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 Composers today take for granted that traditional orchestral instruments form merely one segment of a much broader spectrum of tonal resources available to them. Any object can be a percussion instrument, and any sound can be captured and modified electronically or on tape for use in a musical composition. But what is commonplace today was once utterly unheard of. An explosive expansion of the possibilities of musical sound occurred during the first decades of the twentieth century, and one man was the source of much of the artistic vision necessary to bring it about: Edgard Varèse.
Varèse was born on December 22, 1883, and as an infant was entrusted to relatives in Burgundy and Paris while the rest of the family moved to Turin, Italy. The young Edgard spent a very happy early childhood in France, but at age nine he was returned to his family in Italy and his bucolic days ended.
Like most great composers, Varèse showed musical inclinations at an early age, and like many, he was discouraged from pursuing these inclinations. Instead, his engineer father, Henri, pushed him towards a mathematical and technical education, forcing Edgard to sneak out of the house for music lessons and concerts. Most parents of budding artists simply want what is best for their children, but with Henri Varèse one cannot be sure. The father of Edgard and four other children ran his family through verbal and physical abuse, and his attempts to stifle young Edgard's musical leanings were simply one in a lifelong string of mistreatments Henri brought upon his children. He drove one wife to the grave when Edgard was fourteen; five years later, he had started to destroy another when Edgard, on his way out the door to study music in Paris, gave his father a savage beating of his own. For the rest of his life, Varèse would regret having left his father alive.
Although turn-of-the-century Paris was an exciting time and place for a musician, with Claude Debussy actively reinventing the foundations of traditional composition, Varèse found his own studies at the prestigious Conservatoire and Schola Cantorum stultifying, and his interactions with avant-garde artistic circles (through which he became a friend of Debussy) ultimately unsatisfying. Nobody in Paris, it seems, shared his fiery desire for a fundamental overhaul of the treatment of sound. More important than these experiences for Varèse's later development was a new interest in science and the quasi-scentific philosopher Paracelsus (1493-1541). Ideas of currents (both electrical and watery), waves, seismology and physics would come to decisively inform his music.
After a short stay in Paris, Varèse, his new wife, Suzanne Bing, and their young daughter left for Berlin in 1907. The composer was drawn to Germany by a call to arms that, along with science and the philosophy of Paracelsus, would shape his career: a pamphlet entitled A New Esthetic of Music by Ferrucio Busoni. Busoni was himself a noted musical innovator, and in this tract he described the possibility of musics based on scales other than those used in Europe and predicted the invention of ideal instruments capable of producing any imaginable sound. Enraptured, Varèse packed up his family and set off to seek the author in Berlin immediately.
The relationship between Varèse and Busoni was a most profitable one for Edgard. Not only did he find a perfect mentor and advocate, but Busoni's sponsorship led Varèse to meet the already world-famous Richard Strauss, who in turn arranged for a performance of the young composer's orchestral score Bourgogne in 1910. This premiere would be the beginning of Varèse's public career.
In 1913 Varèse and his wife split amicably, as her acting career called her back to Paris, where she moved with the couple's daughter; Varèse wanted to remain in Berlin. But despite an active composing schedule, friendships with Busoni, Strauss, and Debussy, and a growing public presence, Varèse found life as a composer in Berlin unfulfilling; in 1915 he set off for the United States in search of a musical culture more conducive to the sort of comprehensive innovation he had in mind.
Once he arrived in New York, though, Varèse began his American career not as an iconoclastic composer but as a conductor and musical director. He first came to American attention when he conducted Hector Berlioz's Requiem in New York in 1917, and soon after, he began a career as a promoter of new music. In 1921, Varèse teamed up with avant-garde composer Carlos Salzedo to found the International Composers' Guild. During its six-year existence the ICG would become one of the foremost promoters and outlets for avant-garde composition in the US. That same year he married the poet Louise Norton, whom he had been seeing for several years; she would remain his wife until his death, after which she managed his estate with fervent loyalty.
Varèse had learned in 1919 that the Berlin warehouse containing the scores for most of his early works had burned, and that these works were lost forever. Such an event would be many composers' worst nightmare, but it seemed only to stimulate Varèse's creativity. Starting in 1921, he created a remarkable series of works, totally different from Bourgogne and from anything else being written at the time or ever before.
First among these was Amériques, completed in 1922. The largest among this group of pieces, Amériques is nearly half an hour long and is written for a vast orchestra of over one hundred performers. Although Amériques dwarfs its companions, it shares with them a completely novel musical language of unrelenting, strident dissonance, obsessive repetition of small, frozen melodic figures, and several moments of almost crushing loudness. Like all of Varèse's works from the 1920s on, Amériques was conceived not in terms of melodies and harmonies, not even in terms of themes, but rather as a collection of sound masses intersecting in space, bouncing off each other and creating interference patterns like the waves and particles of modern physics. Among Amériques' large percussion section appears a siren, a newcomer to orchestral and chamber music whose distinctive whine would characterize several of Varèse's scores. It could bring an unfavorable response, as was the case in the 1923 premiere of Hyperprism, in which the audience derided the invasion of street sounds into music. This novelty was among the first signs of what would become an obsessive search for new sounds, a quest which would eventually choke off Varèse's creative output.
The other works which Varèse created during the 1920s included Offrandes, Hyperprism, Octandre, and Intégrales, each much shorter than and written for many fewer instruments than Amériques. Finally there was Arcana, Varèse's last mature orchestral work, with a score bearing a quote from Paracelsus; Leopold Stokowski conducted the world premiere in 1927, as he had for Amériques in 1926 and Intégrales the year before. Each work Varèse produced during this productive decade provoked equal parts outrage and stunned admiration in the best tradition of truly innovative music.
By the time he completed Arcana, however, Varèse was too dissatisfied with the limited sonic capabilities of the instruments at his disposal to continue along the path he had set out during the 1920s. In 1927 the ICG disbanded and reformed as the Pan-American Association of Composers, involving a wider circle of influential avant-garde musicians. But Varèse's thoughts at this time were not as wrapped up in promotion and concert production as they once were. Instead, he became obsessed with the search for new sounds, new resources, and new paradigms.
Varèse and his wife returned to Paris, where the composer hoped to build partnerships with scientists and engineers to create new instrumental technology. The main result of his five-year sojourn, however, was Ionisation, Varèse's most famous work and one of the most remarkable pieces of music in recent history. Written for 13 percussionists, the six-minute piece completely avoids any definitely pitched sound until the final pages, where chimes, celesta, and huge, bell-like piano chords appear. Ionisation was Varèse's declaration of his complete insistence on new sounds.
Together with a piece entitled Ecuatorial (in which Varèse used two theremins, new electronic instruments designed to provide a continuum of pitches), Ionisation also marked the end of Varèse's most productive years. Frustrated to the point of paralysis in his drive for new sonic materials and unable to receive grant money to explore new technology, Varèse completed between 1933 and 1954 only a four-minute work for solo flute entitled Density 21.5 (1936). During this twenty-year dry spell, the composer taught and lectured. He also founded the Schola Cantorum of Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1937, and the New Chorus (later known as the Greater New York Chorus) in 1941. These institutions performed music of earlier times. But friends also remember him severely depressed and manic, filling page after page of manuscript paper with music only to tear them up immediately. Without access to the technological innovations occurring around him, Varèse finally found it impossible to transmit the contents of his increasingly singular compositional mind to paper. He also destroyed the score of Bourgogne, in a private recreation of the 1919 blaze which had consumed his other early works.
Varèse's creative freeze was broken suddenly in 1953 when he received a technologically novel specimen: a tape recorder. Suddenly bursting with productive energy, he began assembling and filtering sounds from industrial factories and recorded music, and in 1954 he completed Déserts, a work for orchestra and tape which incorporates interludes created from these "found sounds" among orchestral passages that Varèse had been sketching since 1950. The result was a profoundly original essay in "musique concrète," with everyday noises sculpted and manipulated into a noisy but musical whole.
After this breakthrough piece, Varèse threw himself into tape-based composition; Poème Electronique (1958), his one complete work in the genre, was in many ways the culmination of his penetrating experiments with pure sound. He did not abandon instruments altogether, though; he left an unfinished work, Nocturnal, written for voices and instruments, later completed by his student Chou Wen-Chung.
Towards the end of his life, Varèse received the institutional recognition long denied him, but appointments to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Royal Swedish Academy could not compensate for the silence which greeted his pleas for support in the 1930s and 1940s. Edgard Varèse died after intestinal surgery on November 6, 1965.
Varèse's legacy of finished works is remarkably small, comprising barely over a dozen works of around two hours' duration. This concentrated, intense body of work is testament to the struggles of an essentially frustrated artistic personality, fighting both with the world and with himself in a quest to appease an internal compulsion for musical revolution. Every small piece drips with tension, frustration, and desire; perhaps no other composer is so readily understood as a man simply by listening to his music.
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