9780465014842

Chapter One

EDGARD VARÈSE AND THE

SOUND OF THE CITY

When, toward the end of the 1920s, Paul Rosenfeld surveyed the American musical scene for a popular audience, he ranged swiftly over a large number of years and folk sources, but being a man of cultivated urban tastes, he preferred to dwell on art music. He personally knew, or knew of, many of those on whom he wrote. To end the book on the strongest possible note, he devoted his final chapter to Edgard Varèse. Lodged in his few pioneering works, Rosenfeld wrote, an attentive listener could discover "the greatest fullness of power and of prophecy yet come to music in America."

Like many European immigrants, Varèse had long held mythical, whimsical, and personal views about an America that existed chiefly in fantasy. Typically, as a boy he had absorbed the Leather-stocking tales of James Fenimore Cooper; untypically, as he had informed Rosenfeld, "the feeling of the prairies became associated in his mind with the sound of a piercing, bitter-high whistle," and the relationship "has persisted in his imagination, although he has never heard its actual replica anywhere in nature." But no more than other talented people do musicians create in sensible, logical, linear ways. That sound was America for Varèse: It could produce music inspired by the desert, as it eventually did, or it could more appropriately suggest something about urban life. In practice, Varèse was a totally urban animal. As his widow recalled him saying often enough, "the virtue of fresh air is very much exaggerated," and he insisted on following the wise example of birds who slept with their heads under their wings, protected from the insidious night air. His modernist language thus became the sound of the city, if in a special sense.

The easy assumption about a composer who evoked the sound of the city would be that he adapted urban sounds to instruments. Rosenfeld had the wit to hear that Varèse never did this. Instead, working with purely formal goals, he produced a musical experience that made the listener hear the city in a new way, as if common sounds were imitating the art. After one concert, Rosenfeld found the streets "full of jangly echoes. The taxi squeaking to a halt at the crossroads recalls a theme. Timbres and motives are sounded by police-whistles, bark and moan of motor-horns and fire-sirens, mooing of great sea-cows steering through harbour and river, chatter of drills in the garishly lit fifty-foot excavations." Walking the streets, you find "threatening machinery become strangely humanized and fraternal," and your mood improves. "A thousand insignificant sensations have suddenly become interesting, full of character and meaning; gathered in out of isolation and disharmony and remoteness; revealed integral parts of some homogeneous organism breathing, roaring and flowing about."

As numerous conservative critics noted in irritation, Varèse did not have conventional musical goals. He was, Rosenfeld wrote, "not so much interested in the creation of beautiful objects as in the penetration and registration of the extant." A composer who actually "philosophized in music," he was also "the poet of the tall New Yorks." He found a "fast-moving, high-pitched, nervous, excited reality surrounding us," and sensed "the vivacity and unconstraint, speed and daring of the pioneer-spirit of our best American life." This urban America was not just noise and confusion; it was rather "a new world not only of the new scientific and mathematical perspectives but of the latent, the immanent, free of prejudice and habit and dogma: the whole glittering region of the unrealized." Appropriately, the first piece he created in this cement soil was Amériques : a foreign name for a newly emerging modern environment. He intended the title, he recalled later, to be "symbolic of discoveries--of new worlds on earth, in the sky, or in the mind of men."

Invalided out of the French army, Varèse had experienced a mixed welcome when he arrived in New York on 29 December, 1915. Long acquainted with Marcel Duchamp, he immediately entered something of a French cultural cocoon. He lived at the Brevoort, whose proprietors were French, and whose stationery described it as "anciennement," and located at "Coin de la 5me Avenue et de la 8me Rue." He accompanied Duchamp to the famous salon of Walter and Louise Arensberg, a home hung to the ceiling in French modernist art. One of the few who knew the composer personally, he could hear Lou Arensberg playing the work of Arnold Schönberg on the piano while the habitués played chess or satisfied their hunger while ignoring the music. Less welcome were the city itself and its inhabitants. He found it "banal" and "dirty," and them philistine, athletic types unable to converse on anything "except the question of the `Dollar.'" He had trouble with the language, which he could not speak; and then he broke his foot when a car mounted the curb and struck him as he waited for a bus.

The only significant modernist musician to emigrate to America during the war, Varèse had arrived in New York with two clear goals: to conduct music so effectively that he could earn a substantial living; and to use that money not only to support a daughter he had left behind, but also to experiment with new instruments that would in turn enable him to compose a new kind of music. His considerable European experience won him several opportunities to conduct, but as his widow noted later, "he was not a good judge of the Americans he met" and on the whole was "a failure at conciliation and compromise." He also experienced frustration when he tried to invent instruments or adapt the inventions of others. His imaginary America had contained the memorable figure of one Thaddeus Cahill, the inventor of the "dynamophone," which reportedly could transform an electrical current into a mathematically precise number of vibrations. These in turn could determine the pitch of a sound with scientific precision and give a composer far more freedom than the conventional tempered scale. Varèse wanted to track Cahill down and encourage further experimentation, breaking away in the process from the sterile rebellions that constituted much of European musical modernism. "I dream of instruments obedient to thought," he wrote in Francis Picabia's short-lived journal 391 , "which, supported by a flowering of undreamed-of timbres, will lend themselves to any combination I choose to impose and will submit to the exigencies of my inner rhythm." Easier dreamt of than realized, for although Varèse worked seriously with the Thérémin and the Ondes Martinot over the years, he found sirens the most available producers of sound of the sort he wanted, and sirens excited both audiences and critics to unwelcome sarcasm about urban noise and compositional incompetence. Not until late in his life, with the developments of electronic sound, did Varèse come close to finding the instrument that he needed.

Since a permanent conventional appointment did not materialize, Varèse decided to found his own orchestra. His first venture was the New Symphony Orchestra, which he put together in 1919. It failed ignominiously, both from organizational ineptitude and critical hostility: A performance of Béla Bartók's relatively innocuous Deux Images , op. 10, was found to be especially offensive. His reputation in tatters, he briefly sold pianos at Wanamaker's until mutual friends from the Arensberg circle brought him into contact with Juliana Force and her patron, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Mrs. Whitney put him on a dependable monthly stipend of two hundred dollars and offered to subsidize the International Composers' Guild (ICG), which Varèse wished to organize with harpist Carlos Salzedo. Through this organization he made his major contributions to American modernism.

The manifesto of the ICG appeared in Musical America for 23 July, 1921. It complained that contemporary composers had little opportunity to win a fair hearing for their works or to win even limited public approval. In other arts, a poet or a painter could present works directly through print or display. A musician could not do this: Interpreters and instruments, always quirky and fallible, intervened. Only "the most timid and anaemic" made it onstage, "leaving absolutely unheard the composers who represent the true spirit of our time." Refusing to die, the most adventurous were thus joining the ICG "to secure a fair and free presentation" of the best new work. The Guild claimed to disapprove of all "isms" and all schools, but of course it spoke for modernism--for all new experimental dialects that expressed themselves through the ear.

With the intervention of Whitney and Force, American modernism found its most important outlets during the 1920s. While Paul Rosenfeld provided something of a cheering section through his well-known reviews, the painters, writers, and musicians of the Stieglitz circle, the Arensberg salon, and the Whitney Studio Club could intermingle and exchange ideas. Varèse entered the most creative phase of his life: Amériques, Offrandes, Hyperprism, Octandre, Intégrales , and Arcana followed in quick succession, all composed between 1918 and 1927, although not necessarily premiered in that order. One other important modernist American, Carl Ruggles, also received a subsidy and experienced a creative burst. No active musician remained unaware of what was happening. In the process, the composition of classical music transcended the European imitations of an Edward MacDowell and the eccentric experiments of a Charles Ives. Composers became a self-conscious group that could legitimately feel a kinship to developments in the other arts.

Musically speaking, perhaps the most significant performance the ICG sponsored was that of Arnold Schönberg's Pierrot lunaire on 4 February, 1923, at the Klaw Theater, with Louis Gruenberg conducting. One of the seminal works of European modernism, it seemed to bring out the worst aspects of the characters of everyone involved. Schönberg himself, determined to be as difficult as anything he put onto paper, assaulted the sponsors with testy letters questioning their prejudices against German composers and their ability to exact proper performances from untested musicians. Something of a perfectionist, Gruenberg wanted an inordinate number of extensive, time-consuming rehearsals. Claire Reis, now a leading administrative force in the ICG, pushed him hard in the direction of scheduling reality and the need for the show to go on as planned. It did, and was a remarkable success in terms of its impact on a highly select audience, only to provoke yet more trouble. Reis, Gruenberg, and a number of others wanted to repeat the performance to take advantage of word-of-mouth publicity. Varèse, Salzedo, and Ruggles adamantly refused. They correctly pointed out that the policy of the Guild was to put on first performances only, and all scorned the very notion of popularity. Reis, Gruenberg, Leo Ornstein, and others thought otherwise and promptly seceded, to form the rival League of Composers (LC). Even thirty years later, Louise Varèse and Reis were still digging elbows into each other in their memoirs about the issues involved.

Other issues also mattered, but not those that aging widows and bureaucrats liked to mention after World War II. Both Ruggles and Varèse were anti-Semitic. The animosity remained in an interview Varèse gave after returning to France in 1928. When asked about the influence of jazz, a subject of perennial interest to the French, he replied that jazz was not representative of American culture. It was rather "a negro product, exploited by the Jews. All of its composers from here are Jews." He was clearly referring not only to Gruenberg, but also to such Jewish students of the French composition instructor Nadia Boulanger as Aaron Copland and Marc Blitzstein, who learned in France the technical contributions that jazz had made to modernist language. Ruggles was profane on many subjects, but in one letter to Henry Cowell that has survived, he speaks of "that filthy bunch of Juilliard Jews" in a musical organization who were "cheap, without dignity, and with little or no talent," with special reference to Arthur Berger. These were apparently not isolated remarks and indicate that the anti-Semitism of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot was not an isolated or infrequent phenomenon among modernists in other disciplines.

With such prima donnas cultivating their prejudices and organizational ineptitudes, disintegration was not long in developing. By the 1925-26 season, the ICG was sinking deeply into debt, Varèse was not feeling well, and he and Ruggles were quarreling over the size of the orchestra that Ruggles could write for in his Portals . At the same time, Henry Cowell and his New Music Society were gathering strength in California and about to take over leadership of organized musical modernism in America. Varèse had for the moment explored the original ideas he had, and despite the fact that he had taken American citizenship he was determined to return to France. He and Ruggles settled their differences, but the ICG collapsed anyway, announcing its dissolution in November 1927.

Varèse's career before he arrived in America has long been something of a mystery. In later life he grew ashamed of several of his musical ancestors and disowned his early works. What war did not destroy, he burned. "Moi, je suis l'ancêtre [I am the ancestor]," was a phrase he used about his musicological heredity. Common enough among creative people, such a wish often scatters leaves over a tangled bank of ancestors even more complex than most conventional genealogies. Varèse had a great many ancestors, some of them improbable, and all of them had consequences for his later role in American modernism.

He was the offspring of an unhappy family. He hated his father, who tried to prevent his musical career and push him into engineering. Part of his heritage was Italian and for business reasons his father forced him to live in Italy, a country he disliked, in Turin, a city he regarded as culturally dead, in thrall to the past. Under such stress he became un grand nerveux with crippling depressions, subject to wild outbursts of temper. He once told Juliette Roche that he had long been tormented by a desire to strangle someone, "anyone, at random," and liked to show off what he called the hands of a strangler. But he also claimed that as a young adult in Vienna he had met Freud and that Freud had discovered the cause of his problem and cured him. True or merely anecdotally appropriate, the story highlighted many of the characteristics that both made him an American modernist and also the temperamentally self-destructive organizer and disorganizer of such groups as the ICG. He was always an outsider, a marginal in the opinion of Pierre Boulez, disaffected from his immediate environment, unable to communicate effectively for long with those in cultural authority. The very qualities that helped make him original also at times made him unbearable, his career problematic.

Determined to make music his life, Varèse escaped to Paris. His cousin Alfred Cortot recommended the Schola Cantorum and arranged an interview with its director, Vincent d'Indy. Once admitted, Varèse soon found d'Indy a pedant only interested in producing disciples. He became friendly instead with Albert Roussel, and a passionate devotee of early, polyphonic church music under the tutelage of Charles Bourdes. After a year Varèse shifted to the Paris Conservatoire. There he worked well with Charles Widor, the great organist who taught him composition, but soon quarreled with Edgar Fauré, who "kicked me out." As impoverished as any young artist in the novels of the day, he picked up funds where he could. He modeled briefly for sculptor Auguste Rodin, only to get into a senseless argument. "He didn't know a damn thing about music," Varèse said, as if that explained the use of the vulgarism that got him tossed from that studio as well.

So he manufactured his own ancestors. In music these at first included Claude Debussy and Richard Strauss. Debussy was the more important, a personal friend. He was, Varèse recalled, "a man of great kindness, intelligence, fastidiousness and wide culture, ... something of a sybarite and loved beautiful things and all the pleasures of the senses." He had the reputation of being "unapproachable, bearish and disagreeable," but never was with Varèse. Debussy appreciated the originality in the younger man's scores without especially liking them. "Rules do not make a work of art," he would say: "You have a right to compose what you want to, the way you want to if the music comes out and is your own." Strauss, on the other hand, seemed supreme at the time, but did not wear well. The master orchestrator of his generation, he and Varèse became acquainted in Berlin, but little came of it.

Paris was far more than a musical environment. Varèse was close to several members of the group that called their house "L'Abbaye de Créteil," with reference to Rabelais and their own often libertarian attitudes toward life and art. The poet Henri-Martin Barzun and the painter Albert Gleizes later joined Varèse in New York during the war. He was always welcome at the salon of Cyprien Godebski, where every Sunday he might encounter not only Roussel, but also Maurice Ravel, Erik Satie, and Jean Cocteau. Ravel was soon experimenting with jazz rhythms and blue notes, while Satie became a great if neglected influence on American modernism. As for Cocteau, although he never made it to America in person, he traveled often enough in fantasy. Painters, poets, and musicians drew no distinctions between their arts.

Varèse had not suffered through his engineering training for nothing, and he long retained an extramusical attitude to the problems of composition. His chief technical memory of his years at the Conservatoire was the occasion when he came across "a definition of music that was the first to satisfy me completely." He took it from Hoëne Wronski, "physicist, chemist, musicologist, and philosopher of the first part of the 19th century," who defined music as "the corporealization of the intelligence that is in sounds." This was the meaning for his craft that stayed with him, for he was soon thinking of "organized sound instead of sanctified and regimented notes." As John D. Anderson has pointed out, Wronski was a mathematician who claimed to have a revelation in 1803--a combination of science and offbeat religion that will reappear often among modernists in both America and Europe. Varèse interpreted him to mean that sounds had an inherent intelligence or will independent of human perception. Sound was organic matter and could thus move freely in space.

Varèse next began "to resent the arbitrary limitations of the tempered system," doubts that were confirmed when he was reading around in the book by Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music (1863). Varèse was especially taken with Helmholtz's experiments with sirens. He went to the marché aux puces to buy two small ones, and "with these I made my first experiments in what later I called spatial music. The beautiful parabolas and hyperbolas of sound the sirens gave me and the haunting quality of the tones made me aware for the first time of the wealth of music outside the narrow limits imposed by keyboard instruments." He used them to great effect in both Amériques and Ionization .

The importance of this reading and thinking was more evident in retrospect than at the time. By all critical reports, Varèse's early works were not all that innovative, and his later memories more evidence of his desire to be his own ancestor than of any startling creativity. Whatever his evolving fascinations, he was not comfortable in Paris; he found the city "constipated," and by 1907 was in Berlin. The work of Hector Berlioz aside, he preferred German masterpieces to French, and soon found German composers more hospitable as well. He fell in with a talented group that included conductor Carl Muck, and the team of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, then the cutting edge of much that was new in music.

But his greatest friend turned out to be Ferruccio Busoni, a famous pianist and composer who already knew the work of the early American modernist Charles T. Griffes, and of Leo Ornstein. Busoni thus demands a closer look, for his role in these three careers was no accident. The assumptions of much musicological scholarship to the contrary notwithstanding, Busoni was the representative figure who stood at the head of a lost tradition of modernism, one that flowered in America between the world wars more luxuriantly than did the better known Austrian atonalism of Arnold Schönberg.

Something of a marginal like Varèse, Busoni too was more a Central European than a product of any single culture. His first language was German, which he had absorbed in Vienna, Leipzig, and Berlin, but he had spent much of his childhood in Trieste and Paris, and had married the daughter of a Swedish-speaking sculptor in Helsinki. He entered American cultural history in 1891, when he moved to Boston to teach at the New England Conservatory. The next year he moved to New York, where he spent two years before returning to Berlin in 1894. He later returned to America for four concert tours, all the while filling the mails with acidulous remarks on America's egalitarianism, and the bad taste he so frequently encountered.

Busoni, too, was never satisfied with teachers, role models, or traditions. He yearned instead for a universal music that transcended time and space to exist in a region where all melodies could exist at the same time. "Time," for a musician, was as crucial as "space" to a painter, and so, like Varèse, Busoni was insensibly moving toward a musical philosophy that in some ways owed more to modernist painting than to musical precedent. Just as painters in Paris experimented with cubism and its successors, Busoni was concerned with die Allgegenwart der Zeit . "I have almost found an explanation for the omnipresence of Time," he wrote his wife in 1911, "but I have not discovered why it is that we humans understand as a straight line from the past to the future, while it must be in all directions, like everything in the universe."

In 1906, Busoni completed the brief volume available in English as Sketch for a New Esthetic of Music , which Varèse and numerous other experimentalist composers took as the first trumpet call of a new music. Declaring that "Music was born free; and to win freedom is its destiny," he placed his emphasis from the start on a spiritual vision eerily reminiscent in its language of American transcendentalism. Sounding like a Theodore Parker informing his audiences of the distinctions between the transient and the permanent in Christianity, Busoni stressed: " The spirit of an art-work, the measure of emotion, of humanity, that is in it--these remain unchanged in value through changing years ," with italics his; " the form, which these three assumed, the manner of their expression, and the flavor of the epoch which gave them birth, are transient, and age rapidly ." Demanding the freedom to experiment, which most artists wanted, he nevertheless insisted that such experiments only gave a superficial stamp of modernity to music. His music, like the music of the other modernists, aimed at " the imitation of nature and the interpretation of human feelings ." He emphatically denied that he was advocating the "sounds" of nature--the slap at Richard Strauss perhaps adding an instrument to his orchestra--and decried the "debasement of Tone to Noise in imitating the sounds of Nature." Never precisely clear as to what he was advocating instead, he seemed to want composers to create as nature created, to behave as nature behaved: not to copy nature's results, but to function in a natural way. He seemed especially eager to dispose of, or else severely modify, the whole notion of the octave, either through the use of tripartite tones, or else an infinite range of tones.

Never much of a writer, Busoni nevertheless occasionally contributed short pieces to journals elaborating his ideas. In the most concise of his formulations, written in Chicago in January 1911 for publication in Berlin, he laid out the five possible paths that he saw for the development of modernism: 1) "The first new harmonic system rests upon chord formation according to customary scales," which he identified with Debussy; 2) "the symmetrical inversion of the harmonic order," which Bernhard Ziehn had suggested to him; 3) "keeping the voices independent of each other in polyphonic compositions," something he himself was already doing; 4) "anarchy, an arbitrary placing of intervals, next and over one another, according to mood and taste," which he said Arnold Schönberg was attempting; and 5) "the birth of a new key system which will include all the aforementioned ways." In theory, Busoni was ready to try anything.

In practice, he was never as radical as Varèse proved to be. Busoni did break down customary notions of tonality and rhythm, and he was also willing to employ dissonance whenever it suited him. He called for new instruments in music, and looked forward to the new sounds they would make, bells seeming to be a major priority. He did go quite a way toward polyphony, and experimented with new forms of notation that encompassed microtones, one-third tones, and the new scales that went along with them. By 1909 he was using a "free tonality," which he differentiated from the "atonality" of his friend Schönberg, creating polytonal effects, and even leaving out bar lines in order to have his music evoke the stream of consciousness. By common critical consent, he reached his experimentalist limit in the Sonatina seconda , op. 43, composed in 1912 and first played in 1913.

Varèse's contacts with Busoni in Berlin had resonance for the history of musical modernism in America. For the next seven years, from 1907 to 1914, Varèse was essentially a cosmopolitan German, sampling the options available to any talented young person of that time and place. He accompanied Busoni to the first performance of Pierrot lunaire , and indeed the two were both outsiders, thrown together by similar characters and situations despite the difference in age and stature. Varèse especially recalled the "Florentine sarcasm" and "overpowering sense of the ridiculous" with which Busoni spoke of many of the people and events of the day. But despite his personal devotion to Busoni, and his later role as the inheritor of his ideas in an American context, Varèse was always his own person and never uncritical. Busoni, like Stravinsky after the war, advocated a classicism with which Varèse never felt comfortable, finding his friend's own compositions and tastes "orthodox." Varèse declared that "classicism, young or old, was just what I was bent on escaping." They could agree about "the strait jacket of the tempered system," yet disagree amicably about tonality: "I was through with tonality," Varèse recalled, but Busoni could never have said that, however much he might "free" it up. They also agreed that new instruments were necessary, and that machines would be among them. Their differences were essentially those between generations, when those generations have good personal relations. "It was as though his heart, loyal to the past, refused to follow his adventurous mind into so strange a future," Varèse wrote. "I owe a most tremendous debt of gratitude to this extraordinary man; ... he crystallized my half-formed ideas, stimulated my imagination, and determined, I believe, the future development of my music."

Despite spending so much time in Berlin, Varèse never severed his ties with Paris, and so was on the spot when the craze for simultaneïsme exploded in the pages of Les Soirées de Paris . Henri Bergson, the most famous philosopher in the city, had discussed "simultaneity" in Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889) and Matière et Mémoire (1896), leaning heavily as he did so on his exposure to the ideas of William James. As a person experienced the stream of consciousness, external things seemed to change, to succeed one another; but in fact they did not. External things coexisted, they were simultaneous with each other; a sentient being had somehow to keep them all in mind at once, an act of will counteracting the normal human wish to experience things one at a time. L'Abbaye de Créteil resounded with the subject, Barzun and Apollinaire speaking simultaneously at each other claiming credit for the idea when applied to poetry. Marius de Zavas told Alfred Stieglitz that it was "the last word" in the Parisian art wars, and the futurists debated its impact on painting in Der Sturm . Robert Delaunay promptly produced Simultaneous Windows and Windows Open Simultaneously .

At this point, cubist painting complemented the ideas under discussion. The subject is easily oversimplified, but in their often-quoted book Cubism (1912), Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger saw as its essence the "moving around an object to seize it from several successive appearances, which, fused into a single image, reconstitute it in time." The resulting painting thus depicted these successive images into a simultaneous moment, freezing time and space in a manner congruent with what Bergson had had in mind. Varèse was fascinated. In the midst of the debates, always more aware of poets and painters than other musicians, he was personally friendly to Apollinaire and was accustomed to meeting him at the Delaunays' house. It all added up to an Orphist music. As Jonathan Bernard, the most thorough musicological scholar of this aspect of Varèse's music has written: "In Varèse's hands, simultaneity employed two techniques for presenting sound masses independently of one another: one, a high degree of timbral differentiation; the other, rhythmic patterns that resisted the listener's attempt to mesh them." By the time he was composing Intégrales in the mid-1920s, he would repeat sound elements as many as fourteen times without precisely replicating either the dynamics or the rhythms, thus achieving what he regarded as the musical equivalent of a cubist painter's movements around an object.

Given all this trendy experimentalism, Varèse seems an unlikely candidate for a disciple of Richard Wagner, but as Olivia Mattis has pointed out in a remarkable insight, in a way he was. No one doubts that Wagner's influence was ubiquitous in Western Europe before World War I, but most modernists were fleeing it as fast as they could. Musicians fled it first, since they were closest to it; but in this context Varèse was more of a writer or painter. The key word here is Gesamtkunstwerk , the total work that unifies the arts in one all-enveloping aesthetic experience. That's what Wagner's operas were supposed to be, and while young rebels might scoff, they could not get the need for the total experience of time and space, of individual and nation, of eye and ear, out of their heads. Being jokers at heart, while simultaneously serious of course, they finally arrived at the perfect modernist solution: the circus as the total work of art for modern times. As improbable as it might seem, the circus worked perfectly. It was a self-contained world in which everything went on at once, sometimes three rings at a time. Clowns and lions and acrobats did their thing, presumably paying no attention each to the others. Masks, jokes, accidents, death-defying stunts, colors, sounds, and so on, all in a deflating yet invigorating spirit of play--just the thing to "play off" against the Wagnerian extravaganzas of their youth. The Cirque Médrano in Paris was a notorious lark for them all, from Gertrude Stein to Pablo Picasso, who indeed went together in 1911. In Schönberg's Pierrot Lunaire and Stravinsky's Petrushka , circus and clown, sane and mad, serious and comic come together, unifying composers who otherwise might seem to have little in common. Wagner would no doubt have been horrified.

In this context, Varèse's connections to two of the more visible movements of modernism become relevant. Although the older he got, the more he tended to deny it, he was in fact involved with futurism over fully two decades on two continents. Through Apollinaire in Paris and Busoni in Berlin, he was familiar with the ideas that Filippo Marinetti and his associates were spreading and knew also several specific paintings, especially those of Umberto Boccioni. He was less enthusiastic about the musical innovations that were soon notorious. Balilla Pratella and Luigi Russolo were advocates of bruiteurs , to use the French term for what were intonarumori in Italian, Geräuschtönern in German, and noisemakers in English. In various interviews and articles, Varèse came down firmly in favor of new instruments and experiments in general, but was convinced that the futurists were making serious errors. "New instruments must be able to lend varied combinations and must not simply remind us of things heard time and time again," he told an interviewer. He refused to limit himself "to sounds that have already been heard. What I am looking for is new mechanical mediums which will lend themselves to every expression of thought and keep up with thought." He was himself headed in the direction of the Thérémin and the Ondes Martinet, and in time electronic sounds. He wanted to convey more precisely what was in his head, not what anyone could hear on the streets.

Varèse also tended to play down his connections to dada, as if its anarchic tendencies did not befit his self-image. But he was close to Marcel Duchamp, Beatrice Wood, and Henri-Pierre Roché as they produced The Blind Man in New York and enjoyed the controversy over Duchamp's famous Fountain , the ready-made urinal submitted to a show. Such friends and such antics implied both a sense of humor and a sense of the aesthetic importance of everyday life, but the entire Arensberg salon was at that time also developing a serious interest in machine art, which Varèse shared. Both Francis Picabia and Duchamp produced work with a machine orientation, and the transition to a musical context was easy. Varèse had always wanted to eliminate interpretation in music: Violins and pianos separated composer and listener, and for someone committed to "organized sound" rather than beauty or tradition, machines that made consistent sounds seemed promising. In time, he was also fascinated by the machines that recorded and reproduced the sounds as well as those that generated them. Meanwhile, he indicated where his sympathies lay by possessing his own ready-made, a weathervane that Duchamp had given to his wife Louise.

III

The translation of Varèse's musical intentions into lay language that does not do violence to the niceties of linear development remains a daunting task. The sounds of the city could easily be noise to the uninitiated, and as befitted a man who wished to be his own ancestor, Varèse was forever obliterating the written record to rewrite his development to suit his current preoccupations. After 1927, without the structural support of the ICG, his rate of productivity declined, all but halting as he searched for instruments of sound generation that suited him. But like casual critics, he too tended to metaphor, leaving the technicalities to the graduate schools. Those metaphors all had their validity, and all evoked the city at least indirectly.

The first significant effort at self-definition came through a mask. Massimo Zanotti-Bianco was a friend as well as a journalist, and when he volunteered to explain Varèse to a larger audience in 1924, Varèse gave him accurate, evocative material to use. Zanotti began as so many were accustomed to begin, with the word "spatial." More than thirty years later, in recalling the piece, Varèse recalled the phrase, "masses in astral space" as an effective way of describing his atonal harmonies. He got the quote slightly garbled, but no matter, that much at least appears both in the original and in the memory of it.

Zanotti actually began with a discussion of rhythm and melody, and the way most musical discussions began with one or the other. He wished to go beyond these categories to have his readers "project an imaginary sound-mass into space," where they would "find that it appears as constantly changing volumes and combinations of planes, that these are animated by the rhythm, and that the substance of which they are composed is the sonority." He then suggested the possibility that a musical composition could be "a succession of geometric sound-figures," the result of "volumes and planes whose successive projections would give birth to architectures of sound whose logic would be given by the equilibrium of their sound vibrations and their forms." Such a conceptualization would merely be the logical step beyond where Busoni, who remained present but unmentioned in the essay, had left music in his essays of fifteen years earlier. It would make music independent and self-justifying.

In analyzing this "sound-geometry," Zanotti naturally stressed the percussion. "His musical body is divided into two parts: the sound-mass molded as though in space (the orchestra without the percussion); and its stimulus, its movement, its dynamics (the percussions)." The percussion section "penetrates the sound-masses, making them pulsate with a thousand varied and unexpected vibrations with an effect not unlike, in the field of vision, a ray of light striking through a crystal prism, giving it a multiple existence." Zanotti termed the results primitive at least in feeling because of the "primary, naked elements" that it involved. He thought that Varèse had managed to unify his emotional impulses with his abstract ideas. His first studies had been in mathematics, and he was now bringing geometry into music. The imagery then shifted abruptly, much like the music, and instead of geometry evoked Bergson: "his flux is continuous, and even when the play of the percussions stop one has the impression of a long syncopation." The description will do for a lay version of many Varèse works: "Sudden stops, sharply broken intensities, extremely rapid crescendi and dimenuendi give an effect of the pulsation of a very complex organism.... The atonal harmony, crudely coloring the sound groups, throws them into frigid relief, like great masses in astral space." And that was the phrase that stuck in the composer's mind, perhaps because it originated there. The rest of the article, and most other adjectival descriptions, were simply repetition. Varèse was the geometrician of space, and planes within space; his space was urban, and could have been Berlin, Paris, or New York. The head of the bird was under its wing listening to its internal intensities.

Zanotti's passing imagery suggested the other metaphors in which Varèse habitually thought: the physics of crystallization and the architecture of stones. The discussions of crystallization apparently appeared first, possibly as a result of Varèse's long-term friendship with the architect, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known to history chiefly as Le Corbusier. Although the two did not actually collaborate until the composition of Poème électronique in the 1950s, they had long been aware of each other and in sympathy with each other's attitudes. In 1925, Jeanneret coauthored an essay, "Towards the Crystal," in which he talked about a "tendency towards the crystal" in later cubist art. Closely related to geometrical organization, crystallization was a way nature took to reveal to people "how its forms are built up by the interplay of internal and external forces. The crystal grows, and stops growing, in accordance with the theoretical forms of geometry; man takes delight in these forms because he finds in them what seems to be a confirmation for his abstract geometrical concepts." Nature could thus find common ground with the human mind because of a human need for logic and reason; the imagery supplied a need for explanation and order. Cubism thus had an organic logic, "which proceeds outward from within." Even the most austere-seeming structures of European modernism, whether in paint, music, or architecture, partook of this biological, organic quality. Neither the cities of Le Corbusier's fertile mind, nor the compositions of Varèse's equally fertile intelligence, were as inhuman as they seemed to outsiders. Their sense of humanism simply included both buildings and cities as having organic qualities.

No less a student of Varèse than Jonathan Bernard has suggested that this essay, or conversations relating to its subject matter, lingered in Varèse's mind until he finally spoke his own version of its ideas. In interviews and essays of the 1950s, he repeatedly returned to crystallization to explain how he composed. His favorite source at that point was Nathaniel Arbiter, professor of mineralogy at Columbia University, who had defined the term this way: "The crystal is characterised by both a definite external form and a definite internal structure. The internal structure is based on the unit of crystal which is the smallest grouping of the atoms that has the order and composition of the substance. The extension of the unit into space forms the whole crystal. But in spite of the relatively limited variety of internal structures, the external forms of crystals are limitless." He then added words that Varèse said had long been effectively on his mind but that he'd never before encountered in print: "Crystal form is a resultant rather than a primary attribute. Crystal form is the consequence of the interaction of attractive and repulsive forces and the ordered packing of the atom." Those words, Varèse continued, suggested "better than any explanation I could give, the way my works are formed. There is an idea, the basis of an internal structure, expanded and split into different shapes or groups of sound constantly changing in shape, direction, and speed, attracted and repulsed by various forces." The form of his works would be "the consequence of this interaction. Possible musical forms are as limitless as the exterior forms of crystals." Or, as Le Corbusier might have added, the forms of the cities and of the buildings of which they consisted. In the modernist psyche, a physics of architecture was replacing the naturalistic biology that had dominated later nineteenth-century attitudes. Varèse's works were the sounds the city produced as it functioned.

Any mention of Le Corbusier almost automatically brings up the subject of architecture; this is legitimate in terms of structural imagery but stylistically misleading. Varèse in fact had long been interested in Romanesque architecture in ways that might well leave later students wondering at the complexities of creativity. The best source for his interest is an interview with Gunther Schuller, a composer and conductor with a great sympathy for modernist work. Schuller asked him about his lost early works and how they might have anticipated the works of the 1920s. Varèse replied that he would call his earlier works "more architectonic." He had been "working with blocks of sound, calculated and balanced against each other," and had been "preoccupied with volume in an architectural sense, and with projection." Schuller then asked him where such architectonic ideas might have come from, in view of the fact that such other pioneering modernists as Debussy and Stravinsky had been working along quite different lines.

Varèse replied by insisting that he had not been influenced so much by other composers as by "natural objects and physical phenomena." He had as a child been much impressed "by the qualities and character of the granite I had found in Burgundy, where I often visited my grandfather." Some of it was gray, some of it streaked with pink and yellow. "Then there was the old Romanesque architecture in that part of France." He said that he was used to playing in one of the oldest surviving churches in France, in Tournus, "one that was started in the sixth century and built in purest Romanesque style." He loved to watch the old stonecutters, "marvelling at the precision with which they worked. They didn't use cement, and every stone had to fit and balance with every other. So I was always in touch with things of stone and with this kind of pure structural architecture--without frills or unnecessary decoration." Clearly, poets were not the only modernists intent on leaving out connectives, or capable of choosing aspects of the distant and seemingly disconnected past for inspiration. Planes, crystals, blocks of stone, these were the metaphors in the mind of a musician. No wonder the music seemed difficult to access.

The overall results remain controversial and difficult even to those who have made their peace with the work of Arnold Schönberg and Igor Stravinsky. But musicians and musicologists have been making Varèse into a legend, not to say a minor industry. Let Stravinsky have the last words: "Varèse's music will endure. We know this now because it has dated in the right way. The name is synonymous with a new intensity and a new concretion, and the best things in his music ... are among the better things in contemporary music. More power to this musical Brancusi."

Amazon no longer offers textbook rentals. We do!

Amazon no longer offers textbook rentals. We do!

We're the #1 textbook rental company. Let us show you why.

Body and Soul : The Making of American Modernism: Art, Music and Letter of the Jazz Age, 1919-1926

0465014844

Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials

Excerpts

Rewards Program