Edgard Varese, Modernism, and the Experience of Modernity

City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 6-2014 At the Threshold: Edgard Varese, Modernism, and the Experience of Modernity Robert Jackson Wood Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/130 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] At the Threshold: Edgard Varèse, Modernism, and the Experience of Modernity by Robert Jackson Wood A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Music in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2014 2014 Robert Jackson Wood All Rights Reserved ii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Music in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. _________________ ________________________________________________ Date Joseph Straus Chair of Examining Committee _________________ ________________________________________________ Date Norman Carey Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Richard Kramer Chadwick Jenkins Brian Kane THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii Abstract At the Threshold: Edgard Varèse, Modernism, and the Experience of Modernity by Robert Jackson Wood Adviser: Richard Kramer The writings of composer Edgard Varèse have long been celebrated for their often ecstatic, optimistic proclamations about the future of music. With manifesto-like brio, they put forth a vision of radically new instruments and sounds, delineate the parameters for spatially oriented composition, and initiate the discourse of what would become electronic music. Yet just as important for understanding Varèse is the other side of the coin: a thematics of failure concerning the music of the present—a failure of old instruments to transcend their limitations, a failure of technique to achieve certain compositional ideals, and a failure of music to connect listeners adequately to the vital current of the times. This dissertation explores the connection of Varèse’s visions of transcendence, together with his continual refrain of art’s metaphysical failure, to one of modernism’s utopian and impossible demands: that the artwork somehow seize upon or make contact with modernity itself—that it be, in the words of Rimbaud, “absolutely modern.” In Varèse’s case, this will mean a desire—stemming partially from the sense of always being left behind by the coursing temporality of post-war modernity—for works (and through them, listeners) to enter into an iv intimate communion with the modern world, providing a kind of unmediated contact with the creative-destructive drive of the new. Chapter 1 will explore this desire by way of Varèse’s interest in the siren, whose continuous parabolic curves will come to symbolize an unmediated realm of the musical real beckoning just beyond the clumsy reach of the tempered scale. In chapter 2, Varèse’s desired immediacy will take the form of the absolute present, which the artwork will attempt to apprehend both through its collaboration with science and through what Varèse will call its necessary “permanent revolution.” In chapter 3, immediacy will be explored by way of Varèse’s highly physical, at times violent, notion of sound, which will become a means of making actual contact with the listener’s body while dissolving the barriers separating them from modernity’s coursing vital stream. v Acknowledgements I would like to extend my gratitude to a number of people for the support, encouragement, and advice they offered me during the course of this project. I first heard Varèse on WXXI radio while in my college dorm room at the Eastman School of Music, so I must first thank the fearless programmers there who saw fit to subject the inhabitants of Rochester to such sublime orchestral cacophony. I am no less indebted to my advisor, Richard Kramer, who provided unwavering support throughout all stages of this project. His insistence that I continually strive to clarify and expound upon, but never abandon, the often unwieldy abstractions that I would bring to the table was immensely important to this dissertation. My family and friends, too, have been a chorus of believers. Surely they thought at times as though this mysterious dissertation that they never saw or read but that I spoke of so incessantly was destined for incompletion. But no matter: outwardly they were infinitely loving, encouraging, and supportive. My friends and colleagues Steve Smith and Seth Brodsky were particularly invaluable, having served as indispensable sounding boards over the years as well as co-travelers down intellectual rabbit holes too numerous to mention. I would also like to thank the remainder of my committee, Rosa Lim, my colleagues at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the archivists at the Paul Sacher Stiftung and Harry Ransom Center for the different, but equally important, forms of support that each provided. vi Preface Edgard Varèse, modernism, and the experience of modernity: it is likely that nothing about this grouping will seem new or unexpected in a dissertation on the composer. Modernism is that aesthetic bracket we tend to place around the angular, unforgiving sound world typical of works like Arcana, Amériques, and Intégrales, while modernity is that sociocultural phenomenon, never more a subject of discourse than during Varèse’s time, to which modernism was supposedly a response. So what about this threshold? What defines it? Why talk about it? What does it have to do with any of these terms? A threshold implies a point or a place past which one thing becomes another, something to be crossed in order for a qualitative change to occur. It can have spatiotemporal associations, as a kind of transitional point encountered on a journey; physiological or psychological associations as a moment of loss associated with pain or paroxysm; or mystical, metaphysical associations, as a moment or place at which matter becomes transmogrified into something beyond its mere self. In reading Varèse’s writing throughout the course of this project, I could not help but constantly think of these and other thresholds. Everywhere, we seem to be just around the corner from something aesthetically or metaphysically game-changing, something monumental. We are brought to a precipice delineated by music’s current technical capabilities and limitations and allowed a glimpse at what resplendent things that—with only this technological advancement and that new instrument—it would surely become. The wind from the coming electronic music revolution is already in our hair. The future is always almost here. But we cannot say, of course, that this sense of a threshold is entirely unique to Varèse’s writings. This is, after all, the age of the manifesto in which countless pronouncements about vii art’s future—what it should be, what it could be, what it almost is—make the reader feel, on the one hand, as though surely utopia is immanent, but on the other, that for some reason, those pronouncements themselves bear more interest than their representative works, or that the works themselves fail, or that they can do no more than stand out as mere tokens of a theorized type. Thus, Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto becomes a document of determined desire—“we want to sing the love of danger,” “we want to glorify war,” “we want to demolish museums and libraries”—but also of desire deferred: “we have therefore at least ten years to accomplish our task.” Never has music history seen such an ecstasy of writing matched with such a sidelining or underplaying of individual works. Varèse, ever teetering on the brink of merging theory and practice, ever exclaiming about what was almost able to be done, was no exception. What I have tried to do in this dissertation is to rethink Varèse from the perspective of different thresholds of transcendence, or at least isolate certain tendencies in his works that seem to evoke them. On the far side of those thresholds is always a musical metaphysics that Varèse will call various things and approach in various ways, but always implicating music in a certain failure to do what he wants it to do. There will be the threshold of beauty (Varèse’s own coinage), for example, capable of being crossed (if crossed at all) only by way of the most dedicated collaboration between art and science. There will be the threshold of the musical real, which will beckon from beyond the reach of the clunky fingers of the tempered scale. There will be the threshold of the absolute present, a utopian place beyond all mediation that will be able to be conjured only obliquely by what Varèse will call the artwork’s “permanent revolution.” There will be other thresholds as well, all of them providing us with new perspectives on Varèse’s urgent rhetoric and exuberant sonic visions. And as we explore them, we will have occasion to approach a number of other facets of Varèse’s music and rhetoric viii in ways that have not been done before. Science, for example, will become less the stuff of rigid objectivity and cold calculus and more something akin to art itself: a vehicle of revelation in the service of providing renewed images of the world, of imagining the world otherwise. Apollinaire will enter here as a criminally overlooked influence on Varèse, providing the composer with a persuasive framework from which to understand art’s ideal relationship with various modalities of innovation and discovery. Sound will become something highly physical, even violent, capable of breaking open the recalcitrant shell of the listener’s subjectivity to enable an unimpeded congress with modernity’s coursing temporality.

Load more