Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse (; also spelled Edgar; December 22, 1883 – November 6, 1965) was a French and American avant-garde composer who spent the greater part of his career in the United States. Varèse's music emphasizes timbre and rhythm;Gérard Pape, Musipoesc: Writings About Music, Paris: Éditions Michel de Maule, 2015, pp. 334-6347 he coined the term "organized sound" in reference to his own musical aesthetic.Goldman, Richard Franko. 1961. "Varèse: Ionisation; Density 21.5; Intégrales; Octandre; Hyperprism; Poème Electronique. Instrumentalists, cond. Robert Craft. Columbia MS 6146 (stereo)" (in Reviews of Records). The Musical Quarterly 47, no. 1. (January): 133–134. Varèse's conception of music reflected his vision of "sound as living matter" and of "musical space as open rather than bounded". He conceived the elements of his music in terms of "sound-masses", likening their organization to the natural phenomenon of crystallization. Varèse thought that "to stubbornly conditioned ears, anything new in music has always been called noise", and he posed the question, "what is music but organized noises?"
Although his complete surviving works only last about three hours, he has been recognized as an influence by several major composers of the late 20th century. Varèse saw potential in using electronic media for sound production, and his use of new instruments and electronic resources led to his being known as the "Father of Electronic Music". Writer Henry Miller described him as "The stratospheric Colossus of Sound".
Varèse actively promoted performances of works by other 20th-century composers and founded the International Composers' Guild in 1921 and the Pan-American Association of Composers in 1926.
Life and career Early life Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse was born in Paris; when he was a few weeks old, he was sent to be raised by his maternal great-uncle and other relations in the village of Le Villars in the Burgundy region of France. There he developed a very strong attachment to his maternal grandfather, Claude Cortot (also grandfather to the pianist Alfred Cortot, a first cousin of Varèse). His affection for his grandfather outshone anything he felt for his own parents.
After being reclaimed by his parents in the late 1880s, in 1893 young Edgard was forced to relocate with them to Turin, Italy, in part, to live amongst his paternal relatives, since his father was of Italian descent. It was there that he had his first real musical lessons, with the director of the Turin Conservatory, Giovanni Bolzoni. In 1895, he composed his first opera, Martin Pas, which has since been lost. Now a teenager, Varèse, influenced by his father, an engineer, enrolled at the Polytechnic of Turin and started studying engineering, as his father disapproved of his interest in music and demanded an absolute dedication to engineering studies. This conflict grew greater and greater, especially after the death of his mother in 1900, until 1903 when Varèse left home for Paris.
In 1904, he commenced his studies at the Schola Cantorum (founded by pupils of César Franck), where his teachers included Albert Roussel. Afterwards, he went to study composition with Charles-Marie Widor at the Paris Conservatoire. In this period, he composed some ambitious orchestral works, but these were only performed by Varèse in piano transcriptions. One such work was his Rhapsodie romane, from about 1905, which was inspired by the Romanesque architecture of the Church of St. Philibert in Tournus. In 1907, he moved to Berlin and married the actress Suzanne Bing, with whom he had a daughter. They divorced in 1913.
During these years, Varèse became acquainted with Erik Satie and Richard Strauss, as well as with Claude Debussy and Ferruccio Busoni, who particularly influenced him at the time. He also gained the friendship and support of Romain Rolland and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, whose Œdipus und die Sphinx he began setting as an opera that was never completed. On January 5, 1911, the first performance of his symphonic poem Bourgogne was held in Berlin.
After being invalided out of the French Army during World War I, he moved to the United States in December 1915.
Early years in the United States In 1918, Varèse made his debut in America conducting the Grande messe des morts by Berlioz.
He spent the first few years in the United States, where he was a Romany Marie's café regular,Robert Schulman. Romany Marie: The Queen of Greenwich Village (pp. 64–65). Louisville: Butler Books, 2006. . in Greenwich Village, meeting important contributors to American music, promoting his vision of new electronic instruments, conducting orchestras, and founding the short-lived New Symphony Orchestra. In New York, he met Leon Theremin and other composers exploring the boundaries of electronic music.
It was also about this time that Varèse began work on his first composition in the United States, Amériques, which was finished in 1921 but would remain unperformed until 1926, when it was premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Leopold Stokowski (who had already performed Hyperprism in 1924 and would premiere Arcana in 1927). Virtually all the works he had written in Europe were either lost or destroyed in a Berlin warehouse fire, so in the U.S. he was starting again from scratch. The only surviving work from his early period appears to be the song Un grand sommeil noir, a setting of Paul Verlaine. (He still retained Bourgogne, but destroyed the score in a fit of depression many years later.)
At the completion of Amériques, Varèse, along with Carlos Salzedo, founded the International Composers' Guild, dedicated to the performances of new compositions of both American and European composers. The ICG's manifesto in July 1921 included the statement, "[t]he present day composers refuse to die. They have realised the necessity of banding together and fighting for the right of each individual to secure a fair and free presentation of his work." In 1922, Varèse visited Berlin where he founded a similar German organisation with Busoni.
Varèse contributed a poem to the Dadaist magazine 391 after an evening of drinking with Francis Picabia on the Brooklyn Bridge. The same magazine claimed that he was orchestrating a "Cold Faucet Dance". Later that year, he met Louise Norton, who edited another Dadaist magazine, Rogue, with her then-husband. She was to become Louise Varèse and a celebrated translator of French poetry whose versions of the work of Arthur Rimbaud for James Laughlin's New Directions Publishing were particularly influential.
Varèse composed many of his pieces for orchestral instruments and voices for performance under the auspices of the ICG during its six-year existence. Specifically, during the first half of the 1920s, he composed Offrandes, Hyperprism, Octandre, and Intégrales.
Varèse took American citizenship in October 1927. After arriving in the US, Varèse commonly used the form "Edgar" for his first name but largely reverted to "Edgard" from the 1940s.
Life in Paris In 1928, Varèse returned to Paris to alter one of the parts in Amériques for the recently-invented ondes Martenot. Around 1930, he composed Ionisation, sometimes considered the first work for percussion ensemble. Although it was composed with pre-existing instruments, Ionisation was an exploration of new sounds and methods to create them.
In 1928, when he was asked about jazz, he said it was not representative of America but instead was "a negro product, exploited by the Jews. All of its composers here are Jews" (referring to students of Louis Gruenberg and Nadia Boulanger, including Aaron Copland and Marc Blitzstein).Robert Morse Crunden (2000). Body & Soul: The Making of American Modernism, p. 42–3. .
In 1931, he was the best man at the wedding of Nicolas Slonimsky in Paris. In 1933, while still in Paris, he wrote to the Guggenheim Foundation and Bell Labs in an attempt to receive a grant to develop an electronic music studio. His next composition, Ecuatorial, was completed in 1934, and contained parts for two fingerboard "theremin cellos" designed by Leon Theremin, along with winds, percussion, and a bass singer. Anticipating the successful receipt of one of his grants, Varèse eagerly returned to the US. Slonimsky conducted the premiere of Ecuatorial in New York on April 15, 1934, to a mixed reception.
Back in the United States Varèse soon left New York City for Santa Fe, New Mexico, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. In 1936, he wrote his solo flute piece, Density 21.5. He also promoted the theremin in his Western travels, and demonstrated one at a lecture at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque on November 12, 1936. (The university has an RCA theremin in its archives which may be the same instrument.) By the time Varèse returned to New York in late 1938, Leon Theremin had returned to Russia; this devastated Varèse, who had hoped to work with him on a refinement of his instrument.
He was approached by music producer Jack Skurnick resulting in EMS Recordings #401. The record was the first release on LP of Integrales, Density 21.5, Ionisation and Octandre and featured René Le Roy, flute, the Juilliard Percussion Orchestra and the New York Wind Ensemble conducted by Frederic Waldman. Ionisation had also been the first work by Varèse to be recorded in the 1930s, conducted by Nicolas Slonimsky and issued on 78 rpm Columbia 4095M. Likewise, Octandre was recorded and issued on 78 rpm discs in the later 1930s, complete (New Music Quarterly Recordings 1411) and as an excerpt (3rd movement, Columbia DB1791 in Volume V of their History of Music). Le Roy was the soloist also on a 1948 (78 rpm) recording of Density 21.5 (New Music Recordings 1000).
When, in the late 1950s, Varèse was approached by a publisher about making Ecuatorial available, there were very few theremins—let alone fingerboard theremins—to be found, so he rewrote the part for ondes Martenot. This new version was premiered in 1961. (Ecuatorial has been performed again with fingerboard theremins in Buffalo, New York, in 2002 and at the Holland Festival, Amsterdam, in 2009.)
Background in science While living with his father, an engineer, Varèse was pushed to further his scientific understanding at the Institute Technique, a high school in Italy that specialized in teaching mathematics and science. Here, Varèse became interested in the works of Leonardo da Vinci. It was through Varèse's love of science that he began to study sound, as he later recalled:
Varèse began his music studies with Vincent d'Indy at the Schola Cantorum de Paris from 1903 to 1905. While he was in Paris, Varèse had another pivotal experience during a performance of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony at the Salle Pleyel. As the story goes, during the scherzo movement, perhaps due to the resonance of the hall, Varèse had the experience of the music breaking up and projecting in space. It was an idea that stayed with him for the rest of his life, that he would later describe as consisting of "sound objects, floating in space." Unfinished projects