Varese's Multimedia Conception of Deserts Olivia Mattis Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/76/4/557/1081086 by guest on 29 September 2021 Edgard Varese's Ddserts is a landmark work that had a great influence on the post-World War II generation of composers. Its premiere, on 2 December 1954, was one of those beaux scandales that make Paris Paris,1 but the public's jeering had serious consequences. As the live radio transmission of the performance was the first stereophonic broad- cast in French radio history, radio executives were listening to it; the shouts that they heard of "salaud" and "pendez-le!" nearly caused the cancellation of funding for Pierre Schaeffer's studio of musique concrete where the taped portion of the piece was completed, and which was under the national radio's subsidy.2 Moreover, Varese was never rein- vited to work in France. One critic wrote after the premiere, "This is music of the time of the H-bomb."3 Another wrote, "The audience was exceptionally patient; they only protested after a few minutes."4 Varese's reaction: he cried. But there was a failure of communication in both directions, as the piece that the audience heard was not quite the one the com- poser had envisaged. Varese wrote, "Even the most perfect work of art is but an approximation of the artist's original conception. It is the artist's consciousness of this discrepancy between his conception and the realization that assures his progress."5 Deserts, more than any other work in Varese's oeuvre, encompassed this struggle. The historical significance of this work is generally seen to lie in the fact that it was the first work of "the father of electronic music" to use recorded sounds. In Deserts, four orchestral portions alternate with three interpolations of taped, electronically manipulated sounds. Varese wrote to his disciple Andre" Jolivet in 1952: "I no longer believe in concerts, the sweat of conductors and the flying storms of virtuosos' dandruff, and am only interested in recorded music. That's why I have to wait. There are more opportunities in Europe for this type of activity, but one would have to be there, and unfortunately Europe is no place to make a living. It will come, and in the States."6 557 558 The Musical Quarterly At the premiere of Deserts, two loudspeakers were used for the recorded portion, one placed on each side of the orchestra. In addi- tion, two radio stations broadcast the concert, Chatne Nationale and France-Inter, each carrying half the signal. For radio listeners to hear the stereo effect, they needed two radios, one tuned to each of the two stations. But Diserts is significant for yet another reason: it was the culmi- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/76/4/557/1081086 by guest on 29 September 2021 nation of a long preoccupation by its composer with Utopian multime- dia projects, involving theater, cinema, and the projection of lights. We now know that visual images were latent in Deserts, as in many earlier pieces. My own interviews, as well as Varese's unpublished letters to his family and others, his published interviews, recollections by fellow artists, and other documents that have come to light, dem- onstrate that the final musical incarnation of Deserts is but a partial realization of a grand, apocalyptic conception that combined visual images with the organized sound. This essay traces the evolution of these hidden aspects over the course of Varese's career. History of the Work Ddserts was the piece that broke what are known as Varese's "silent years": the nearly twenty-year period following the 1936 premiere of Density 21.5, during which Varese vanished from the musical scene and from which not a note survives in published form. During those years, Var&se worked on, but never completed, an ever-changing, Utopian work, known mainly as Espace, but carrying other names as well: The'One-AU'Alone, Sinus, II n'y a plus de firmament and L'Astro- name.. At one point it was to be a thirty-five minute orchestral work that introduced an immense choir in the final movement: a space-age Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. In another version it was to include a pair of ondes martenot, as is evident in a surviving sketch.7 Varese admitted that Ddserts was an outgrowth of that piece: "For me 'deserts' is a highly evocative word. It suggests space, solitude, detachment. To me it means not only deserts of sand, sea, mountains and snow, of outer space, of deserted city streets, not only those stripped aspects of nature that suggest bareness and aloofness but also the remote inner space of the mind no telescope can reach, a world of mystery and essential loneliness. The title is personal, not intended as a descrip- tion of the music. There are elements in it taken from a work I never finished and which I had decided to call 'Espace'."8 Vartse's D&erts 559 Varese composed the instrumental portion of Diserts between 1949 and 1952 and began the taped portion in 1952,9 after receiving an Ampex model 401A tape recorder as a gift.10 In 1952 and 1953, Varese recorded factory sounds at Westinghouse, Diston, and Budd Manufacturers. In late 1953, he met the young composer Ann McMillan who was at the time a music editor for the long-playing record division of RCA Victor; she became his student-assistant in Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/76/4/557/1081086 by guest on 29 September 2021 January of 1954. Together they recorded organ sounds in New York in the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, and she assisted him in transform- ing these recorded sounds into music. By October, when Varese left for France to work in Pierre Schaeffer's studio, he had already com- pleted the first tape interpolation and part of the second. Fernand Ouellette, the composer's biographer, mentions that when Varese arrived in Paris to finish the tape interpolations for Deserts, he brought "his sounds and his diagrams with him."11 In Paris, with the assis- tance of Pierre Henry, Varese completed the second interpolation and wrote the third. The work was first performed in December of that year by the French National Orchestra under the baton of Hermann Scherchen.12 In 1961, with the assistance of Turkish composer Biilent Arel and sound engineer Max Mathews, he reworked the tape inter- polations in New York at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. A number of sources attest to the fact that Deserts was intended to be a film. Music and image would thus jointly express the manifold aspects of Varese's desert. The earliest mention of this idea is in the following letter to his daughter Claude, from June of 1949. His choice of collaborator for the project is surprising: An actor whom you surely know named Burgess Meredith, even while continuing his starring career would also like to begin directing. He has just finished shooting a film in France: "l'Homme de la Tour Eiffel," which is due to be released in the fall. I tell you all this in order for you to place him. Well, Burgess Meredith and I are making a film together, "le Disert" (not documentary). New approach, that is to say light against sound, the images following or contradicting the score, something which has never yet been done. The music shall be written first, and I shall finally be able to afford acoustic studies and experi- ments for the 1st time in my life, so it's an opportunity. As the choice of subject was left up to me, I opted for the desert, which is the envi- ronment that I prefer and in which I feel in my element.13 Another potential cinematographer was a French art dealer, Raymond Creuze, who at the time was very young and had no experience in 560 The Musical Quarterly films. He described Varese's film project to me as six hours of wordless images in conjunction with music. Creuze, though flattered by Va- rese's faith in him, had no interest in the plan, and declined to par- ticipate. 14 A series of letters from 1952 makes clear that at that time Varese was considering Walt Disney as the filmmaker for his project. Varese wrote to Nicolas Slonimsky on 21 June 1952: "Important: do you have Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/76/4/557/1081086 by guest on 29 September 2021 the personal address of Walt Disney? (or know where it can be obtained?)"15 On 4 July, the composer wrote to Merle Armitage, publisher, impresario, and the editor of Look magazine; with his letter, Varese included a copy of a funding proposal for his Deserts film. The following day he again wrote to Slonimsky: If my memory is to be trusted: didn't you tell me years ago that Walt Disney was interested in what I was doing? If so, confirm information and tell me if you know him well enough, just in case, to recommend me to him. Naturally, before I take any action, I shall send you the plan that I intend to present, so that you may judge if it is worth the trouble of attempting anything at all in this direction, for we should not forget that despite all that might be said, written, read, Hollywood is Hollywood. "We want new things!" provided "they will be the old Later that month, Varese wrote once again to Merle Armitage on the subject: "This is to let you know that I have just been told that Dis- ney is now in Europe, but will be back in California August 5th.