Edgard Varese

Early life

Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varese was born in Paris, but when he was only a few weeks old, he was sent to be raised by his great-uncle and other relations in the small town of Le Villars in the Burgundy region of France. There he developed a very strong attachment to his maternal grandfather, Claude Cortot (also grandfather to the pianist Alfred Cortot, a first cousin of Varese). His affection for his grandfather outshone anything he felt for his own parents.

After being reclaimed by his parents in the late 1880s, in 1893 young Edgard was forced to relocate with them to Turin, Italy, in part, to live amongst his paternal relatives, since his father was of Italian descent. It was here that he had his first real musical lessons, with the long-time director of Turin's conservatory, Giovanni Bolzoni. In 1895 he composed his first opera, Martin Pas, which has since been lost. Now in his teen years, Edgard, influenced by his father, an engineer, enrolled at the Polytechnic of Turin and started studying engineering, as his father disapproved of his interest in music, and demanded an absolute dedication to engineering studies. This conflict grew bigger and bigger, especially after the death of his mother in 1900, until in 1903 Varese left home for Paris.

From 1904 he was a student at the Schola Cantorum (founded by pupils of Cesar Franck), where his teachers included Albert Roussel; afterwards he went to study composition with Charles-Marie Widor at the Paris Conservatoire. In this period he composed a number of ambitious orchestral works, but these were only performed by Varese in piano transcriptions. One such work was his Rhapsodie romane, from about 1905, which was inspired by the Romanesque architecture of the cathedral of St. Philibert in Tournus. In 1907 he moved to Berlin, and in the same year he married the actress Suzanne Bing, with whom he had one child, a daughter. They divorced in 1913.

During these years, Varese became acquainted with Erik Satie and Richard Strauss, as well as with Claude Debussy and Ferruccio Busoni, who particularly influenced him at the time. He also gained the friendship and support of Romain Rolland and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, whose Œdipus und die Sphinx he began setting as an opera that was never completed. On 5 January 1911, the first performance of his symphonic poem Bourgogne was held in Berlin; the only one of his early orchestral works to be properly performed in his lifetime, it caused a scandal.

After being invalided out of the French Army during World War I, he moved to the United States in December 1915.

Early years in the United States

In 1918 Varese made his debut in America conducting the Grande messe des morts by Berlioz.

He spent the first few years in the United States, where he was a Romany Marie's cafe regular in Greenwich Village, meeting important contributors to American music, promoting his vision of new electronic art music instruments, conducting orchestras, and founding the short-lived New Symphony Orchestra. In New York he met Leon Theremin and other composers exploring the boundaries of electronic music.

It was also about this time that Varese began work on his first composition in the United States, Ameriques, which was finished in 1921 but would remain unperformed until 1926, when it was premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Leopold Stokowski (who had already performed Hyperprism in 1924 and would premiere Arcana in 1927). Virtually all the works he had written in Europe were either lost or destroyed in a Berlin warehouse fire, so in the U.S. he was starting again from scratch. The only surviving work from his early period appears to be the song Un grand sommeil noir, a setting of Paul Verlaine. (He still retained Bourgogne, but destroyed the score in a fit of depression many years later.) It was at the completion of this work that Varese, along with Carlos Salzedo, founded the International Composers' Guild, dedicated to the performances of new compositions of both American and European composers. The ICG's manifesto in July 1921 included the statement that

In 1922, Varese visited Berlin where he founded a similar German organisation with Busoni.

Varese contributed a poem to the Dadaist magazine 391 after an evening of drinking with Francis Picabia on the Brooklyn Bridge. The same magazine claimed that he was orchestrating a "Cold Faucet Dance". Later that year he met Louise McCutcheon (then Norton), who edited another Dadaist magazine, Rogue, with her then-husband. She was to become Louise Varese and a celebrated translator of French poetry whose versions of the work of Arthur Rimbaud for James Laughlin's New Directions imprint were particularly influential.

Varese composed many of his pieces for orchestral instruments and voices for performance under the auspices of the ICG during its six-year existence. Specifically, during the first half of the 1920s, he composed Offrandes, Hyperprism, Octandre, and Integrales.

He took American citizenship in October 1927. After arriving in the USA Varese commonly used the form 'Edgar' for his first name but reverted to 'Edgard', not entirely consistently, from the 1940s.

Life in Paris

In 1928, Varese returned to Paris to alter one of the parts in Ameriques to include the recently constructed ondes Martenot. Around 1930, he composed his most famous non-electronic piece entitled Ionisation, the first to feature solely percussion instruments. Although it was composed with pre-existing instruments, Ionisation was an exploration of new sounds and methods to create them.

In 1928 when he was asked about jazz, he said it was not representative of America but instead was, "a negro product, exploited by the Jews. All of its composers here are Jews," meaning Gruenberg and Boulanger students including Copland and Blitzstein.

In 1931, he was the best man at the wedding of his friend Nicolas Slonimsky in Paris. In 1933, while still in Paris, he wrote to the Guggenheim Foundation and Bell Laboratories in an attempt to receive a grant to develop an electronic music studio. His next composition, Ecuatorial, was completed in 1934, and contained parts for two fingerboard Theremin cellos, along with winds, percussion, and a bass singer. Anticipating the successful receipt of one of his grants, Varese eagerly returned to the United States to realize his electronic music. Slonimsky conducted its premiere in New York on April 15, 1934.

Back in the United States

Varese soon left New York City for Santa Fe, San Francisco and Los Angeles. In 1936 he wrote Density 21.5. He also promoted the theremin in his Western travels, and demonstrated one at a lecture at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque on November 12, 1936. (The University has an RCA theremin in its archives which may be the same instrument.) By the time Varese returned to New York in late 1938, Theremin had returned to Russia. This devastated Varese, who had hoped to work with him on a refinement of his instrument.

He was approached by music producer Jack Skurnick resulting in EMS Recordings #401. The record was the first release of Integrales, Density 21.5, Ionization and Octandre and featured Rene le Roy, flute, the Juilliard Percussion Orchestra and the New York Wind Ensemble conducted by Frederic Waldman.

When, in the late 1950s, Varese was approached by a publisher about making Ecuatorial available, there were very few theremins—let alone fingerboard theremins—to be found, so he rewrote/relabelled the part for ondes Martenot. This new version was premiered in 1961. (Ecuatorial has been performed again with fingerboard theremins in Buffalo, NY in 2002 and at the Holland Festival, Amsterdam, in 2009.)

Background in science

While living with his father, an engineer, Edgard was pushed to further his scientific understanding at the Institute Technique, a high school in Italy that specialized in teaching mathematics and science. It was here where Edgard became particularly interested in the works of Leonardo da Vinci. It was through Edgard's love of science that he began to study sound, as he later recalled "When I was about twenty, I came across a definition of music that seemed suddenly to throw light on my gropings toward music I sensed could exist. Jozef Maria Hoene-Wronski, the Polish physicist, chemist, musicologist and philosopher of the first half of the nineteenth century, defined music as 'the corporealization of the intelligence that is in sounds.' It was a new and exciting conception and to me the first that started me thinking of music as spatial—as moving bodies of sound in space, a conception I gradually made my own."

Edgard began his music studies with Vincent d'Indy (conducting) at the Schola Cantorum de Paris from 1903–05 and later began studying at the Conservatoire de Paris under Charles-Marie Widor from 1905–07. While he was in Paris, Varese had another pivotal experience during a performance of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony at the Salle Pleyel. The story goes that during the Scherzo Movement, perhaps due to the resonance of the hall, he had the experience of the music breaking up and projecting in space. It was an idea that stayed with him for the rest of his life, that he would later describe as consisting of "sound objects, floating in space."

Unfinished projects

From the late 1920s to the end of the 1930s Varese's principal creative energies went into two ambitious projects which were never realized, and much of whose material was destroyed, though some elements from them seem to have gone into smaller works. One was a large-scale stage work called by different names at different times, but principally The One-All-Alone or Astronomer (L'Astronome). This was originally to be based on North American Indian legends; later it became a futuristic drama of world catastrophe and instantaneous communication with the star Sirius. This second form, on which Varese worked in Paris in 1928–1932, had a libretto by Alejo Carpentier, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes and Robert Desnos. According to Carpentier, a substantial amount of this work was written but Varese abandoned it in favour of a new treatment in which he hoped to collaborate with Antonin Artaud. Artaud's libretto Il n'y a plus de firmament was written for Varese's project and sent to him after he had returned to the U.S. but by this time Varese had turned to a second huge project.

This second project was to be a choral symphony entitled Espace. In its original conception the text for the chorus was to be written by Andre Malraux. Later Varese settled on a multi-lingual text of hieratic phrases to be sung by choirs situated in Paris, Moscow, Peking and New York, synchronized to create a global radiophonic event. Varese sought input on the text from Henry Miller, who suggests in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare that this grandiose conception—also ultimately unrealized—eventually metamorphosed into Deserts. With both these huge projects Varese felt ultimately frustrated by the lack of electronic instruments to realize his aural visions. Nevertheless, he used some of the material from Espace in his short Etude pour espace, virtually the only work that had appeared from his pen for over ten years when it was premiered in 1947. According to Chou Wen-chung, Varese made various contradictory revisions to Etude pour espace which made it impossible to perform again, but the 2009 Holland Festival, which offered a 'complete works' of Varese over the weekend of 12–14 June 2009, persuaded Chou to make a new performing version (using similar brass and woodwind forces to Deserts and making use of spatialized sound projection). This was premiered at the Gashouder concert hall, Westergasfabriek, Amsterdam by Asko/Schonberg Ensemble and Cappella Amsterdam on Sunday 14 June, conducted by Peter Eotvos.

International recognition

By the early 1950s, Varese was in dialogue with a new generation of composers, such as Pierre Boulez and Luigi Dallapiccola. When he returned to France to finalize the tape sections of Deserts, Pierre Schaeffer helped arrange for suitable facilities. The first performance of the combined orchestral and tape sound composition came as part of an ORTF broadcast concert, between pieces by Mozart and Tchaikovsky and received a hostile reaction.

Le Corbusier was commissioned by Philips to present a pavilion at the 1958 World Fair and insisted (against the sponsors' resistance) on working with Varese, who developed his Poeme electronique for the venue, where it was heard by an estimated two million people. Using 400 speakers separated throughout the interior, Varese created a sound and space installation geared towards experiencing sound as it moves through space. Received with mixed reviews, this piece challenged audience expectations and traditional means of composing, breathing life into electronic synthesis and presentation.

In 1962 he was asked to join the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, and in 1963 he received the premier Koussevitzky International Recording Award.

Musical influences

In his formative years, Varese was greatly impressed by Medieval and Renaissance Music (in his career he founded and conducted several choirs devoted to this repertoire) and the music of Alexander Scriabin, Erik Satie, Claude Debussy, Hector Berlioz and Richard Strauss. There are also clear influences or reminiscences of Stravinsky's early works, specifically Petrushka and The Rite of Spring, on Arcana.

He claimed to have been inspired by the writings on music of Jozef Maria Hoene-Wronski, and especially the Polish savant's statement that the object of music is "the corporealization of the intelligence that is in sound". He was also impressed by the ideas of Busoni, who christened him L'illustro futuro.

Students and influence

According to George Perle "his partitioning of the octave in the first ten bars, places Varese along with Scriabin and the Schoenberg circle, among the revolutionary composers whose work initiates the beginning of a new mainstream tradition in the music of our century."

Students

Varese's best known student was the Chinese-born composer Chou Wen-chung (b. 1923), who moved to the United States, met Varese in 1949 and assisted him in his later years. He became the executor of Varese's estate following the composer's death. He edited and completed a number of Varese's works. For other pupils of Varese, See: List of music students by teacher: T to Z#Edgard Varese.

Influence on classical music

Composers who have claimed, or can be demonstrated to have been influenced by Varese, include Milton Babbitt, Harrison Birtwistle, Pierre Boulez, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Roberto Gerhard, Olivier Messiaen, Luigi Nono, John Palmer, Krzysztof Penderecki, Silvestre Revueltas, Wolfgang Rihm, Leon Schidlowsky, Alfred Schnittke, William Grant Still, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis, Frank Zappa and John Zorn.

On July 19 and 20, 2010, Lincoln Center in New York City dedicated two evenings to a nearly complete retrospective of his music, involving leading contemporary musicians directed by Steven Schick in the music for ensembles and the New York Philharmonic directed by Alan Gilbert in the orchestral works.

Influence on popular music

Varese's emphasis on timbre, rhythm, and new technologies inspired a generation of musicians who came of age during the 1960s and 1970s. One of Varese's greatest fans was the American guitarist and composer Frank Zappa, who, upon hearing a copy of The Complete Works of Edgard Varese, Vol. 1 became obsessed with the composer's music. The first album Zappa heard was released on LP by EMS Recordings in 1950, and included Integrales, Density 21.5, Ionisation, and Octandre.

On Zappa's 15th birthday, December 21, 1955, his mother allowed him an expensive long-distance call to Varese's home in New York City. At the time Varese was away in Brussels, Belgium, so Zappa spoke to Varese's wife Louise instead. Eventually Zappa and Varese spoke on the phone, and they discussed the possibility of meeting each other. Although this meeting never took place, Zappa received a letter from Varese. Varese's spirit of experimentation with which he redefined the bounds of what was possible in music lived on in Zappa's long and prolific career. Zappa's final project was The Rage and the Fury, a recording of the works of Varese. In the linernotes of his early albums, he often subtly misquoted the ICG manifesto, "The present day composer refuses to die." In 1981, Zappa produced and hosted "A Tribute to Edgard Varese" at the Palladium in New York City, an event at which Louise was an honored guest.

The Beatles were influenced by Varese's work. Lennon and McCartney's avant-guard influences were represented in works such as Revolution 9 and the unreleased recording Carnival of Light.

Another admirer was keyboardist Robert Lamm of the rock/jazz group Chicago. In 1972 Lamm's group recorded a song titled "A Hit By Varese" for the album Chicago V.

The tenth track of Brazilian-born electronic musician Amon Tobin's 2002 album Out from Out Where, titled Proper Hoodidge, consists largely of material from Poeme electronique.

Tributes

Predictions

On several occasions, Varese speculated on the specific ways in which technology would change music in the future. In 1936, he predicted musical machines that would be able to perform music as soon as a composer inputs his score. These machines would be able to play "any number of frequencies," and therefore the score of the future would need to be "seismographic" in order to illustrate their full potential. In 1939, he expanded on this concept, declaring that with this machine "anyone will be able to press a button to release music exactly as the composer wrote it—exactly like opening up a book." Varese would not realize these predictions until his tape experiments in the 1950s and 60s.

Idee fixe

Some of Edgard Varese's works, particularly Arcana make use of the 'idee fixe', a fixed theme, repeated certain times in a work. The 'idee fixe' was most famously used by Hector Berlioz in his Symphonie fantastique; it is generally not transposed, differentiating it from the leitmotiv, used by Richard Wagner.

Works