The story so far... I remarked on another thread that Ecuatorial sounded to me as if it were a much longer piece, most of which had been cut, and Ollie replied that a lot of Varèse sounded like that to him. Maybe that was the way he worked (does anyone know?), but it seems to me that the joins in Ecuatorial are a lot more mismatched than usual.

Anyway, what are our thoughts about Varèse and his music? What strikes me on hearing some of the earlier pieces like Hyperprism (1923!) is how thoroughly radical they are, untouched either by the twelve-tone or neoclassical trends of the time, but attempting a much more thorough rethinking of music and its materials, in a way that hardly anyone else even conceived of doing until after 1945. While his example was crucial for the development of such different composers as Stockhausen, Xenakis, Carter and Feldman, and not only these, what about the music itself? To me almost all the pieces are impressive for their intensely concentrated musical energy, though the orchestral pieces tend to sound more conservative, the electronic music (especially Déserts) is notably less sophisticated than the instrumental writing, and the frequent occurrence of sirens and suchlike seems at this distance in time somewhat anecdotal. But I remember some performances I've heard (the ASKO Ensemble in Intégrales, for example) which have convinced me that there's very little twentieth century music which expresses itself with such uncompromising directness.

I didn't think you'd meant it adversely. That's another of the radical things about this music, I think. For me one of the most crucial innovations in twentieth century music is the idea, made realisable by the invention of the tape recorder, of treating sounds as physical entities (embodied in lengths of tape) and working with them "sculpturally" in their irreducible complexity, rather than symbolically through notation. And Varèse seems to have got hold of this idea before it was strictly realisable, so that his pieces from the 20s and 30s often sound in retrospect as if they've been put together from "objets sonores".

Interestingly (well I think so) Ecuatorial shares many of its sound-sources (organ, voices, electronic glissandi etc.) with Poème electronique which, of course, as befits its medium is even more disjunct.

I believe it was a computer, Bryn. In any case it sounds all wrong to me. The performance of Intégrales I was referring to was live, at the Concertgebouw I seem to remember, though I've forgotten who was conducting.

It's a shame the first complete recording of Varèse's work was entrusted to Chailly rather than to someone to whom this music was more central (like Cliff Crego), and that the ASKO material hadn't been recorded some years earlier when the ensemble's attitude was more experimental and committed than it later became.

Yes. I conducted Intégrales a year or so ago and both getting to know it and standing in front of it was a mind-blowing experience. I agree, some of the ideas seem rather underdeveloped, or at least cut short...he is peculiar in that he seems at times to misjudge the 'pacing' of music (in Intégrales - though he nails it in Octandre rather oddly...). He's astonishingly important and ahead of his time (I might even argue he's still ahead of THIS time...). That horn call in Intégrales is a truly wonderful moment in recent music...

My colleague Brian Kane has written an interesting article on Ecuatorial -- it's a little bit of speculation about the genesis of the piece in connection with 'modern' concerns.

http://browsebriankane.com/My_Homepage_Files/Download/Varese%20paper.pdf

Perhaps so. But that's how I feel at least...

Now here's a funny thing in that I'm quite comfortable with the pacing of Intégrales whereas if anything I find Octandre teasingly brief. For me it's hard to know if something is 'underdeveloped' in Varèse just because with his sorts of ideas and contexts (or more usually: absence of contexts) it's hard for me to know what 'sufficiently' developed (or I suppose overdeveloped...) might mean.

Is it anything to do with Varese's 'rhetoric'? I'm just thinking that a lot of the stock-in-trade gestures of all those pieces are to do with climactic tropes, most typically the crescendo to sFF with a cutoff. The rather angst-ridden drama of these always seems to me to suggest a rather greater level of musical discourse having been undergone than is actually the case, usually.
On the other hand, I don't mind it a bit. Something like Octandre does seem, and is, brief; but its brevity, and the implied refusal to 'develop', accounts for a large part of its impact, to my ears.