Edgard Varèse

French born composer (December 22, 1883 – November 6, 1965) who lived in the USA for a good part of his life..

Influenced by Ferrucio Busoni and the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo, Varèse expressed many innovative ideas and wished for technological development to be able to implement some of these.

The raw material of music is sound.

As far back as the twenties, I decided to call my music “organized sound” and myself, not a musician, but “a worker in rhythms, frequencies, and intensities.”

To conditioned ears anything new in music has always been called noise.

 

The innovations Varèse saw coming with new scientific insights and the advancement of technology:

  • liberation from the arbitrary, paralysing tempered system;
  • the possibility of obtaining any number of cycles or if still desired, subdivisions of the octave, consequently the formation of any desired scale;
  • unsuspected range in low and high registers;
  • new harmonic splendours obtainable from the use of sub-harmonic combinations now impossible;
  • the possibility of obtaining any differentiation of timbre, of sound-combinations;
  • new dynamics far beyond the present human-powered orchestra;
  • a sense of sound-projection in space by means of the emission of sound in any part or in many parts of the hall as may be required by the score;
  • cross rhythms unrelated to each other, treated simultaneously, or to use the old word, “contrapuntally” (since the machine would be able to beat any number of desired notes, any subdivision of them, omission or fraction of them) – all these in a given unit of measure or time which is humanly impossible to attain.

Ground breaking works include:
Ionisation, for 13 percussion players (1929-1932)
Poème électronique for electronic tape (1957–1958) and commissioned by architect Le Corbusier for the Philips pavilion at the 1959 Brussels world fair.

 

 

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