Varèse: WHO WAS HE?
Music, which should pulsate with life, needs new means of expression, and science alone can infuse it with youthful vigor.
I dream of instruments obedient to my thought and which with their contribution of a whole new world of unsuspected sounds, will lend themselves to the exigencies of my inner rhythm.
So wrote Varèse eighty years ago. Who was this man whom the world has finally heeded? He was a man 'full of sun', as all who knew him will say. No more fitting words could be found than these, which Varèse himself used to describe his beloved brass instruments. A man of great nobility, he was ever warm, generous and courteous. A man of boundless energy, he was young, animated and vital. A man of immense wit, he had a wealth of jokes, anecdotes, and was ever ready with repartee. He was also full of fire   an uncompromising defender of truth and quality, an indomitable enemy of mediocrity and falseness. A man of prophetic vision, he never bent to the conventions of his society, to the traditions of his culture. Secure in his roots, he obeyed only the laws of a higher order. Confident of his own destiny, he fought against men and his times.
As a boy, he fought to study music against the wishes of his father, who was preparing him for an engineering career. At the age of eleven, he composed an opera to Jules Verne's Martin Paz.
Later, having learned about the great Zambesi River, he imagined all the turbulent cross currents, drifting debris, and pulsating life and dreamed of transplanting such interpenetrating movements into the realm of sound. Even then his searching mind reached beyond the horizon.
Having parted ways with his fathe fought against the conservatism of D’Indy and Fauré and left the Schola Cantorum and the Conservatoire in quick succession.
On the other hand, at the Schola he studied the music of Medieval, Renaissance and early Baroque masters with a devotion that never left him. He founded and trained choruses in Paris, Berlin, Santa Fé and New York and continued to perform this great music for many years, until he was finally given the opportunity to realize the dream of his life: to compose electronically 'organized sound'.
As a young rebel, he was the model for Jean Christophe by Romain Rolland, who, writing of Varèse to a friend, said: 'Jean-Christophe actually exists'. He was befriended by Debussy, who said: 'You have a right to compose the way you want to, if the music comes out and is your own. Your music comes out and is yours'. In Berlin he became a protégé of Busoni, whose stimulating mind helped crystallize his own revolutionary ideas. His first major performance came at Strauss's insistence when Josef Stransky conducted Bourgogne with the Blüthner Orchestra in Berlin on December 15, 1910. His initial success as a conductor took place on January 4, 1914, when he gave the first performance in concert form of Le Martyre de saint Sébastien with the Czech Philharmonic in Prague. But the outbreak of World War 1 obliterated in one stroke his rising career in Europe.
On the eve of 1916 Varèse arrived in America   America: the very word which had meant to him since childhood 'all discoveries, all adventures... the Unknown'.
In New York, he became a lionized 'maestro'who could have had immediate success if he had only been willing to accede to the taste and whims of the time. But Varèse came to the New World to seek another new world  that of music. Instead of catering for old habits, he chose to fight for new music. Resigning as the conductor of the New Symphony Orchestra, which was organized for him, he founded with Carlos Saizedo in 1921 the International Composers' Guild. As its chairman, in the next six years he gave American premieres of works by such composers as Bartók, Berg, Casella, Cowell, Chávez, Honegger, Krenek, Malipiero, Milhaud, Ruggles, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Szymanowski and Welbern.
Varèse was always an internationalist. Two years before he put his ideas into practice, he wrote the New York Times on March 20, 1919: 'I should like to propose a League of Nations in Art. It needs no covenants... it would exist solely in the mental attitude of the world... Only by a free exchange of art   music, literature, painting   can one people be interpreted to another... in art, as well as in politics, we have been jarred out of our traditional isolation. And the result will be good. The contact, the emulation, the competition will spur us to greater accomplishment... What a combination the freer mingling of national characteristics in art would give! What beauty and strength!' As in the case of his prophetic ideas in music, the world took almost thirty years and another war to catch up with him.
Varèse was always an individualist. In the Guild's manifesto, he set forth a credo to which he remained faithful till the very end of his life, declaring that the Guild 'disapproves of all 'isms; denies the existence of schools; recognizes only the individual'. He was The One all alone, to borrow the title of a work he once considered.
Because of his interest in percussion and his acquaintance with Marinetti and Russolo, Varèse was referred to on occasions as a Futurist; but his ideas on the use of sounds and noises in music are entirely opposed to those of the Futurists. He once said: 'Futurists believed in reproducing sounds literally; I believe in the metamorphosis of sounds into music'. Again, because of his friendship with Duchamp, Picabia and Tzara, Varèse was regarded on other occasions as a Dadaist. His answer was: 'I was not interested in tearing down but in finding new means... Unlike the Dadaists I was not an iconoclast'.
He called neo Classicism 'one of the most deplorable trends of music today', and yet the Guild gave the first American performance of Hindemith's Kammermusik No.3 (op.36 no.2), Stravinsky's Les Noces, Renard, and a performance of the Octet. As for the twelve tone system, he once commented: 'It is important in the same way that Cubism is important in the history of fine arts. Both came at a moment when the need for a strict discipline was felt in the two arts... But we must not forget that neither Cubism nor Schoenberg's liberating system is supposed to limit art or to replace one academic formula with another'. Yet again his Guild gave the first American performances of Schoenberg's Das Buch der hängenden Garten, Herzgewichse, Pierrot lunaire, Serenade, Webern's Five Movements for string quartet, and Berg's Chamber Concerto.
His works for conventional instruments anticipated the sound of today's electronic music by a whole generation. And yet until it became fashionable to 'discover' him again in recent years, this feat reaped him only monumental torrents of abuse and ridicule, culminating in almost total neglect for over ten years. Ironically, it was the death of a critic that brought back his music to the public, when Hyperprism (1922 23) was performed at a concert in memory of Paul Rosenfeld, an early admirer, on January 23, 1949.
Even today Varèse is still bestowed such dubious honors as being called 'pioneer' and 'precursor' to which he retorted that 'while giving a man credit for a past, they minimize his present and deny him a future'. To the many critics who branded his works 'experiments', he said: 'Of course, like all composers who have something new to say, I experiment, and have always experimented. But when I finally present a work it is not an experiment   it is a finished product. My experiments go into the wastepaper basket. People are too apt to forget that in the long chain of tradition each link has been forged by a revolutionary, a pioneer, an experimenter of a previous period'.
Much has been made of his small output  seemingly out of proportion to his importance. Few have paused to ponder the reasons: loss of all his early works; his uncompromising commitment to quality; the quest for new mediums of expression. When World War 1 broke out, he had practically completed his opera, Oedipus und die Sphinx, in collaboration with Hugo von Hof mannsthal. By that time he had already composed eight works for orchestra. All were lost in a warehouse fire in Berlin shortly after the war, except for Bourgogne which he later destroyed himself. He said: 'With Amériques I began to write my own music, and I wish to live (or die) by my later works'.
He was said to have stopped for over ten years after Density 21.5 of 1936. On the contrary! So preoccupied was he with the need for 'new mediums which can lend themselves to every expression of thought and can keep up with thought', that he never completed any of the projects he worked on. When his dream of half a century finally became a reality, he brought forth triumphantly Déserts (1950 54) and Poème électronique (1957 58), fruits of those eloquent years of silence!
This need for 'new mediums' was first aroused while Varèse was still a student at Paris; he had been stimulated by Hoëne Wronsky's definition of music as, in Varèse's words, 'the corporealization of the intelligence that is in sounds.' At the same time, he studied HeIrnholtz's Lehre von den Tonempfindungen, experimenting with sirens and whistles. He began to think of music 'as spatial   as bodies of intelligent music from the tempered system, from the limitations of musical instruments and from years of bad habits'.
In the late spring of 1913, Varèse first met Réné Bertrand, inventor of the dynaphone. By then he was also aware of Thaddeus Cahill's experiment mentioned in Busoni's remarkable book, Entwurf einer neuen Asthetik der Tonkunst, but was disappointed later when he saw it demonstrated after his arrival in New York. In 1927, Varèse began seriously discussing with Harvey Fletcher, the Acoustical Research Director of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, the possibilities of developing an electronic instrument for composing. He also tried to work at the sound studios in Hollywood. Tragically, these repeated attempts were all frustrated by lack of understanding and financial support. Nevertheless, in the mid thirties, he did make some very modest experiments, and Léon Thérémin built two instruments to his specifications for Ecuatorial (1932 34). In spite of general apathy during those years, Varèse took another step forward and worked on and off on what he called a 'sound montage in space', entitled Espace, to be simultaneously broadcast from various points of the world and then resynthesized for the audience.
As early as 1936, in a series of lectures entitled 'Music as Living Matter', Varèse gave a detailed description, now proved to be a realistic production, of how his new music would be composed, notated and actually sound 'when new instruments will allow me to write music as I conceive it', as he wistfully put it. Years of non productivity? Not in his prophetic mind and fertile imagination! But what brutally tortured years Varèse had to endure! What a tragedy to us all that so much of him was wasted for so long!
Once, during a lecture given towards the end of the last War, in speaking about the effects of the Thiry Years' War on German music of that time, he said: I only hope that out of a similar inferno now raging in Europe will come a spiritual and aesthetic renaissance so much needed today. I dare believe it will. I look forward to a complete revision of values and a restoration of the things of quality to the high usurped place that is rightfully theirs'. So it happened. And, one of the 'things of quality' restored to their rightful place is Varèse himself. His own 'renaissance' came after the end of World War II. The performance of Hyperprism in 1949 and the EMS recording
one year later signalled the rumbling of a tidal wave that was to carry his music to every shore of the world. His brief visits to Columbia University in 1948 and to Darmstadt two summers later ignited the beacon which was to light the way of the postwar generation of composers. Ever true to his manifesto, Varèse never formulated an 'ism', never founded a school. He simply inspired.
Varèse was alone in his prophetic vision. His was 'a world of mystery and essential loneliness', as he himself said of Deserts. The dawn of 'a whole new world Of unsuspected sounds' is his legacy to us.

Professor Chou Wen chung
Chou Wen chung is Fritz Reiner Professor Emeritus of Musical Composition and Director of The Centre for United States China Arts Exchange at Columbia University. He met Varèse in 1949, studied with him for several years, and was closely associated with him from that time. Professor Chou was literary executor of the Varèse estate. His own compositions are a determined and subtle exploration of the synthesis of Western and Eastern music.