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Check out ICE’s blog and podcast, ICEcast, for our newest podcast on Varèse: www.iceorg.org/icecast

ICEcast spoke with ICE pianist Jacob Greenberg and pianist Amy Williams about their upcoming New York premiere of Varèse’s own arrangement of his iconic Amériques for two pianos, eight hands. The performance will be broadcast live on wqxr.org tomorrow (Wednesday, July 7) at 7 p.m. EST.

Amy and Jacob discuss the recent discovery of this interesting piece, as well as what we can expect to hear tomorrow night.  Check out the podcast and be sure to listen in tomorrow night!

By Jacob Greenberg,
ICE pianist and Director of Educational Programs.

In 1937, after most of the works for which Edgard Varèse would be known were already written, he said in an interview, “My work is the future. I’ve barely begun.” For Varèse, imagining the future was everything—and not just the subject of his music. The composer believed that it was one’s artistic duty to constantly invent. In the words of Feruccio Busoni—a fellow musical futurist, whose dictums Varèse committed to memory—“The function of the creative artist consists in making laws, not in following laws already made.”

This is what moves me most about Varèse’s music. I love to think about Varèse’s great successes as a composer alongside those projects that obsessed him but which he ultimately failed to realize. I love them both equally—to imagine the cello theremins of Ecuatorial as they might have been used in his constantly-reworked, unfinished science fiction opera (alternately called The Astronomer, The All-One-Alone, or Espace), or hearing the fascinating, charged texts by Anaïs Nin in Nocturnal merged with the haunting sounds of Poéme Electronique. All these pieces, completed or not, represent a romantic vision of the future which is particular to Varèse. The man who reinvented himself and his music upon his journey to New York City in 1915 realized that America was just one frontier of many—a feeling thrillingly captured in Amériques, which for me is the ultimate hymn to adventure. Americas, plural—which America? There are so many new roads to take. Again from Busoni: “Music was born free and to win freedom its destiny.” Varèse imagined, he heard—and moved music forward.

The following is an excerpt from an article written by Frank Zappa for Stereo Review, June 1971 (pp. 61-62)

“Edgard Varese: Idol of My Youth”

On my fifteenth birthday my mother said she’d give me $5. I told her I would rather make a long-distance phone call. I figured Mr. Varese lived in New York because the record was made in New York (and because he was so weird, he would live in Greenwich Village). I got New York Information, and sure enough, he was in the phone book.

Frank Zappa with Louise Varese; Halloween, 1974.

His wife answered. She was very nice and told me he was in Europe and to call back in a few weeks. I did. I don’t remember what I said to him exactly, but it was something like: “I really dig your music.” He told me he was working on a new piece called Deserts. This thrilled me quite a bit since I was living in Lancaster, California then. When you’re fifteen and living in the Mojave Desert and find out that the world’s greatest composer, somewhere in a secret Greenwich Village laboratory, is working on a song about your “home town” you can get pretty excited. It seemed a great tragedy that nobody in Palmdale or Rosamond would care if they ever heard it. I still think Deserts is about Lancaster, even if the liner notes on the Columbia LP say it’s something more philosophical.

All through high school I searched for information about Varese and his music. One of the most exciting discoveries was in the school library in Lancaster. I found an orchestration book that had score examples in the back, and included was an excerpt from Offrandes with a lot of harp notes (and you know how groovy harp notes look). I remember fetishing the book for several weeks.

When I was eighteen I got a chance to go to the East Coast to visit my Aunt Mary in Baltimore. I had been composing for about four years then but had not heard any of it played. Aunt Mary was going to introduce me to some friend of hers (an Italian gentleman) who was connected with the symphony there. I had planned on making a side trip to mysterious Greenwich Village. During my birthday telephone conversation, Mr. Varèse had casually mentioned the possibility of a visit if I was ever in the area. I wrote him a letter when I got to Baltimore, just to let him know I was in the area.

I waited….

I waited some more. The letter came. I couldn’t believe it. A real handwritten letter from Edgard Varèse! I still have it in a little frame. In very tiny scientific-looking script it says:

——————————————————————————————
VII 12th/57
Dear Mr. Zappa

I am sorry not to be able to grant your request. I am leaving
for Europe next week and will be gone until next spring. I am
hoping however to see you on my return.
With best wishes.

Sincerely
Edgard Varèse

——————————————————————————————
I never got to meet Mr. Varèse. But I kept looking for records of his music. When he got to be about eighty I guess a few companies gave in and recorded some of his stuff. Sort of a gesture, I imagine. I always wondered who bought them besides me. It was about seven years from the time I first heard his music till I met someone else who even knew he existed. That person was a film student at USC. He had the Columbia LP with Poème électronique on it. He thought it would make groovy sound effects.

Clipping from a New York Times interview with Zappa from 1966, when he was 26.

I can’t give you any structural insights or academic suppositions about how his music works or why I think it sounds so good. His music is completely unique. If you haven’t heard it yet, go hear it. If you’ve already heard it and think it might make groovy sound effects, listen again. I would recommend the Chicago Symphony recording of Arcana on RCA (at full volume) or the Utah Symphony recording of Ameriques on Vanguard. Also, there is a biography by Fernand Oulette, and miniature scores are available for most of his works, published by G. Ricordi.

On Wednesday, July 7 at 7 p.m. EST, Q2 streams the music of Edgard Varèse, including the New York premiere of the 8-hand piano version of the iconic Amériques, in addition to performances of Un Grand Sommeil Noir and Density 21.5. Hosted by WNYC’s John Schaefer at the Yamaha Piano Salon, this sneak preview concert of Lincoln Center Festival’s Varèse: (R)evolution features ICE musicians Claire Chase and Jacob Greenberg.

Want to be in the audience for this special event? Of course you do.

Be one of the first 20 people to RSVP to varese@lincolncenter.org to secure a spot for you and a guest on the guestlist.

varèse: (R)evolution from ICE on Vimeo.

from left: Joshua Rubin, Claire Chase, Ryan Streber, Steven Schick, and Chou Wen-Chung

Joushua Rubin, Claire Chase, Ryan Streber, Whit Bernard, and Steven Schick talked last night with Varèse’s protégé Chou Wen-Chung in Varèse’s former house on Sullivan Street.

Chou Wen-Chung became a student of and assistant to Varèse in 1949 as Varèse was composing his last works, and later served as his music executor. He prepared corrected editions of most of Varese’s scores, first under the composer’s supervision, and continuing after his death. He also completed several of Varèse’s pieces, edited the original version of Amériques for publication, and wrote the spacialization diagrams for Varese’s Étude pour espace.

He has been incredibly generous with his time and expansive knowledge of Varèse as ICE has moved forward with this project.  Stay tuned to the blog in the coming weeks for more material from our conversations with him.

Chou discusses his spacialization diagrams for Étude pour espace with audio engineer Ryan Streber

Chou with Varèse, 1965

Poème électronique was Varèse’s final composition, and it represents the apotheosis of a dream long deferred. In the early 1930s, he wrote a manifesto entitled “The Liberation of Sound,” explaining his goal of freeing music from the “arbitrary” constraints of notes, rhythms and traditional instruments. It was a vision he hoped to achieve by creating electronic instruments, and he sought for decades to secure the support of major US and European recording laboratories, most of whom looked at him as if he were cross-eyed. Varèse’s dream of discovering “new and more musically efficient devices” became such an obsession that in the late 1930s, upon hearing that his third bid for a research position at Bell Laboratories had been declined, he openly considered suicide.

It wasn’t until 1957 that Varèse was given the longed-for chance to “liberate sound” with cutting-edge technology, and even then, it barely happened. Poème électronique was commissioned by the Phillips Corporation as a sound installation to be played while visitors walked through the company’s pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World Expo. The building, like the piece written for it, was a game-changer: Designed by Le Corbusier, with the assistance of Iannis Xenakis, it was a dramatic, asymmetrical tent-like concrete structure which defied engineers’ beliefs about what was physically possible.

Varèse with Le Corbusier in Eindhoven, 1958

Le Corbusier had insisted early on that Varèse be chosen to compose the piece, but Phillips executives were none too thrilled to be working with an aging radical. They discreetly commissioned a substitute. When Le Corbusier found out, he was furious: “There can be no question of dropping Varèse. If that happens, I withdraw from the affair.” He got his wish, and the Phillips executives, who had wanted only to show off the sophistication of their audio products, ended up with more than they had bargained for.

The music bears a resemblance to strains of experimental electronica that would come much later: it’s basically a mashup. Recorded material from earlier pieces (you’ll have déjà vu when you hear Ecautorial) was frenetically interspersed with machine noises and synthesized sounds to create a schizophrenic soundscape, diffused through an array of cutting-edge Phillips speakers, and accompanied by a series of projected images.

Poème électronique was written to accompany a particular experience, in a particular space, at a particular time. It can’t be reproduced, and Varèse certainly did not have an iphone in mind when he created the piece. But if he were alive today, there can be no doubt that Varèse, of all composers, would be an obsessive cellphone experimentalist: the idea of diffusing sound through millions of cellphones, randomly and simultaneously, would have thrilled his romantic, futurist disposition. So download the ringtone and bring it around town, as a tribute to Edgard. You’ll never miss a call again.

The revolutionary composer’s résumé had a line for silent film star as well. From Alex Ross’s “The Rest is Noise” blog:

A scene from John Barrymore’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920). The man on the right is Edgard Varèse. He has just administered poison to the gentleman in the middle, who seems to have been sleeping with his wife.

The YouTube clip also includes a scene with the “moodily handsome” Edgard as a policeman.

To start things off boldly, we hereby extend Varèse’s sound experiments from the theremin to the iPhone. Hold the Phillips Pavillion in your pocket with the ICE limited edition Poème Electronique ringtone: A free gift from ICE to you. Download it, use it, own it, tell your friends about it. We hope to see you again soon.

Right-Click Here to Download!

As a composer, an engineer, and a visionary musical inventor, Edgard Varèse transformed the way we think of sound.

In anticipation of ICE’s July 19th performance of Varèse’s music at Lincoln Center, we have created this site as a forum for all things Varèse. Expect weekly updates from composers, performers, and zealots from a variety of fields, with essays and anecdotes from historians and ecstatic bystanders alike. We’ll supplement these writings with video and audio posts aimed at exploring Varèse’s music, sketches, and ideas.

The idol of a sixteen-year-old Frank Zappa, a muse for Charlie Parker, not to mention an inspiration for generations of composers, musicians, and artists, Varese’s influence extends far beyond the confines of his compositions. Over the next two months, we invite you to join us in an exploration of Varèse–his life, his music, his ideas, and his legacy. Visit often, post comments, and suggest topics.