“There is a section in ‘Intégrales,’” says Ms. Chase, “where two piccolos play as loudly as possible on their lowest note, at the same time that two E-Flat clarinets play up in the high register. You say, ‘What the heck was he thinking?’ You won’t find it anywhere else in the literature. But it turns out to sound phenomenal.”

“…In the midst of the musical balancing act, a truck horn invades from the street below, sounding a persistent concert D. “If Varèse were here, he would have recorded that truck,” notes Mr. Schick of a composer who used every conceivable sound source, including sirens and theremins. “The message of it all is, ‘hang your preconceptions at the door.’”

Read more in Stuart Isacoff’s preview of Varèse: (R)evolution in the Wall Street Journal.

My brother Mark and I grew up listening to Bach and Beethoven, Mozart and Mussorgsky. There was always a lot of classical music playing in our house but Mark seemed to outgrow all that quickly. Soon he was studying composition and wanted to become a composer himself. By the time I was entering middle school he was off looking for recordings of Charles Ives and Harry Partch. Five years his junior, I thought everybody was listening to what my grown-up brother had on his record player.

The Beatles’ White Album? The Rolling Stones Beggars Banquet? Nope.

I loved the Varèse album. And what a great cover: A crazy-looking old man with crazy-looking neon lights swooshing around his head. To my pre-teenage mind, the music was as wonderfully weird and scary as the photo. Dissonant, for sure, but also lyrical and fun and strangely familiar. I guess so many repeated listenings made it an appropriate soundtrack to my childhood, so each time I heard it, I was brought back to some magical yet familiar world. Unknown and puzzling, yet always looking toward to the future.

The album did become quite an actual playlist for my childhood. For regular neighborhood puppet shows we’d put on Varèse’s “Ionization”. For tape-recorded plays and parodies of current television shows? “Density 21.5” and “Octandre”.

And as a highlight each summer, kids in the neighborhood would put on scary costumes, rearrange the boxes in our basement and have people take a tour of our “Spook House”.

The soundtrack for this summertime spectacle? Varèse’s “Poeme Electronic”.

Who says Varèse is difficult? Child’s play.

One additional note: ICE’s recent performance of “Ameriques” for eight-handed piano took me back to the past in a fresh way. Those themes and phrases were so familar, yet surprisingly brand new. Like listening to a fresh pressing of an oft-played LP….crisp, clear, exciting. I hadn’t heard the original in perhaps 20 years, but ICE’s performance made everything which was at one time both futuristic and old…surprisingly new and familiar. A great performance and a great evening.

—S. Ann Alburger

“For the International Contemporary Ensemble, an intrepid and adventurous new-music group based in Brooklyn and Chicago, presenting brash sounds and fresh discoveries is all in a day’s work, though stellar musicianship and infectious enthusiasm prevent any whiff of routine from tainting its labors. On Wednesday evening those qualities made its members ideal emissaries for Edgard Varèse, a maverick composer whose works will be featured during two concerts in this year’s Lincoln Center Festival…”

Read more at NYTimes.com.

Steven Schick conducting ICE in 2009

The music of Varèse is a palimpsest inscribed in sound, an over-written parchment on which traces of the old are still visible and mixed with the new. The embedded geologies of his music carry us into the past, to a pre-lingual state and a music on the verge of utterance. Listen to the small noises of the percussion – the moaning of the “lion’s roar” or the vocalise of the guiro – and hear the building blocks of human speech. On the other extreme of scale, listen as terrifying wind and brass explosions parse the apocalyptic poetry of the birth of the cosmos (as Varèse himself implies in his choice of an epigraph by Paracelsus for the orchestral work Arcana). But even as Varèse connects us to a primordial past, he also looks to the future. And indeed a central aspect of a palimpsest is not just its indebtedness to the past, but the concurrent obligation to make a new imprint, to add another stratum to the overlay. In this music we also see Varèse the visionary. In 1934 (!) he combined acoustic and electric instruments by including two theremins in his Ecuatorial. (Note that after Léon Theremin and his instruments disappeared into the maw of the Soviet Gulag, Varèse rescored Ecuatorial for ondes martenot. Tonight we will present the work with its original sounds using two theremin cellos.) We find Varèse the futurist in the multi-channel sensory experience of Poème électronique and Etude pour espace, and in the raucous proto-punk outbursts of his brief and alluring Dance for Burgess. Varèse was like a rifle loaded with the future, taking aim at the banalities of his day with volleys of taught dissonance in Intégrales and the geometric extrusions of one of the masterpieces of any historical period, Déserts.

Ultimately though Varèse’s music is all about sound – beguiling, earsplitting, incantatory, whispered, life-affirming sound. Sound, the material point of connection to an immaterial world; at the same time a composer’s practical acoustical reality and organic matter with dreams of its own. So on this trip to New York I will walk, as I always do, and listen, as Varèse did, to the living sonic tissue of the city he adopted. And I will be dazzled, again, by the sounds of the city and by this music that was born here. But as the tide of daily noise rises ever higher, the most astonishing thing about Varèse’s music, as Henry Miller noted in his prescient essay “With Edgar Varèse in the Gobi Desert,” is that “after you listen to it you are silenced.”

-Steven Schick