Tuning Up

lronically, the story of Tuning Up sums up in a nutshell that of Varèse’s lifelong failure to gain support for his vision, therefore wasting so much of his creativity. The 1947 film Carnegie Hall, produced by Boris Morros, featured many musicians, such as Leopold Stokowski, Bruno Walter, and Fritz Reiner. Varèse had known Morros through Walter Anderson, a loyal advocate of Varèse and the editor of The Commonweal who published Varèse’s seminal essay, “Organized Sound for the Sound Film,” in 1940. Morros, however, failed to support Varèse in the 1930s in gaining use of the sound studios in Hollywood for his acoustic experiments. While Carnegie Hall was in production in 1946, Morros persuaded Varèse, through Anderson, to compose a couple of minutes of music parodying the orchestra’s preconcert tuning-up, to be played by the New York Philharmonic with Stokowski. Varèse evidently took the request seriously, whereas Morros wanted slapstick and abandoned the idea. lt was said that Varèse was paid a large sum but that he rejected the cheque in a fury upon hearing his music distorted at rehearsal.

The truth was that Varèse had, without discussing a fee, worked hastily on the piece, and that no rehearsals had ever taken place. Besides, no score or parts exist.

What Varèse had kept of this venture are two short drafts of about one-and-a-half minutes each, employing quotations from his own music. The drafts appear to be revisions of an earlier version, with parts of manuscript pages and photocopies pasted over each other. The quotations, ranging from a single percussion figure to a few measures, are taken from Amériques, Arcana, Ionisation, and Intégrales, and are often modified or juxtaposed with new material. To create a complete edition of Tuning Up for performance, the first decision to be made was whether it would make sense for the two drafts to be played successively. At the end of one of the drafts, following a statement on the pitch A in six octaves, there are two additional measures of soft and isolated sounds of A-related pitches that call to mind the final and the penultimate endings of Déserts, which suggest openness and expectation for continuation (perhaps suggesting the endless expanse of a desert).

Déserts was composed a few years after Tuning Up, but much of its material actually came from Espace, with which Varèse was involved in 1946. lt was then concluded that this draft should precede the other, with its open ending expanded in the fashion of the passages in Déserts, to serve as transition to the second draft which ends on open A's. This statement on A covering the entire orchestral range obviously has a significant role and is therefore elaborated slightly both times in the completed edition. Elsewhere, much of the percussion had to be filled in, mostly by quoting Varèse’s own manner from Ionisation and Amériques.

The most enigmatic notation in the drafts are the numerous large (in size) and long (in number of measures) signs of crescendo and diminuendo. These are not synchronised with the dynamic marks for instruments, being often contradictory. lt could easily be assumed that Varèse had some electronic means in mind. But he had been trying to contact Léon Theremin in Russia1 without success since 1940, and he would hardly have had time to explore other devices not then available to him.

Besides, there are no other indications in the drafts as to what kind of musical content these hairpin signs are for. On the other hand, Varèse’s two sirens were in plain view in his workshop and could easily be brought to Carnegie Hall on demand. It was therefore decided to interpret these signs as for instruments in the orchestra to play “as if tuning” and for the sirens as used in Ionisation.

In recognition of his usual attention to register, timbre and dynamics, these added “tuning” passages are organised according to how they interact with the notated parts by Varèse with respect to these parameters. Similarly, percussion parts are expanded or filled in to highlight or contrast the pitched parts written by him, and to correlate with the parabolic sounds of the sirens.    

As completed, Tuning Up is an interplay of flashes of orchestral sonorities, rainbow-like colors of percussion, spatial trajectories of sirens, and the undulating sound of “tuning.” On another level, Varèse clearly had fun with the pitch A: teasing and flirting with it, juxtaposing or building upon it, and often resorting to his favorite schema of intercepting cycles of intervals, frequently the fifth. Tuning Up is a perfect overture to Varèse’s music, and an equally fascinating opening for any symphonic concert.

(Chou Wen-chung, from the booklet of Varèse.

The Complete Works,

Decca CD 460 208-2.)

1 Composer and inventor Léon Theremin (Lev Sergeyevich Termen, 1896–1993) was a Soviet prisoner between 1939 and 1947; from 1940, he had been forced to work as a scientist at the Central Construction Bureau no. 29 of the NKVD in Moscow. (Note of the editor.)