerts. Yet forty years after the composer’s death, this modest output seems more relevant and vital than ever.

Varèse was born in Paris to an Italian father and French mother. Until the age of twenty he lived in Turin. He then moved to Paris, where he completed his studies with Vincent d’Indy, Albert Roussel, and Charles Widor. In 1914, he moved to the United States, where he decided to destroy all the works composed up to that moment, and to set off in search of totally new “territories” in music. The first work he wrote in that new period was Amériques; it established Varèse’s reputation as an extremely bold innovator.

During the years 1928–33 Varèse was again in Europe, living in France. He renewed his old artistic friendships with Picasso and Cocteau, and made new ones with Jolivet and Villa-Lobos. After leaving for the United States for the second time, he experienced a long creative crisis. He unsuccessfully tried his hand at writing film music as well as establishing new music institutions and searching for a home, first in Santa Fé, then in San Francisco and Los Angeles, finally returning to New York in 1941. His musical production came to a halt, and his experimental research failed to catalyse into new musical works. Between 1934, the year in which Ecuatorial was composed, and 1950, he composed only three works: Density 21.5 for flute; the brief Étude pour espace for choir, two pianos and percussion (performed only once and still unpublished), and the even lesser-known Dance for Burgess. A breakthrough did not come until the last fifteen years of Varèse’s life. He began working with renewed energy, composing such masterpieces as Déserts and Nocturnal, which consolidated his position and achieved international recognition. He received prestigious commissions, including from Le Corbusier for the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, which produced Poème électronique. He lectured at the Summer Courses in Darmstadt. His music began to be recorded and became more widely known, although far from being fully understood. Varèse died on 6 November 1965 at the New York University Medical Center Hospital, leaving incomplete the music for Henri Michaux’s Dans la nuit.

Varèse’s only surviving work from the period before 1914, Un grand sommeil noir for voice and piano to words by Verlaine (1906), may provide the key to understanding the composer’s decision to reject all of his youthful works. His aim was to radically reform music—one might say, to begin it anew. However, that could only be achieved from 1920 onwards. The concept of “unexplored territories” seems to be the best description of Varèse’s aims and the nature of his music. No other twentieth-century composer has rethought in such a radical manner the art of sounds. To use Schoenberg as an example: his works from the period 1909–20 always betray the desire to underline the contrast with traditional musical language. In fact, when Schoenberg adopted dodecaphony, he did not renounce traditional forms, as if he wanted to establish a solid link between past and present as an act of conciliation. A similar case can be made for Bartók (for whom Varèse had enormous respect): his innovations depended on his ability to use and artistically sublimate the potential derived from folk material. Berg also resorted to traditional forms and harmony. Even the visionary quality of Ives’s work in its real shape derives from a mixture of the musical language of the past with that of the present. Finally, the so-called musical cubism of some of Prokofiev’s works exists only insofar as it distorts, overturns, and sublimates well-known traditional musical structures. The same dialectical relationship between the past and the present is to be found in Shostakovich, Malipiero, Villa-Lobos, Ravel... There is only one twentieth-century composer whose work does not reflect this harsh conflict, this struggle to remould and renew: that composer is Edgard Varèse. Perhaps traces of an unresolved conflict, a degree of subordination to the past, may have been perceptible in his early works and that may have been the reason for his decision to destroy them.

With Amériques, Varèse entered an entirely unexplored territory, distant from the polemics and compromises that his contemporaries may have had to accept. Varèse had distanced himself physically as well, by settling in a virgin territory 6,000 kilometres from Paris. There he could begin his new work with the feeling that he was planting the seed of something unknown. Varèse’s terse harmonies are not an “antithesis” or “negation” of anything, and still less are they an attempt to épater les bourgeois. They are self-explanatory, owing to their physical and acoustical logic; they are not interested in demonstrating that they are more advanced or modern than others. This music simply exists, in its purity and autonomy of construction, in its simplicity of form (underlined by its brevity).

I don’t think anyone has been able to explain why Varèse failed to take full advantage of the electronic medium. Tireless in experimentation and in the auscultation of the various percussive and exotic instruments, he was quite happy to record street sounds and then manipulate this material. Varèse felt perhaps that the electronic sonorities represented the dehumanising culture against which he had fought all his life. He was still sufficiently tied to a nineteenth-century conception of the “machine” to shrink from them fearfully. There is no doubt that he was wrong, though indeed he was perhaps too old to set about exploring an entirely new territory. Nonetheless what he did achieve has served as an example for several generations of composers.

(Abridged and edited text by Giacomo Manzoni, August 1989, translated by Stephen Hastings)

 

Selected works: Un grand sommeil noir for voice and piano to words by Paul Verlaine (1906; orchestral arrangement: Antony Beaumont), Amériques for large orchestra (1921, rev. 1927), Offrandes for soprano and chamber orchestra to words by Vicente Huidobro and José Juan Tablado (1921), Hyperprism for winds and percussion (1923), Octandre for winds and double bass (1923), Intégrales for winds and percussion (1925), Arcana for large orchestra (1925–27, rev. 1960), Ionisation for 41 percussion instruments and two sirens (1929–31), Ecuatorial for bass (or unison choir), eight brass, piano, organ, two ondes Martenot / theremins and percussion to words from the Popol Vuh, the holy book of the Mayan Kiche people (1932–34), Density 21.5 for flute (1936), Tuning Up for orchestra (1946, completed by Chou Wen-chung in 1998), Étude pour espace for choir, two pianos and percussion (1947), Dance for Burgess for chamber orchestra (1949), Déserts for wind instruments, piano, percussion and tape (1950–54; rev. 1960, 1961), Trinum for orchestra or electronic sounds (1950–54, unfinished), La Procession de Vergès for tape, music for Thomas Bouchard’s film Around and About Joan Miró (1955), Poème électronique for three-track tape, created for the Le Corbusier’s Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair (1957–58), Nocturnal for soprano, male choir and small orchestra after Anaïs Nin (1961, completed by Chou Wenchung in 1973), Nuit (Nocturnal II) for soprano, brass, double bass and percussion to words by Henri Michaux (unfinished).