Arts and Letters

Edgard Varèse was born in 1883, not in 1885, as had been believed till the time of his death. He was part Franco-Italian and part Burgundian, part engineer and part musician (a pupil of the École Polytechnique as well as of both the Schola Cantorum and the Paris Conservatoire), a conductor both of modern orchestral repertory and of Renaissance choral music, a friend of Debussy and of Busoni, and a composer the most modern of them all. A broadly-based European (ten years resident in Italy, fifteen in France, seven in Berlin, those last brilliant years before World War I), he took to America so completely in his thirty-third year that all his preserved music is American work.

Debussy's assumption that chords do not move, Busoni's advice that there was more future outside of classical harmony than within the thorough-bass convention, and America's freedom of artistic expansion (unique in 1916) made him the leader of our musical advance—and indeed of the world advance—a position which he held unchallenged during the time of his major production as a composer, or about fifteen years. During five of his last twelve years, beginning at seventy, he composed again, this time with electronic materials. And again he was the farthest out among the far-outs, partly because he had a first-class ear for sound and partly because he had long since by-passed, way back in his Berlin days, the attempt to make non-tonal music out of only tonal instruments and materials, an effort that later came to represent for him a doctrinaire, or establishment-type, modernism.

Varèse's own music, for all its awareness of acoustical theory and of sound-source technology, remains highly resistant to analysis. This fact represents no small achievement, as indeed it does also in the case of Europe's older masters from Mozart through Debussy. For the explainable loses interest. And Varèse 's music, over a nigh on to fifty-year period, has not lost its interest. It is still exciting, sometimes shocking, often vastly beautiful as sound, and always the work of genius—in other words, of imagination and brains. Aspects of it are surely arcane, the result of unstated but systematic calculations; others are just as certainly irrational, spontaneous, and inspired; and the whole of it has long seemed to me, by exactly these qualities plus that of never showing fatigue, great music.

Melody, harmony, and form, in the classical sense, it seems to have shaken off completely in spite of its author's classical education. From Amériques of 1919 to the Poème électronique of 1957 he worked with timbre alone, with kinds of sound, chunks of it, organized these into a polyphony comparable perhaps to the intersecting polyhedrons that are the shapes of modern architecture. Nevertheless, these pieces are not static like a building, nor even like the music of Debussy; they move forward, aerodynamic, airborne. What moves them forward? Rhythms, I think, rhythms counterpointed to create tension and release energy. There are also in the timbre contrasts and loudness patterns designs for producing anxiety and relief, just as there are in tonal music. And these designs create psychological form, though the music is not overtly planned for drama.

It seems to hang together not from themes and their restatements but from tiny cells or motives which agglomerate like crystals. As Varèse himself described this phenomenon, "In spite of their limited variety of internal structure, the external forms of crystals are almost limitless." To have produced with so cool a concept of artistic creation music of such warm sonorous interest and such urgent continuity makes of Varèse, and I think there is no way round this, the most original composer of the last half century and one of the most powerfully communicative.