Sound as Living Matter: Edgard Varèse

“It is imagination that gives form to dreams”

Throughout his life, Edgard Varèse used a phrase in his lectures and writings which he had derived as a young man from a footnote in a textbook on harmony: “Music is the corporealization of the intelligence that is in sounds.” It was certainly unusual that a brand-new student at the Paris Schola Cantorum in 1905 was less interested in combining tones in artful scholarly fugues, less interested in the notes, but more in sounds as such, and did not hesitate to ascribe their own intelligence to them. To Varèse, sounds were living subjects of music. Later, he was to recall that at that time he spent hours listening to the sound patterns of a siren he had bought at a flea market. Chou Wen-Chung, Varèse’s master pupil, once spent a long time waiting outside of his teacher’s room. 50 years after his student years in Paris, the latter was busy playing a very simple pair of notes again and again on the old piano in his New York apartment, alternately in a high and a low register. When Varèse spent half an hour immersing himself in the oscillation of this fifth, not even noticing the doorbell, he was certainly busy exploring the “intelligence” of this sound through listening. At the time, he was working on his great late work Déserts (1949–1953).

This formula has been attached indelibly to the composer’s name, and there is hardly anyone even superficially familiar with his work who would not respond to the mention of Varèse’s name with this quotation – his “battle cry”, so to speak. What it describes, beginning with an infinite, almost childishly-tender fascination for sounds, is the goal of opening up the world of composed music to all kinds of sound phenomena; those that are relegated to the status of noise, which traditionally have no place in our music, just as much as sounds that may yet be discovered. Thus, it is not surprising that in Amériques, the first of his works that Varèse himself accepted and handed down to posterity (1918–1921), he not only explores the sounding body of the symphony orchestra in all its facets from the massive tutti to the most intimate chamber music sound, but also combines it in an absolutely new way with the sounds of a fire engine’s siren and a steamboat whistle. It is superfluous to emphasize that his goal was not to be original, funny or shocking in any way – on the contrary. It also seems coherent that Varèse was one of the first composers to create a work using only percussion: Ionisation (1929–1931). Among the 46 rhythm instruments, there are various drums, but also anvils, bells, a piano as well as South American instruments such as guiro or maracas, a string drum (also called “lion’s roar”) and, as the exception to the rule, two sirens. While the mission of Amériques was to broaden the horizon of sound, Ionisation turns the traditional idea of music on its head: the “tone” is simply eliminated; instead, the work celebrates the new and exciting world of “noise”.
To Varèse it seemed natural that this sensitivity to sound meant more than composing with sounds. No sooner had he arrived in his future adopted hometown of New York early in 1916 than he postulated that new instruments had to be invented, electric instruments capable of producing new sounds never heard before. They were to be the result of the scientific and ground-breaking sound research of a specialized laboratory. Varèse was to remain faithful to this revolutionary idea, which was ahead of the musical and technological development by decades, with unparalleled tenacity. Even shortly before his death in 1965, he insisted on the wish to have his own laboratory of sound. The wish was never fulfilled and perhaps was more a poetic concept than a technical project. However, the idea of combining compositional creativity with scientific research is emblematic for the composer’s philosophy. He himself summed it up in the following aphorism: “On the threshold of beauty, art and science must collaborate.”
His disappointment with the lasting failure of his enormous plan plunged him into a deep creative crisis from the mid-1930s onwards, a crisis he only overcame when he began working on Déserts. Shortly before the work was completed, he was given one of the earliest models of a portable tape-recorder. He immediately decided to integrate sound sequences recorded on tape into his work. The three “interpolations” he called “organized sound” were later reworked or re-engineered variously. First, however, astonished New York pedestrians witnessed the 70-year-old composer and his assistant tape-recording the sounds of cars starting in the street, of the harbor, factories and also a church organ on a huge machine. The fact that the work’s premiere in Paris in 1954 caused a veritable riot, the unprepared audience reacting with indignation and amusement in roughly equal parts, was a shock for the composer. However, his pioneering work caused the architect Le Corbusier to insist that none other than Varèse work with him on planning his gigantic multimedia spectacle Le poème électronique for the World Fair in Brussels in 1957 – against considerable resistance from the organizers. The taped music of the same title was heard by several million people at the Philips Pavilion in Brussels and constituted a late triumph which made up for many setbacks Varèse had suffered on his steady way as a “man working with frequencies, intensities and rhythm,” as he once said.

“There are no modern or ancient works, but only those which live in the present. Ideas change, and with them their medium of expression. In the works of today and in those that have preceded them, the same elements and principles are common to all.”

Given the force and insistence with which Varèse promoted a broadening of sound horizons, both in writing and music, it would be easy to overlook the many facets of his work. Actually, he was one of the first people with a passion for early music: he promoted vocal “pre-Bach” music from Guillaume Dufay’s Renaissance to Vittoria’s motets and Heinrich Schütz’s oratorios. Even as a student, he founded a mixed chorus based at an adult education center in Paris. When he moved to Berlin for a few years in 1908, he worked as a chorus director there too, and in the 1940s in New York, he came to the public’s attention as a choral conductor. The old masters’ works were always the focus of his activities. It is remarkable that none other than the uncompromising explorer of new sound worlds in the 1940s gave twenty lectures on the development of liturgical music at a school of church music.
Varèse was not an avant-garde sectarian, but had an open perspective like few others. When he founded the International Composers’ Guild (ICG) in New York in 1921, the first American organization for performing new music, he emphasized that he rejected all “isms” and recognized no schools; the only criteria he used when selecting works for his concerts were “mastery of craftmanship and honesty of purpose”. “I want to encompass everything that is human… from the primitive to the farthest reaches of science.” In a concept for a new kind of music school, which he considered founding during his years in Paris at the end of the 1920s, he planned to document the music “of all races, all cultures, all periods and tendencies.” Years before the UNESCO initiatives and long before the rise of world music, he was fascinated by the classical music of India and the music of the Japanese court. And right after the founding of the League of Nations in Geneva, he postulated a League of Nations in Art… Obviously, Varèse wasted no time on small thoughts. He founded a branch of ICG in Germany (even before the founding of the IGNM) and planned a further one for Russia. A gigantic multimedia project with the working title Espace (Space), which he worked on for more than 20 years and the sheer unrealizability of which presumably contributed to his creative crisis, called for simultaneous performances in a number of world capitals and a world-wide radio broadcast. He had nothing but scorn for cultural Euro-centrism: “The white people of course, those poor idiots, believe they invented everything…”
All those suspected of following an “ism” or belonging to a school were treated with bitter sarcasm; this mainly applied to the “twelve tone petit-bourgeois” of the Schoenberg School, who had simply replaced an old system with a new one, and to Stravinsky’s neo-classicism, which he called “the impotent return to the formulas of the past”. Against the tendency to form schools and to return to traditions, he placed his own credo: “The very basis of creative work is irreverence!” However, his opinions did not stop Varèse in any way from programming works of the above-mentioned styles for the ICG, from being friends with Arnold Schoenberg and from admiring the music of Anton Webern.
By distancing himself from the two dominating musical trends of his time for his own writing, however, he became one of its most excellent and typical representatives. After all, art music of the 20th century is not characterized by stylistic unity, but by multiple artistic view-points. Varèse represents the phenomenon of the personal style. His music is unique and inimitable. Many of the most important composers of the following generation admired him greatly for this very reason. Among them, Iannis Xenakis should be mentioned, who was the architect of the Brussels pavilion and thus in contact with Varèse; Morton Feldman, who called Varèse one of his personal role models; and Wolfgang Rihm, for whom Varèse’s music was one of his central sources of inspiration.

“All a composer has to do is to feel and convey his sensations to music.”

Amériques, especially in its first version, must be considered one of the most colorful and vital works in the entirety of new music. The title stands for “new worlds on earth, in the stars and in the minds of men”. Upon closer listening, it turns out that the composer created a synthesis of his personal musical development in this work. He had studied barely one year at the Paris conservatories before he left for Berlin, the town of his first great role model, Richard Strauss, to acquire his own musical language through independent studies. Debussy’s orchestral pieces, Strauss’s symphonic poems, Schoenberg’s works (especially the Five Orchestral Pieces, Op. 16) and Stravinsky’s ballets served as the points of departure for new and re-compositions that were experimental while being analytical and creative at the same time. Many such fragments are woven into the score of Amériques; they never seem like quotations and are never meant that way. On the contrary, they stand for Varèse’s credo of “authenticity”: only elements with biographical, emotional and personal roots can be the material of imagination. Even the steamboat whistle mentioned earlier is not a joke, but a souvenir of Varèse’s childhood, spent in a small village in Burgundy near the Saône river. Was he not to say later that novelty is the result of transformation? If living sound is to be the subject of music, then composing can no longer be about the treatment of thematic figures, about the grand architecture of motivic developments – as was the case when the romantic symphonies were written. Varèse knew that sound and sounds alone do not make a composition. He conceived every sound value as a musical function within a very precise rhythmical and formal event context. Thus, his music appears to us to be an organic, almost natural succession of sound events which dissolve each other in ever-new forms, are projected into the soundscape, interrupted, amplified, contradicted, which approach each other, mix, overlay and clash with each other. Varèse called such constellations of sound, which are always based on a very simple, often almost simple-minded motif, “masses of sound”.
As powerful and archaic as such masses of sound may be, especially in early works up to Arcana, they are always calculated and balanced within themselves down to the smallest detail, down to the individual clicking of a woodblock. The composer who rejected systems owed it to himself to arrange every detail anew in this constant process; and because this arrangement of the finest musical nuances was his primary strength, he could afford to do without any overarching compositional system. One could say that all Varèse’s forms, even those of the lengthy works such as Amériques, Arcana and Déserts, are an artful succession of compositional miniatures – strings of pearls, made of sound.
The second work for a large orchestra, Arcana (1925–1927), was characterized by Varèse’s striving for an ever more precise musical expression; an answer to the exuberance of Amériques, so to speak. In Arcana, the development of the productive early 1920s, during which the composer provided a new work to be premiered by his ICG every year, reaches its zenith. With its length of merely four minutes, it was the short Hyperprism (1922) which provided a manifesto-like preview of the composer’s mature style. “We should write in a telegraphic style. We should do nothing by round-about means and try for expressions in the simplest way.”

Dieter A. Nanz

Quotations taken from texts originally written by Varèse in English are quoted in the original.

The realization of the Varèse Continent program focus is made possible by Roche, our project sponsor. Thanks to this support by Roche the Continents series is to be continued in the future and will be devoted each year to a composer of the 20th or 21st century.