Varèse, Edgar (EN)

Varèse Edgar, actually Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse, *22 December 1883 Paris, †6 November 1965 New York, American composer of French descent. His father, Henri Varèse, an engineer and industrialist, was born in Piedmont but was a naturalised Frenchman; his mother, Blanche Marie, née Cortot, came from Burgundy; Edgar was their eldest son. In 1893, the Varèse family moved from Paris to Turin, where Edgar began studying music, first privately with G. Bolzoni (harmony and counterpoint), and from 1900 he studied percussion at the conservatory; he participated in student concerts and made his first attempts at composition. In 1903, he returned to Paris. In 1904, he joined the Schola Cantorum, studied composition and conducting with V. d’Indy, counterpoint and fugue with A. Roussel; he was interested in science and philosophy. He met P. Picasso, J. Miró, J. Gonzales, A. Modigliani, E. Satie, and G. Apollinaire. In January 1905, at G. Fauré’s urging, he transferred to the composition class of Ch.-M. Widor at the Paris Conservatory. His first major works were written there, but we know them only by title, as the scores were lost or burned during World War I; only two songs have survived. In 1906, Varèse founded and later led an amateur choir in the suburb of Saint-Antoine, which he gave concerts with, primarily of early music. In 1907, thanks to J. Massenet’s support, he received an artistic scholarship from the city of Paris, but he considered the city’s artistic climate unfavourable to new music (sic!) and decided to move to Berlin. In November 1907, he married actress Suzanne Bing. He arrived in Berlin in early 1908. He introduced himself to F. Busoni, whose publication “Outline of a New Musical Aesthetic” had made a profound impression on him earlier, and he befriended the conductor C. Muck. H. von Hofmannsthal proposed that he write an opera based on the text of his drama “Oedipus and the Sphinx.” The opera was completed, but the only two copies of the score were lost in the turmoil of war. Later that same year, Varèse had an important meeting with R. Strauss, and during a brief stay in Paris, with C. Debussy, and in 1909 with R. Rolland. In 1913, his wife left Varèse and returned to Paris.

In 1914, Varèse attempted to launch a conducting career, but under his direction, only one concert took place – in Prague, with the Philharmonic Orchestra. The outbreak of war thwarted Varèse’s further conducting projects; as a citizen of an enemy state, he could not return to Berlin (after the war, it turned out that all his manuscripts and scores had been destroyed in a fire in the warehouse where they were stored). He then decided to go to America for a while; in December 1915, he sailed from Bordeaux and, as a result, left France for a longer period. C. Muck, who was a conductor in Boston at the time, introduced him to the musical world of the East Coast of the United States. Varèse made a living copying sheet music and orchestrating works, and he also gave music lessons.

Quite unexpectedly, he was entrusted with conducting a performance of H. Berlioz’s Requiem with a 300-person choir and a 150-person orchestra at the New York Hippodrome (1 April 1917). This concert, enthusiastically received by audiences and music critics, opened the door for Varèse to other American stages. At the end of 1917, Varèse met Louise Norton, married her in 1922, and remained in this happy relationship for the rest of his life. In 1919, he founded the New Symphony Orchestra in New York, whose goal was to perform the latest works by contemporary composers. Due to disputes with the orchestra’s board, he resigned from the management and in 1921, together with harpist C. Salzed, founded the International Composers’ Guild, which operated until 1927. On its behalf, he led the performance of 56 contemporary compositions, including A. Schoenberg’s Pierrot Luna, I. Stravinsky’s The Wedding, A. Berg’s Violin Concerto, works for string quartet by A. Webern, and many of his own.

Between 1918 and 1921, Varèse composed a major orchestral work entitled Amériques, which opened a new chapter in his music. In 1921, the composer joined the Dadaist movement and signed its manifesto. From March to December 1924, he lived in Paris, staying at F. Léger’s studio in Montparnasse, where he met, among others, M. Ravel. In the summer, he spent a week in London and attended a performance of Hyperprism on the BBC. In an interview for the Daily Mail Evening, he lamented the insufficient avant-garde nature (compared to other art forms) of 20^th-century music. After returning to New York, he created further works: Octandre (1924), Intégrales (1925), and Arcana (1926), received enthusiastically by some, with decided disapproval by others; he gained an increasingly strong artistic standing in American circles. Louise and Edgar spent the summer and early fall of 1927 again in France. On 26 October 1927, Varèse received United States citizenship. In February 1928, Varèse, H. Cowell, and C. Chávez founded the Pan American Association of Composers in New York to support and perform new music from the Americas; N. Slonimsky was its chief conductor and organizer. In October 1928, Varèse and his wife returned to France and, thanks to donations from L. Stokowski and F. Bernouard, a friend from his youth, stayed there for five years. Varèse met with painters and filmmakers (T. Bouchard, A. Carpentier, L. Russolo, and others). In 1929, he began work on Espace. The performance of Amériques at the Salle Gaveau on 30 May 1929 was met with loud protests, but Octandre and Offrandes at the Salle Pleyel on 14 March 1930 aroused admiration for the composer. In 1933, Varèse briefly visited Barcelona (where he met J. Miró), Madrid, and Lisbon. The premiere of Ionisation, conducted by N. Slonimsky, took place in New York without his participation (6 March 1933). In 1936–37, while still living in New York, he visited Santa Fe several times, invited by the university. In 1938, he moved to Los Angeles and tried unsuccessfully to interest Hollywood producers in his music.

In 1940, Varèse returned to New York. There, he attempted to realize his idea of ​​having an electromusical company build a new, multi-purpose electronic instrument; these efforts, however, also proved fruitless. Difficult years followed for Varèse, and he almost ceased composing. He led amateur choirs and held sporadic composition seminars at Columbia University. Only the premiere of Étude pour Espace in New York in 1947 restored Varèse’s popularity. By 1948, he was leading a regular composition seminar at Columbia University, and in 1950, he accepted an invitation to participate in the Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt and to lecture further in Germany. In 1951, he began work on Déserts. On 5 October 1954, he arrived in Paris and recorded two versions of a musique concrète tape for this work at the French Radio’s Studio d’Essai (later P. Schaeffer’s GRM studio). The premiere of Déserts took place on 2 December 1954, at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, conducted by H. Scherchen. It provoked a protest uproar, even greater than that which had occurred during the premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Subsequent performances in Hamburg and Stockholm took place in a calm atmosphere and with the audience’s approval. In January 1955, Varèse returned to New York. The first American performance of Déserts in Bennington (17 May 1955) was conducted by F. Waldman. In December 1956, Varèse again briefly stayed in Paris. In September 1957, in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, he began work on Poème électronique, intended for the Philips Pavilion designed by Le Corbusier and Xenakis at the World’s Fair in Brussels. At the exhibition’s opening on 2 May 1958, electronic music and concrete sounds were played in a mobile manner from over 400 loudspeakers placed along the joints of the pavilion’s walls and around the edges of the floor. The electronic poem was repeated several times a day for several months, until the exhibition closed.

The year 1958 saw the consolidation of Varèse’s artistic reputation. Numerous concerts of his works in Europe, America, and the Far East established him as a prominent figure among the world’s most distinguished composers. This was confirmed, for example, by his performance of Arcana under the direction of L. Bernstein at Carnegie Hall in New York four times (on 27, 28, 29, and 30 November 1958). In 1959, Varèse’s compositions were presented at the most important music festivals in Europe: in Vienna, Paris, Donaueschingen, Venice, and also at the Warsaw Autumn Festival (Densité, 21 May). In October 1960, Varèse produced another version of the tape editing for Déserts for Radio Canada. New York-based composer Chou Wen-Chung, a student of Varèse’s, became his musical assistant (and, after Varèse’s death, the custodian of his legacy). On 1 May 1961, in New York, under the baton of Robert Craft, the premiere of Nocturnal took place. In 1964–65, Varèse remained in New York, battling illness and attempting to write. He began a new edition of Nocturnal and planned the vocal-instrumental composition Nuit. He did not complete this work. In October 1965, he suffered a sudden attack of intestinal thrombosis and underwent surgery at the university hospital, but died of the infection. In accordance with Varèse’s last wishes, his body was cremated and his ashes scattered; there was no funeral.

In the last years of his life, Varèse received numerous honours and distinctions, including membership in the Kungliga Musikaliska Akademien in Stockholm and the Creative Arts Awards Medal at Brandeis University in 1962; he was also the first recipient of the S. Koussevitzky Award in 1963 (the same distinction was awarded to W. Lutosławski a year later).

Varèse’s entire known oeuvre comprises only a dozen or so works, but his music, as well as the radiance of his ideas, expressed both in his writings and lectures, in interviews and conversations with musicians, poets, and other artists, caused a tremendous stir in the minds of his contemporaries. Great artists of the time considered him the creator of music of the future, a visionary of new music. And although he did not create a new sound system (comparable to dodecaphony) or a distinct school, younger composers – K. Stockhausen, L. Berio, J. Cage, I. Xenakis, H.M. Górecki, as well as F. Zappa and many others – they owed the most to him.

The Varèse phenomenon is difficult to explain. Varèse had an extraordinary gift for convincing people of his art and his ideas, and they were incredibly appealing. He preached freedom of action, in accordance with the ancient principle of “spiritus flat ubi vult.” He adopted F. Busoni’s statement that “Music was born free, and freedom is destined for it” (Outline of a New Musical Aesthetics), as well as – through French theorists (C. Durutte, Ch. Henry) – J. Hoene-Wroński’s maxim: “Music is the embodiment of reason in sounds” (Philosophie absolue de la musique; he adopted this latter idea, however, in a substantially modified version, giving it the form: “Music is the embodiment of reason contained in sounds”). He believed that music in his era – the era of Cubism, Dadaism, abstractionism, and all currents that contradicted “classical” art – was insufficiently modern in relation to other arts. According to Varèse, it should break away from the rules imposed on it by 18^th– and 19^th-century tradition. A composer should not passively submit to the rules of musical convention, but should create them himself or select them from among existing ones, in accordance with the immanent “rationality” of sounds themselves. This applies primarily to the concepts of form, texture, and sonic material, limited by the rigors of tuning and the dominance of pitch over other aspects of sound. A composer should draw freely from the entire resource of audible sounds, considering all their properties as potentially equivalent.

The lack of tools such as new electronic instruments, combined with a distaste for “pseudo-instruments,” such as those invented by the Futurists, pushed Varèse to create a new sound within the existing orchestra. He achieved new timbres by privileging wind instruments, which he often entrusted with the foreground material, and by treating untuned percussion as a standalone group. Varèse initially implemented ideas for utilizing sounds beyond the twelve-tone scale by introducing sirens and Martenot waves into the orchestra, then by processing acoustic effects recorded on tape, including instrumental ones (Déserts), and finally through synthetic sound (Poème électronique). He foresaw the need to introduce electronic instruments into music as early as 1913. In a 1936 lecture in Santa Fe, he spoke of the idea of ​​building an electronic “musical machine that could produce sounds of any frequency and rhythms impossible to achieve by live performers” (see The Liberation of Sound). To realize this idea, he postulated close collaboration between artists and scientists (it should be added that Varèse was interested in physics – both historical and contemporary. His particular passion was crystallography, as well as acoustics and optics. Hence the loose associations of sound structures with mathematical objects or natural phenomena in his works, and titles such as Hyperprism, Octandre, Ionisation, and Intégrales).

It is unknown, however, why Varèse, who constantly advocated moving beyond the 12-semitone tempered scale, failed to take an interest in the microtonal experiments of his contemporary composers (A. Hába, J. Carrillo, H. Partch). He also did not take advantage of the natural possibilities for obtaining microtones offered by fretless string instruments; microtonality was also available in the Ondes Martenot and L. Termen’s instruments, which Varèse frequently employed. In practice, he limited himself to the tempered scale, treating extra-temperamental phenomena (untuned percussion, siren glissandi, etc.) as complements and enriches the dominant traditional sounds. Only access to advanced electronic synthesis at the Philips studio in the Netherlands prompted Varèse to open himself to the world of uncodified sounds.

The sonic material of Varèse’s compositions is decidedly chromatic, though unrelated to serial arrangements – created rather by juxtaposing adjacent semitones, sometimes scattered across several octaves. The lack of tonal centres and functional connections makes this music distinctly atonal, although Varèse did not abandon the use of leading tones (French “pivots”) or octave doublings. However, he eschewed traditionally understood transformation work. Its place was taken by the assembly of rhythmic, rhythmic-timbre, or rhythmic-pitch units: the exposure of stable signals – motifs – subject to transposition, timbre changes, lengthening, or shortening. The form of the composition arose through the variable combinations of these units, while the structure of each unit (the relationships between the sounds that constitute them) was essentially unchanging and rigid – unlike conventional transformation techniques.

A characteristic feature of Varèse’s orchestral texture is the overlapping of sustained and rhythmised notes, which leads to the creation of specific, shifting sound planes dominated by sharp-sounding intervals. Polyphony is created by the superimposition of several motivic layers, often against a backdrop of repeated dissonant chords and rhythmically active percussion, in rhythms and with various rhythmic divisions. This creates a distinctive aura and, at the same time, a structural basis for Varèse’s distinctive “sound images.”

Varèse’s innovation was expressed primarily in his departure from the conventional hierarchy of musical elements. The primacy of harmony and melody, established in Western European tradition, was challenged in his music to a greater extent than in the works of Debussy, Stravinsky, Schönberg, or Bartók: each of the sound parameters could assume a form-forming role in the piece. This “liberation of sound” was perhaps the composer’s most important message. It had a decisive influence on the development of music in the second half of the 20^th century.

Literature: “Musique et l’Univers sonore,” May 1955, special issue “Liberté 59” I, 1959 No. 5; Le poème électronique Le Corbusier (texts Le Corbusier, Varèse and others), ed. J. Petit, Paris 1958; Visages d’Edgar Varèse, ed. F. Ouellette, Montreal 1959; I. Strawiński, R. Craft, Memories and Commentaries and Dialogues and Diary, Berkeley – Los Angeles 1960, 1963 (Stravinsky’s comments on Varèse’s music and personality); F. Ouellette Edgar Varèse, Paris 1966, revised and extended ed. 1989; G. Charbonnier Entretiens avec Edgar Varèse suivis dune étude de son l’oeuvre par Harry Halbreich, Paris 1970; L. Varèse Varèse. A Looking-Glass Diary, vol. 1: 1883– 1928, New York 1972;

H. Jolivet Varèse, Paris 1973; O. Vivier Varèse, Paris 1973; G. Wehmeyer Edgar Varèse, Regensburg 1977; Edgar Varèse. Rückblick auf die Zukunft, «Musik-Konzepte» 6, ed. H.-K. Metzger and R. Riehn, Minich 1978, extended 2^nd ed. 1983; A. Carpentier Varèse vivant, Paris 1980, 2^nd ed. 1991; J. Maderuelo Edgar Varèse. Músicos de nuestro siglo, Madrid 1985; J.W. Bernard The Music of Edgard Varèse, New Haven 1987; Edgar Varèse 1883– 1965. Dokumente zu Leben und Werk, ed. H. de la Motte-Haber and K. Angermann, Frankfurt am Main 1990; H. de la Motte-Haber Die Musik von Edgar Varèse. Studien zu seinen nach 1918 entstandenen Werken, Hofheim 1993; Edgar Varèse – A. Jolivet. Correspondance 1931–1965, ed. Ch. Jolivet-Erlih, Geneva 2002; D.A. Nanz Edgar Varèse. Die Orchesterwerke, Berlin 2003;

H. Cowell The Music of Edgar Varèse, “Modern Music” I, 1928, reprint in: American Composers on American Music, ed. H. Cowell, Palo Alto (Stanford University) 1933, new ed. New York 1962; H. Cowell Déserts, “The Musical Quarterly” XLI, 1955; H.-K. Metzger Hommage à Edgar Varèse, «Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik» II, Mainz 1959; T.A. Zieliński Edgar Varèse. Prekursor nowej muzyki, “Ruch Muzyczny” 1961 No. 17; E. Heim Aussenseiter Varèse, “Melos” XXXII, 1965; M. Kondracki Edgar Varèse (1883–1965), “Ruch Muzyczny” 1965 No. 24; G. Schuller Conversation with Varèse, “Perspectives of New Music” III/2, 1965, Polish ed. transl. H. Krzeczkowski, “Res Facta” 1,1967; M. Babbitt Edgar Varèse. A Few Observations of His Music, “Perspectives of New Music” IV/2, 1966; Chou Wen-Chung Varèse. A Sketch of the Man and His Music, “The Musical Quarterly” LII, 1966; A. Whittall, Varèse and Organic Athematicism, “Musical Review” 1967, No. 28 (comments on Déserts); P. Schaeffer, P. Boulez Hommages à Varèse and O. Vivier Edgar Varèse. Esquisses et œuvres détruites, “La Revue Musicale” 265–266, 1969; F. Zappa Edgar Varèse. The Idol of my Youth, “Stereo Review” VI, 1971; A. Wilheim, The Genesis of a Specific Twelve-Tone System in the Works of Varèse, “Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae” 1977, No. 1; J. Strawn, The „Intégrales” of Edgard Varèse. Space, Mass, Element, and Form, “Perpectives of New Music” XVII/1, 1978; L. Stempel, Varèse’s ‘Awkwardness’ and the Symmetry in the ‘Frame of 12 Tones’: An Analytic Approach, “The Musical Quarterly” LXV/2, 1979; J.W. Bernard Pitch/Register in the Music of Edgar Varèse, “Music Theory Spectrum” III, 1981; M. Stowpiec Poglądy estetyczne Edgara Varèse’a, “Muzyka” 1982 No. 3–4; J. Siddons, On the Nature of Melody in Varèse’s ‘Density 21.5’, “Perspectives of New Music” XXIII/1, 1984; Ph. Lalitte, «Arcana» d’Edgard Varèse, thématique et espace des hauteurs, un univers musical en expansion, “Analyse Musicale” 1986 No. 3; J.-Ch. François, Organization of Scattered Timbral Qualities: A Look at Edgard Varèse’s „Ionisation”, “Perspectives of New Music” XXIX/1, 1991; E. West Marvin, The Perception of Rhythm in Non-Tonal Music: Rhythmic Contours in the Music of Edgard Varèse, “Music Theory Spectrum” XIII/1, 1991; M. Bristiger, Dziewiętnastowieczne aspekty myśli muzycznej Antona Weberna i Edgara Varèse’a, in: Muzykolog wobec dzieła muzycznego, Kraków 1999; B. Halliday Edgar Varèse. Complete Works (reviews of recordings of Varèse’s works), “Mappa. Mundi Magazine” VIII, 1999; F. Mitchell, Form and Expression in the Vocal Works of Edgard Varèse, “Contemporary Music Review” XXIII/2, 2004; Ph. Lalitte, The Theories of Helmholtz in the Work of Varèse, “Contemporary Music Review” XXX/5, 2011; F. Di Gasbarro, Sketching a New Verticality: Varèse’s Atonal Sound and Its Contexts – Schoenberg, Webern and Ruggles, “Contemporary Music Review” XXXVIII/3–4,  2019.

Documentaries: Les Grandes Répétitions: Hommage à Edgar Varèse, dir. L. Ferrari, S. G. Patris, 1965; Edgard Varèse: A Portrait, dir. M. Kidel, 1997; Het elektronisch gedicht – Edgard Varèse in Nederland, dir. Willem Hering, Hank Onrust, 1998