Edgard Varèse

French-born American composer

• Born: December 22, 1883
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: November 6, 1965
• Place of death: New York, New York

Varèse was one of the first composers to appreciate the opportunities presented by electronic music and advanced recording techniques. His influence has been felt by many modern composers and has percolated into rock music.

Early Life

Edgard Varèse (ayd-gahrd vah-rayz) was born in Paris. His father was from the Piedmont region and his mother was a Parisienne. As his father’s work entailed much travel, Varèse was several weeks old when he was entrusted to the care of his uncle Joseph and his wife, who lived in Villars. When Varèse was seven, his father moved his family to Turin. Varèse felt very isolated there and grew estranged from his father. Varèse attended his first concerts in Turin and was exposed to the music of Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss, Claude Debussy, and Jean Sibelius. Varèse began when he was seventeen to spend his pocket money secretly taking harmony and counterpoint lessons from the director of the conservatory, Giovanni Bolzoni.

When Varèse was eleven, he composed his first “opera,” Martin Paz, based on a Jules Verne novel, to amuse his friends. His childhood was divided between Paris and relations in Burgundy. Varèse’s father attempted to mold his son into following him in business, insisting that he take courses in engineering and mathematics. His father was not pleased with Varèse’s choice of profession, preferring him to pursue a career in either mathematics or science. When Varèse found his son becoming too interested in the grand piano in the family home, he locked the keyboard shut. The strain between Varèse and his father grew so great that, after Varèse moved to Paris, he never saw his father again. By the age of fourteen, Varèse had already set his sights on being a composer.

In 1903, Varèse left home for Paris and the following year entered the Schola Cantorum. Varèse left the school in 1905 and entered the Conservatoire National de Musique et de Déclamation to study composition under Charles Widor. Varèse supported himself during these hard times by working as a musical copyist and later found employment in a library.

Life’s Work

While at the Schola Cantorum, Varèse met avant-garde artists from fields other than music; he numbered Max Jacob, Pablo Picasso, and Juan Gris among his acquaintances. Varèse’s sources of inspiration frequently came from outside the musical sphere; he studied topics as diverse as alchemy and Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks. He later observed that music was the “art-science.” Given his scientific education, he was particularly drawn to the work of physicists. Unfortunately, none of his works from this period has survived. In 1906, Varèse founded the choral society of the people’s university, an educational establishment for working-class people in the faubourg Saint-Antoine. Varèse’s personal life was also settling down; on November 5, 1907, he married Suzanne Bing.

Varèse in late 1907 left Paris for Berlin, where he would remain for most of the next six years; he had been impressed by Ferruccio Busoni’s A New Aesthetic of Music and wanted to study under him. Busoni encouraged Varèse, and Varèse was later to state, “I owe him a debt of gratitude.” He also met Debussy and Maurice Ravel around this time. In early 1909, Varèse finished his symphony Bourgogne and began work on a symphonic poem, Gargantua. He continued to support himself and his wife by copying music. He met Gustav Mahler and Strauss during this period, and Strauss made representations on Varèse’s behalf to help him find work. In 1910, Varèse’s daughter Claude was born. On December 15, 1910, Bourgogne was performed in Berlin, where its reception was stormy. Varèse would later destroy the score, his last link with his prewar past.

Despite the controversy, Varèse continued composing. Three years later, Suzanne Varèse decided to return to Paris to resume her acting career, and they were amicably divorced. The outbreak of World War I caught Varèse in Paris, and he was unable to return to Berlin until after the war in 1922, when he discovered that the warehouse in which his manuscripts had been stored had been completely destroyed by fire.

Varèse entered the military in April, 1915; after six months he asked for a transfer, but a medical examination showed that he was unfit for military service, and he was discharged. Varèse then decided to try his chances in the United States and arrived in New York on December 29, 1915, with ninety dollars in his pocket and knowing two words of English. He had originally planned to stay only a few weeks, but he eventually settled for good. The heady atmosphere of the Big Apple was introduced to him by a close friend from Berlin, Karl Muck, who was then conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Varèse’s larger interests also put him on the edge of Dadaist groups. Once again, Varèse turned to music copying to keep body and soul together. Varèse was clear on what he wanted to achieve with his music, commenting to one reporter, “our musical alphabet must be enriched; we also need new instruments very badly.”

Varèse made his New York conducting debut on April 1, 1917, with Hector Berlioz’s Requiem; his performance was very favorably received. Conducting engagements now began to trickle in. Varèse remarried, taking as his bride Louise McCutcheon, a writer. In 1920, Varèse began to work on Amériques , which was premiered in 1926. It was scored for 142 instruments, including two sirens. Varèse also helped found the International Composers Guild with Carlos Salzedo at this time to encourage and support progressive composers. In the guild’s six-year existence, it organized performances of works by Igor Stravinsky, Anton von Webern, Alban Berg, and many others.

In 1922, Varèse premiered Offrandes ; the form of the work with soprano vocal and strings still had recognizable links with European tradition, but it was the last work Varèse composed that was so “conventional.” The International Composers Guild staged the first performance on March 4, 1923, of Varèse’s Hyperprism ; scored for sixteen percussionists and ten wind instruments, the piece’s debut was stormy. One listener, the London music publisher Kenneth Curwen, was sufficiently stirred to offer to publish Varèse’s scores. One music critic observed of Varèse that he was the cause of peaceable music lovers coming to blows and using one anothers’ faces for drums. Subsequent performances generated similar polarized criticism. When the British Broadcasting Company the following year broadcast a performance of Hyperprism, one critic complained of “musical Bolshevism.” In reply to his critics, Varèse observed that “there has always been misunderstanding between the composer and his generation. . . . Music is antiquated in the extreme in its medium of expression compared to the other arts.” One conductor who was to consistently champion Varèse’s work was Leopold Stokowski, who premiered Amériques in 1926 in Philadelphia.

Despite maintaining his residency in the United States and eventually acquiring American citizenship, Varèse made a number of brief trips to Europe in the 1920’s, and in 1928 began a long stay in Paris. One work was begun during this period, L’Astronome, but never completed. A second piece from this period, L’Éspace, was also never finished, although Varèse continued to tinker with it into the 1940’s. As originally conceived, L’Éspace was a massive undertaking; in its most highly developed shape it was to involve simultaneous broadcasts by musicians scattered across the globe.

Varèse moved a step further to his concepts of musique concrète with his 1931 piece, Ionisation ; the work explored more thoroughly than any other nonelectronic composition the structural values of all nonpitch properties of sound. The score was written for a thirteen-piece percussion ensemble. According to Louise Varèse, Ionisation was the piece of music that Varèse himself was most proud of and satisfied with. Varèse called the work, “cryptic, synthesized, powerful, and terse.”

Varèse left Paris in 1933; before his departure he attempted to raise funds for a center of electronic instrument research from both the Bell Telephone Company and the Guggenheim Foundation, but the effort failed. Varèse’s failure threw him into a deep depression that lasted for many years. In 1936, Varèse completed the work Density 21:5 ; he then wrote nothing for a decade. The following year, he gave classes in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at the Arsuna School of Fine Arts. Varèse moved in 1938 to Los Angeles and attempted to interest film producers in the possibilities of his concepts of “organized sound” for film scoring, but the conservatism of Hollywood doomed his efforts to failure. Returning to New York, Varèse organized the Great New York Chorus for performances of Renaissance and Baroque music. In 1948, he taught courses at Columbia on twentieth century music and composition. In 1950, he taught summer courses in Darmstadt, Germany.

In 1953, an anonymous donor provided Varèse with a tape recorder, a tool that finally allowed him to begin to explore more fully the possibilities of mixing live music and electronic prerecorded material. He began to record sounds for use in Déserts , a piece that he had begun to score three years previously for wind, percussion, and tape. In 1955, the work was broadcast in live concert form in stereo on French national radio, the first work to be so presented in France. At the Brussels Exhibition in 1958, Varèse had his Poème électronique performed. Poème électronique was a work for tape alone; relayed over four hundred loudspeakers and subsequently recorded, the work was very influential.

The last few years of Varèse’s life brought him increasing recognition and renown. Performances of his works were staged much more frequently, and prominent younger composers such as Pierre Boulez and Robert Craft made recordings of his works. He received a number of academic and artistic honors, among them election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the Royal Swedish Academy. The one thing missing from this period of Varèse’s life was new compositions. One of Varèse’s confidants offered an explanation. In 1949, the composer Chou Wen-chung began to study with Varèse and eventually became his closest musical colleague as well as the executor of Varèse’s musical estate. According to Chou, the reason for a lack of completed works by Varèse after 1960 is that he was “fundamentally writing a single work, despite the number of titles he worked with.” Chou stated that Varèse discarded a great number of manuscripts shortly before his death.

Significance

Varèse’s most important contributions to music began in the 1920’s; like a number of his contemporaries, such as Stravinsky, he was aware that new modes of making music would be necessary to produce what he called organized sound. Varèse was one of the first composers to become interested in musique concrète, and as early as the 1950’s he composed two of the earliest pieces in the classical mode employing taped effects. The great tragedy of Varèse’s career was that his ideas outran the technology of the day; he would have been quite at home with the modern electronic revolution of synthesizers and digital sampling. Varèse did not leave a large body of work total playing time for the pieces he wrote between 1920 and 1960 is about two hours; his influence nevertheless is immense. Varèse used rhythm as the primary base of his musical language at a time when other composers relied on melody and harmony.

Bibliography

Austin, William W. Music in the Twentieth Century. New York: W. W. Norton, 1966. This work fits Varèse and his accomplishments into the larger context of post-1900 musical development. While many surveys tend to concentrate on Varèse’s earlier, more “heroic” works, Austin deals with Varèse’s accomplishments as a unity.

Julius, Ruth. “Edgard Varèse: An Oral History Project, Some Preliminary Conclusions.” Current Musicology 25 (1978): 39-49. Julius conducted interviews with fourteen composers living in the New York metropolitan area, all of whom had known Varèse. The article is an interpretive documentation of the interviews; the transcripts of the interviews are in the City University of New York Oral History Archives. Julius was interested not only in biographical information about Varèse but also in the composers’ thoughts and observations on the music itself.

MacDonald, Malcolm. Varèse: Astronomer in Sound. London: Kahn and Averill, 2003. An in-depth study of Varèse’s music. MacDonald discusses all of Varèse’s compositions and analyzes how they express the composer’s aesthetic and scientific ideas.

Ouellette, Fernand. Edgard Varèse. Translated by Derek Coltman. New York: Orion Press, 1968. Ouellette’s work remains the best biography of Varèse. The author had the benefit of a number of conversations with the composer, and Varèse’s widow read and commented on this manuscript before it went to press. The work contains an extensive bibliography of works on Varèse.

Van Solkema, Sherman, ed. The New Worlds of Edgard Varèse. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Institute for Studies in American Music, Brooklyn College, 1979. This monograph collects papers delivered at a symposium concerning Varèse’s work conducted at the City University of New York in April, 1977. The papers are primarily analytical and technical; of particular interest is Chou Wen-chung’s treatise on Varèse’s Ionisation.

Varèse, Louise. Varèse: A Looking-Glass Diary. New York: W. W. Norton, 1972. Varèse calls this work “a personal remembering.” The work was to be the first of several volumes and offers an intimate portrait of the composer up through 1928.