It was many decades ago when we were a youth at his most impressionable our music master who initiated us to modern melody through thrusting one evening into our hands a recording of Octandre. It came to us as a revelation of the thrilling power of Art. Sudden shocks are always preferable to gradual disclosures would not Members agree?
Let us therefore list a few salient and significant facts about the doings of this so profound and influential composer!
1) Varèse studied of course
under Roussel and D'Indy, and the start they gave him evidently served him well for the rest of his creative life. We clearly hear for instance moments in Roussel's
First Symphony echoed fifty-two years later in the
Electronic Poem.
2) He went off to Berlin in 1907 having read the book "
Outline of a new Musical Æsthetic" (published in that year) by the avant-gardist Busoni. Doubtless Varèse was neither the first nor the last great man to have his course of
life changed by a book. Incidentally it may be downloaded from the Internet Archive. Varèse was particularly impressed by these two
dicta of Busoni:
a) "Music is born free, and its destiny is to conquer freedom"
b) "The
rôle of the creative artist is to construct laws, not to follow those which have already been constructed."
3) Let it not be forgotten that this Busoni up with whom he proceeded to strike a close acquaintance was the very first musician to espouse:
a) microtonality (36 to the octvave) and
b) electronic music.
4) Among
Varèse's greatest works we hear were the 1905 Symphonic Poems
The Apotheosis of the Ocean and
Song of the Youths (so much more significant than Sockhausen's 1956 effort bearing the identical appellation), his
Three Pieces for Orchestra (also 1905, an idea imitated by Berg nine years later),
Bourgogne (1908 - another symphonic poem, full of sevenths and ninths, which a Berlin critic described as "an infernal noise"),
Mehr Licht (1911 - Goethe's famous last words as most Members will be aware, but Varèse's plan was to filter his sonic material so as to render it more and more luminous), and the 1913 opera
Oedipus and the Sphinx to a text of Hofmannsthal.
5) Around 1912 on a visit to Paris he introduced Schoenberg's system of pantonality to that intentionally vague Frenchman Claude Debussy. In October 1912 he took part in a preview performance of what we consider Schoenberg's ugliest work,
Pierrot Lunaire.
6) In 1913 while Varèse was again visiting Paris he left most of his manuscripts in storage in Berlin. A fire broke out and almost all his early work was destroyed. We consider this to be the
second greatest tragedy in the history of twentieth-century composition (the greatest being of course the premature expiry of Scryabine due to something he picked up in London).
7) In 1939 Varèse set out his view of the
new possibilities machines might offer the composer:
a) liberation from the tempered system
b) a pitch-range extended in both directions
c) new harmonic splendours obtainable from the use of sub-harmonic combinations until then impossible (we especially approve of this one)
d) increased differentiation of timbre
e) an expanded dynamic spectrum
f) the feasibility of sound projection in space
g) unrelated cross-rhythms.
In 1959 we ourselves set out our view of the new possibilities machines might offer the composer:
a) performers and conductors may be dispensed with (they are often no more than a source of misunderstanding and other problems)
b) superhuman feats of execution become possible
c) new timbres may be concocted as required
d) tremendous accuracy of pitch is achievable.
8) Varèse, as a good acoustician, once told Xenakis (of all people!) that Schoenberg's system was fundamentally wrong, because it
made no distinction between sharps and flats.
9) In 1962 Varèse is said to have destroyed
Bourgogne "in a moment of despair." What a significant act that was we see when we consider its year of composition:
1908 - when humanity reached its most advanced cultural point and began a long steep decline.
10) Varèse's principal piece of advice to the talented and aspiring youths who surrounded him was always
"Only ever associate with the élite." It was of course his own way in life.
Finally we might give a brief indication of why Varèse was a
first-rate composer in contradistinction to so many later modernists who are seventh-raters or even charlatans. The reason lies in his use of pitched sound-blocks; not random but chosen - or rather, carefully constructed - in such a way that they somehow take on an
universal significance. It is therein - in that universality of his material - that his real genius lies. It means that Varèse became one of the
most mystical of composers because of his love of new worlds and the mythologies of science and the machine.
And besides, as is so regrettably not the case in so much of the music of his lesser modern imitators, there is in his an abundance of significant and unflagging simultaneities.
