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 broadcast 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 composer 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 addition, 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 multimedia 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 description 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 completed 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 assistance 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 interpolations 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 experiments 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 participate. 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. Keeping my fingers crossed. Many thanks. Love to you both from Louise too, and to my desert."17 Varese's interest in Disney is curious, in light of his reaction, eleven years earlier, to Fantasia. Though Varese had admired the experiments of Oskar Fischinger along the same lines, to be examined below, his initial reaction to Disney's film, even before having viewed it, was negative, as he wrote to Merle Armitage on 11 June 1941: "I read with keen interest your criticism of Fantasia. I am still virginally unprejudiced, not having seen or heard the merchandise, being indif- ferent to the Disney's case of arrested development and to the dis- torted results of necrophilian enhancements. Why should certain people convert right away new vehicles into hearses?"18 Despite this condemnation of Disney's vulgarization of artistic innovation, Varese could not have been immune to the popularity of everything that bore the Disney name. So, for a short while in 1952, partly because of Disney's experience with Fantasia and his close association with Varise's Deserts 561

Leopold Stokowski, one of Varese's most ardent champions, the composer hoped that a collaboration between the two of them might be possible. Here is part of the text of the Ddserts film proposal that Vatese sent to Merle Armitage, and wished for Walt Disney to read:

The idea of this project is to produce a picture new in conception Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/76/4/557/1081086 by guest on 29 September 2021 in its relationship between images and sound. Not a travelogue or anec- dotical [sic], this picture will reveal certain aspects of the U.S.A., its theme being the American Deserts. By deserts must be understood all deserts: deserts of earth (sand, snow, mountain,) deserts of sea, deserts of sky (nebulae, galaxies, etc.,) and deserts in the mind of man. For this multiple conception of deserts, visual image and sound will be used each in its unique way to communicate the beauty and the mystery of that solitude which finds such an intense, though perhaps not consciously understood, response in every human heart. . . . For the realization of my project the score will be written first, rehearsed and recorded on the sound track. Duration, 20 to 30 minutes, approximately. The score will be a complete unit in itself. The dynamic, tensions, rhythms (or better RHYTHM, element of stability) will naturally be calculated with the film as a whole in mind. The director of the photography will familiarize himself thoroughly with the score and details will be discussed before he starts his shooting expedi- tion. From the film material he brings back, a choice will be made, a continuity extracted, in which images, sequences etc. will be used to obtain planes and volumes which will be organized and so composed as to obtain a final montage to be fitted to the already existing musical construction. The views of earth, sky, water will be filmed in parts of the American deserts: California (Death Valley,) New Mexico, Ari- zona, Utah, Alaska: sand deserts, lonely stretches of water anywhere, solitudes of snow, steep deserted gorges, abandoned roads, ghost towns etc. For star galaxies, nebulae, mountains of the moon, existing photographs could be used. Cameras: 35 millimeter, black and white, infra- red, (if desirable colour,) telescopic. The whole must give a sense of timelessness, legend, Dantesque apocalyptic phantasmagoria. I have chosen deserts because I feel them and love them, and because in the United States this subject offers unlimited possibility of images which are the very essence of a poetry and magic and which few people realize are to be found in this country. 1 think that the time is ripe for such an undertaking. People realize more and more that quality not only counts but is beginning to pay. It might also be interesting to stress later on that this is the first time that a score has been written with a film in mind before the photographs were taken. 562 The Musical Quarterly

There will be no expenses for actors, narrator, sets etc. I plan to use an instrumental ensemble of twenty men, and a small chorus of the same number. The expenses to be figuredo n will be: chorus, ensemble, conductor, recording, filming,photographers , sound men, travelling etc.19

Notice that Varese writes that the "score has been written with a film Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/76/4/557/1081086 by guest on 29 September 2021 in mind" and also that he intends to use "a small chorus." When Varese wrote this text he had nearly finished the composition of the instrumental part of the score, and it is entirely possible that what finally became the interpolations of tape music was initially intended to be wordless, plotless film. The duration "20 to 30 minutes" corre- sponds to the timing on the published score: 23'28". The presence of a chorus links Diserts concretely with Espace, his unfinished choral magnum opus. The film idea did not abate. In January of 1954, the composer described the work-in-progress to a journalist in the following way:

Visual image and organized sound will not duplicate each other. For the most part light and sound will work in opposition in such a way as to give the maximum emotional reaction. Sometimes they will join for dramatic effect and in order to create a feeling of unity. Such contrasts achieved through the synchronization of simultaneous, unrelated elements would create a dissociation of ideas which would excite the imagination and simulate the emotions.20

This concept of the opposition of visual and auditory elements is the extension into the visual realm of Varese's famous dictum, presented in 1936, that music comprises "zones of intensities," which, by means of loudspeakers, can be accentuated, so that the individual elements of sound (zones) are "felt as isolated" and give "the sensation of non- blending."21 The version of Diserts that now exists and that was premiered by Scherchen on 2 December 1954 is a purely musical work, but in early 1955 Varese had the following exchange with the journalist Georges Charbonnier:

Charbonnier: Have you written for the cinema? Varese: No. But I would like a filmt o be made on Diserts. C: Do you wish that, with Diserts, the reverse process from the usual be done, namely that one would start from the score to construct a film? V: Yes. Diserts was calculated for that purpose. C: Should the images be abstract in character? Varise's D&erts 563

V: Nothing is abstract. What do you call "abstract"? C: Are you thinking of figurative images or not? V: Everything is figurative.22 C: Yes, everything is figurative. Everything is sign. Everything is image. I mean to say: is the succession of images intended to "tell a story"? V: No. No. To tell nothing. Simply to suggest. Awaken the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/76/4/557/1081086 by guest on 29 September 2021 imagination. Eliminate all repose from the spectator. The spectator must also bring his contribution.23 Only by this contribution can a contact be established between the man who creates and the man who listens or sees. Between the one who gives and the one who receives.24 C: How should sound and image be treated in order to avoid paraphrase ? V: It is imperative that the film be in complete opposition to the score. Only through opposition can paraphrase be avoided. To certain violences in the music must correspond images of opposite character. Violent sounds shall coincide, for example, with images bereft of all violence. As I said earlier, these images will never be descriptive. The voice shall be avoided, thus any dialogue. There will be no mixing of the human, vocal element with the organized sound and the instrumental ensemble.

Here again the "zones of intensities" notion is applied in the realm of multimedia: Varese favors "complete opposition" between image and sound. Furthermore, we normally think of Ddserts as an alternation between live and recorded sound materials, but in Varese's film conception as articulated to Charbonnier there is a "human, vocal element" which is distinguished from the "organized sound and the instrumental ensemble" taken together. The interview continues:

C: Could it be said, nevertheless, that the film would contain a "scenario"? V: It goes without saying, the images shall be organized according to a logical succession. The calculated sequences of images will correspond to, or rather, will oppose, certain parts of the musical work. C: But in no case could there be what is commonly called "action." V: There will be no action. There will be no story. There will be only images. Purely luminous phenomena. C: Will the images that make up this film correspond to the com- mon notion of an image: a message pregnant with meaning, descriptive and recognized as such? V: One can impose meaning on any given thing. As for the artistic intention, the images would not be descriptive, but successive. Suc- cessions, oppositions in the visual domain, just as there are successions 564 The Musical Quarterly

and oppositions in the domain of sound. Abstract images, but perhaps also "representational." For example, human faces if die imagination of the scenarist requires it too. Naturally, an organic link will unite the images. C: Thus organization will exist primarily in the rhythmic domain. Never by die logic of the action. V. It is the action on die spectator that will express the logic. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/76/4/557/1081086 by guest on 29 September 2021 Logic will chase away boredom. Naturally, all die elements needed to obtain an equilibrium will have to be calculated. C: Would this not be a unique case, since ordinarily one writes music for a film and not a film for a piece of music? V: Yes, indeed. But caution! The wavelengths of sound and of light are quite different. Thus if the first goal is to respect die music strictly and to calculate the succession of visual images, it is conceiv- able that die synchronization of visual images and sound images will require the score to be modified. A certain flexibility may be necessary. But, as far as I am concerned, the primary intention will not have been changed.25

This dialogue makes clear that Varese's aim here is not to compose a musical accompaniment for a film, no matter how "abstract," but rather to create a multimedia work whose sights and sounds engage the spectators' minds and thus encourage their participation in the creative act. His insistence on the opposition between visual and auditory images is designed to help in this goal.

History of Varfese and Film

This interview took place in 1955, but Varese's interest in film had a long history. Films were one of the ways in which the composer came to know America before his 1915 arrival; he followed Pearl White's popular adventure films The Perils of Pauline and The Exploits of Elaine, die lattet of which he saw with Jean Cocteau and Valentine Gross under die title Les Mysteres de New York.26 In addition, the composer seems to have acted in at least three films soon after his New York arrival. An examination of Beatrice Wood's diary reveals the identity of one of the films as being the famous Dr. ]ekyll and Mr. Hyde. On 28 March 1920 she jots, "See Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with [husband] Paul. Varese has small role. Good." Louise Varese describes John Barrymore's invitation to Varese to act in a film in Chicago, directed by John S. Robertson. In a letter from Chicago dated 19 April 1920, Varese tells his mother-in-law Sophie Kauffmann, who was busy rais- ing Claude, the composer's daughter, that he was "vagabonding in the Varise's D&ero 565

West, and not returning to New York before the end of next month."27 Louise Varese says that Varese then acted in another film that year, also directed by Robertson, starring the actress Billy Burke, in which the composer played "a young roughneck or gangster demon- strating the technique of knife-throwing to the heroine, Billy Burke.1'28 By the early 1930s Varese was interested in the medium of film Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/76/4/557/1081086 by guest on 29 September 2021 as a possible locus of sonic experimentation; we read in Varese's letters to Louise from that period that he was trying to interest members of the film industry in his ideas.29 Musicologist Richard S. James has demonstrated that during his French sojourn, 1928-1933, Varese was in close contact with progressive film composer Arthur Hoe'rde, "whose work, in the early 1930s with drawn sound and the manipula- tion of sounds recorded on photographic film, would closely prefigure the techniques of musique concrete.30 James learned in an interview with Hoe're'e that "the two men had lengthy discussions of Varese's notions of the use of electronic equipment to expand sound resources."31 A 1930 article on Hoe're'e states that he "dwelled on the radical ideas of Edgar Varese and reported that he tried to keep abreast of all Varese did."32 James avers that "the fact that Hoe're'e spoke, by 1934, of organized sound, techniques of manipulating recorded sound and of 'electro-acoustic techniques' may be seen as an indication of how seriously he took Varese."33 In addition, it has been claimed that Varese was familiar with the "quest for synaesthesia"34 present in the 1930s color-music films of Oskar Fischinger, which consist of dancing, colored shapes animating the screen in synchronization with a musical score. Film historian William Moritz describes Fischinger's experimental techniques:

Fischinger . . . filmed representational shapes and abstract ornaments onto the sound-track area of the filmstripi n order to release the innate sounds locked inside silent, or nonmusical, objects—a theory he explained to Edgard Varese and John Cage with crucial effect on their compositions.35 Fischinger's mystical notions, as described by Moritz, seem closely linked to Varese's conception of spatial music. Moritz explains that "having studied Pythagoras, alchemy, and Buddhism, [Fischinger] was fascinated by the notion that every element and object contained an essential personality that could be revealed by the visionary artist who found a technical formula through which the material could speak for itself."36 Compare this notion to Varese's statement, quoting Kant's disciple Jozef Marja Hoene Wronski (1766-1853), that music is "the 566 The Musical Quarterly

corporealization of the intelligence in sounds." While still a student at the Conservatory the composer read Camille Durutte's annotated translation of Wronski's Esthetics of Music, in which he was struck by the following passage:

The corporealization of the intelligence in sounds is the object of

music, ... in which we immediately discover that the first principle of Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/76/4/557/1081086 by guest on 29 September 2021 this art, considered as science, consists in esthetic modifications over time, which alone constitutes it priori a corporealization of the spirit or of the intelligence forming the object of music.37

Regardless of Wronski's or EXirutte's intended meaning for this passage, for Varese this description of the musical phenomenon "was probably what first started me thinking of music as spatial—as bodies of intelligent sounds moving freely in space."38 For both Varese and Fischinger, then, film was a way to corporealize the essence of musical matter: in short, to depict the musical object. Another important contact for Varese in the working out of his experimental notions with film was Harvey Fletcher, the famous acoustician at Western Electric (the antecedent of Bell Telephone Laboratories). In 1932, writing from Paris, Varese initiated contact with Fletcher to ask for corporate sponsorship to carry out his sound/ image experiments; he wrote:

My objectives are two-fold: acoustical research in the interest of pure music and the working out and application of certain [principles] for the improvement of the Sound Film—with other ramifications, radio etc. It is naturally along the latter lines that I look to gain the interest of any organization in my collaboration.39

On his return to the States in 1933, Varese indeed met with Fletcher several times; Louise Varese describes their meetings: "It may be imagined how Varese, with his hunger for more and more knowledge of acoustics and his passionate interest in the voyaging of sounds in space, lived for those visits to the laboratory as though he were going to a Socratic banquet."40 Nothing tangible is known to have resulted from these meetings. In the late 1930s, Var&e moved westward: first to New Mexico, then to San Francisco, and finally to Los Angeles; while there he tried to interest film studios in his ideas. In April of 1940, he wrote a letter to a Hollywood film producer, in which he described his ideas on the potential uses of "organized sound" in cinema: A new dramatic situation in a motion picture will call for a corre- sponding new use of organized sound, its direct purpose being to Var&se's D&erts 567

achieve an adequate response. . . . Much of the criticism of the over- loud blaring of the conventional symphony orchestra throughout the march of a film comes from a realization, conscious or unconscious, that the emotional appeal of the music is too reminiscent of past expe- riences and does not correspond directly enough to actions taking place on the screen. . . . There is a discrepancy between actual happenings and a sound commentary produced entirely by concert instmments Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/76/4/557/1081086 by guest on 29 September 2021 which had already reached their climax in the 18th and 19th centuries, and whose texture cannot possibly suggest the sounds we expect to find surrounding the action nor the visually logical source of these sounds. . . . [When] on the screen we see a tremendous cataclysm of nature, cyclone or tornado for example, the accompanying commentary by a large symphony orchestra is too apt to evoke for the hearer not this particular, real drama of nature, but rather a gesticulating conductor leading his men through a tempest of William Tell or The Flying Dutchman or any other too well-remembered program music. Why not startle the imagination into a realization of the actuality of the unfolding drama (whether of nature or of human lives) by the use of combinations of sound possible today but which never before today could have been produced?41

Compared to the later Ddserts project, it may seem that in this letter, despite his progressive notions about music, Varese does not yet view film itself in a new way. It appears that here he addresses the concept of cinema rather traditionally, simply substituting new music for old, unlike his later truly multimedia approach. But in fact, if one exam- ines the visual images he chooses to highlight here, a cyclone, a tornado, a cataclysm of nature, it becomes clear that his aims in both instances are exactly the same: namely, to highlight the non-human, natural world by creating a music and a coordination of music and image that elicit the "maximum emotional reaction," as he says, from the spectator. The violent images and loud music are not an excuse to shock; rather, they are necessary to stir the complacent audience into encountering the magnificent grandeur of nature. Alejo Carpentier remarked on Varese that "he conceived of the hearing of his works, on the part of the public, as a sort of trial, like an endurance test, as something that one absolutely had to experience, like making love."42 During the 1940s and 1950s Varese had several opportunities to work on films with his close friend, photographer Thomas Bouchard. The first, Femand Uger in America—his New Realism (1942-1945), premiered at the Sorbonne on 5 April 1946.43 According to Bou- chard, for this film Varese selected portions of Octandre, Intigraks, lordsation and Hyperprism. "These portions which Varese edited with 568 The Musical Quarterly Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/76/4/557/1081086 by guest on 29 September 2021

Figure 1. Postcard of desert scene sent by Varese to Andrt: and Hilda Jolivet from Santa Fe on 14 July 1936.

me express exactly the rugged, modern power of Lexer's paintings."44 Another Bouchard film, Kurt Seligmann, The Birth of a Painting (finished c. 1950), contains baroque music selected and edited by Varese. In addition, composer Frank Wigglesworth recalled viewing a Bou- chard film with Varese's music, whose opening shot is of an orange, progressing to a view of a merchant pushing an orange cart, and finally revealing the New York City skyline.45 Finally, in the mid-1950s Varese composed two segments of electronic music for Bouchard's film, Around and About Joan Mird, including music used in a sequence featuring a midnight torch procession in the Catalonian town of Verge's. He also selected the film's other music: pieces by Antonio de Cabez6n, Isaac Albe"niz and Enrique Granados.46 Bouchard wrote to Ouellette about this collaboration:

I am enclosing ... a color reproduction of a color drawing by Varese which he sent to me while we were working on the Verge's sequence. Every so often he sends me drawings, gouaches, crayon sketches, fanta- sies and the like. An indication of a sensitive eye as well as ear. . . . I am also enclosing ... a timing sheet by Varese of the "organized Varise's Deserts 569

sound" of the Verge's procession. This type of notation for film sound was invented by Varese, and as far as 1 know is original with him and he created it for the Mir6 film.47

Bouchard's daughter Diane also mentions a visual component to Va- rese's composition: Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/76/4/557/1081086 by guest on 29 September 2021 The original score diat Varese composed for the Mir6 film "Around and About Joan Miro" was for a Midnight Holy Week Procession in the mountainous town of Verge's in Catalonia which Mir6 and [Joan] Prats had taken my father to see. Bouchard found it all very beautiful but quite dark as the procession was lighted only by torches. Varese was very excited by the footage and composed the Verged score specially for that Verges sequence Bouchard shot. He gave this Verges score, an original composition by Varese to my father and me as a gift for the Mir6 film and we hold the copyright to it.48

Perhaps the "score" that she mentions is the same as the "timing sheet" mentioned by her father as initiating a new form of notation. The specifics of the score are unknown, as Diane Bouchard has never shown it to scholars.

Theater and Projected Lights

Varese's preoccupation with the association of auditory and visual stimuli was not limited to the medium of film. At times he wished to combine certain musical ideas with the projection of white or colored lights.49 As early as his 1909 orchestral work Bourgogne, Varese sought to express "the kind of inner, microcosmic life you find in certain chemical solutions, or through the filtering of light."50 In 1925, the composer dreamt of two fanfares; these are notated in a letter to Louise, in which he describes his dream in detail:

The 2 Fanfares I dreamt. 1 was on a boat that was spinning dizzily on the high seas, in wide circles. In the distance one could see a very tall lighthouse, and way on top there was an angel, and it was you, a trumpet in each hand. In addition: projections of all colors: red, green, yellow, blue, and you were playing fanfare no. 1, trumpet in your right hand. Then suddenly the sky was becoming incandescent, blinding. You brought your left hand to your mouth, and Fanfare no. 2 burst forth. And the Boat kept turning and spinning, and the alternation of projections and incandescence was becoming more frequent, intensified, and the Fanfares more nervous, impatient . . . and then, merde, I woke up. But it will be, all the same, in Arcana.51 570 The Musical Quarterly

The fanfares, which Varese notates in the same letter, are indeed in die 1927 orchestral work Arcana, but the projected lights and colors remained hidden. The Arcana dream, with its element of light, is related to the various manifestations of the Utopian work that haunted the composer for most of his "silent years." It was to be a space-age theatrical pro-

duction, combining text, music, color, movement and projected lights Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/76/4/557/1081086 by guest on 29 September 2021 or film. The composer was forever searching for the perfect text to express his conception, and so the project took a variety of names, as mentioned above: The-One-AH-Alone, Sirius, Espace, II n'y a plus de firmament and L'Astronome. Ecuatorial represents a portion of this idea as well, with its mythical theme, non-lexical syllables and two finger- board theremins. The authors involved in assembling Varese's text included some of the avant-garde writers of the 1920s and 1930s: Jean Giono, Robert Desnos, Alejo Carpentier, Georges Ribemont-Des- saignes, Antonin Artaud, and even e. e. cummings.52 Louise Varese writes that at this time, "The urge to get his stage work started was very strong in him, his imagination teemed widi images, visual and musical."53 Though the piece was never completed, surviving traces of it allow us to glimpse into the composer's creative attempts. A sketch from 1928 contains the following description of the scenario:

Discovery of instantaneous radiation—speed 30,000,000 times that of light. Rapid variation in the size of Sirius (explosion) which becomes a Nova. All the astronomers examine the Companion (of Sirius) —this is where the signals are being transmitted from. (The Companion is the active agent). Unexpected reception of signals—prime numbers 1, 3, 5, 7. The governments decide they must answer 11, 13. The answer to that is 17, 19. When the catastrophes occur, it is this decision which will turn the fury of the mob against the astronomer, since if he had not replied, Sirius and the Companion would not have taken any notice of Earth. Regular messages from Sirius. Mysterious—in musical waves (supple, fluctuating).Th e Wise Men study them. Perhaps it is the acoustical language of Sirius. The brightness of Sirius is still increasing, other radiations come in from the Companion, precipitating the catastrophes. Explosions, darkness, etc.54

This is the version that contains an indication for that "other- worldly" early electronic instrument: the ondes martenot. Two of these instruments are used here to express the "messages from Sirius. Mysterious—in musical waves (supple, fluctuating)." In 1930, Varese asked Louise to prepare a rough draft of a scenario for The-One-AU-Alone that he could in turn present to Carpen- Varise's D&erts 571

->f K I Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/76/4/557/1081086 by guest on 29 September 2021

Figure 2. Postcard of pueblo sent by Varese to Andr6 Jolivet from Santa Fe in the summer of 1936.

tier, Desnos and Ribemont-Dessaignes, in order for them to polish it. In a letter to her from 15 July of that year, the composer describes the scenario that he wishes her to write:

SCENARIO I want the whole thing direct, steel like high tensioned wire, with great contrasts. In its apocalyptic unity, passages of radiant impos- sibility, exhaltation, ecstasy, terror, everything, except a morbid or decadent feeling. It must be huge, very structured, of an irresistible force. Thank you. Don't forget the aspect of returning to the primitive: pounding dance of fear, almost voodooistic prophetic cries, shaking, twitching, and the ending as grand as the heavens. Apocalypse. Apoca- lypse.55

One of the most interesting components of her surviving text, that reads like a fable, is the description of the protagonist as light itself:

The-One-All-Alone, his back half turned to the audience, ... is represented in three different ways: the figure of a man, as in the Prologue, whenever he is seen personally by one of the characters, or when he is alone on the stage; a changing shadow during the ceremony of sacrifice, and a light when he is being worshipped as a God. . . . The Arrow Maker lets fly his arrow. As it touches The-One-All-Alone it grows 572 The Musical Quarterly

into a long ray of light. All the others shoot. Rays of light radiate in all directions from the body of The-One-AU-Alone.56

This scenario, as with all the other manifestations of the Ubermensch idea in Varese's ceuvre, was fundamentally autobiographical, and so it is of utmost interest that one of the protagonist's facets was pure light,

while the antagonist's tool is an arrow that becomes a beam of light Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/76/4/557/1081086 by guest on 29 September 2021 when fused with the light of The-One-All-Alone. Here is alchemy at work in Varese's oeuvre: the transmutation of man into Godhead from whose body "rays of light radiate in all directions." In May of 1933, Varese attended a lecture by the playwright Antonin Artaud on "le the'Stre de la cruaute\" and decided that Artaud should take over the project, now called L'Astronome, from the other writers. Artaud agreed, as they shared the same view of music's role in theater: namely, that it should have such an impact on the spectators that they become part of the action. Photographer Brassai recalled that Varese discussed his plan for L'Astronome with him, describing it as follows:

Set in an observatory, it has as protagonist an astronomer who rakes the sky with his telescope. He rakes it ... with such avidity that the stars grow progressively bigger and bigger so that they become also more and more threatening and end up by absorbing him completely. . . . But, in the final scene, when the astronomer is volatilized into inter- stellar space, factory sirens and airplane propellers were to sound. Their "music" was to be as strident and unbearable as possible, so as to terrify the audience and render it groggy. At that moment . . . the powerful spotlights supposedly raking the sky up on stage would be turned abruptly down into the auditorium blinding the audience and filling them with such panic that they would not even be able to run away.57

Violence and control over the audience were both inextricable parts of Varese's artistic conception. The "spotlights," the "beams of light," are explicit in Varese's scenario and are an essential component of his compositional idea. Artaud's resulting script, "II n'y a plus de firmament," displeased the composer, as both the character of the astronomer and the aspect of multimedia were missing in this version, and the piece was never produced.58 The most enduring version of this Utopian conception was Espace, on which Varese labored from the early 1930s to the mid- 19405, and for which some sketch material survives. The choral text was to consist of leftist political slogans in diverse languages, along with "laughing, humming, yelling, chanting, mumbling, hammered V'arise's D&erts 573 declamation," and other extended vocal techniques. It was to be sung simultaneously from many points on the globe, or broadcast from a single point, so that the world could be symbolically united. The rhythms, "quick, slow, staccato, dragging, racing, smooth," were to erupt into a "final crescendo . . . projecting . . . into space."59 The music was to coincide with "quick visual images."60 The spatial and visual elements in Espace were intended to draw the listener/hearer Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/76/4/557/1081086 by guest on 29 September 2021 closer to the idea behind the multimedia whole. As he wrote to Car- los Salzedo: "Music, like all the arts, is but a means of expression; only the conception counts. As perfect as it may be, never will technique be able to rise to its level."61 We see the centrality of light to Varese's Utopian projects: the star of Sirius that becomes a Nova; the Obermensch protagonist in The-One-AU-Alone who becomes pure light; and the "spotlights" or "beams of light" in Brassai's description of L'Astronome. This is because Varese, like Scriabin, Messiaen and a few others, imbued his compositions with a synaesthetic aspect. Louise Varese recalls the composer's reaction to natural phenomena: "He told me that once watching a display of the aurora borealis he felt an "unbelievable exal- tation—an indescribable sensation" and that as he watched those "pulsating incandescent streamers of light" he "not only saw but heard them." As soon as he returned home he wrote down the sounds that had accompanied the movements of the light."62 Fernand Ouellette, Varese's biographer, mentions the same phenomenon: "Varese . . . undertook a new work during 1911 entitled Mehr licht. Though this title had a different meaning for him than intended in Goethe's famous phrase, Varese intended to signify more light, as though it were a question of filtering the raw material of sound in order to render it more and more luminous."63 Therefore, we can reinterpret some of Varese's pronouncements on sound to include a visual component, for example the following from 1930: "Taking the elements of sound as a group, it is possible to subdivide this mass; it can be split up into other masses, into other volumes, into other planes, by loudspeakers arranged in different places, giving the impression of movement through space, although what we have today is but a kind of ideogram."64 We can understand the "movement through space" as a synaesthetic event. By 1936 he was explicitly describing the visual sensation inherent in the spatial projection of music; he called it "that feeling that sound is leaving us with no hope of being reflected back, a feeling akin to that aroused by beams of light sent forth by a powerful searchlight—for the ear as for the eye, that sense of projection, of a journey into space."65 574 The Musical Quarterly

Deserts, the Desert, and Space

Varese's conception of Ddserts owed a great deal to his experience in the deserts of New Mexico during 1936 and 1937. Though he spent only two long summers there, living in New Mexico marked him; its grandeur and desolation presented to him an elegant metaphor for his

internal thoughts. At that time Varese wrote regularly to his student Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/76/4/557/1081086 by guest on 29 September 2021 Andr£ Jolivet, confiding to him his impressions of the land. In one letter he says, "The West ... is very beautiful, unimaginable for a European."66 He sent Jolivet postcards of desert scenes (Figure 1). The desert represented for Varese something unattainable, unreachable. The first impact of the deserts of the southwest is a visual sensation; one is not surprised to learn tliat when he began studying with Varese in 1949, Chou Wen-chung noticed photographs and newspaper clip- pings of deserts littering his piano and work table.67 Varese was thinking of Espace when he wrote to his wife Louise on 14 November 1936 from New Mexico, "In 8 or 10 days I shall make the departure arrangements. But I want to return here. More and more I love the strength and the desolation of this land—its violence—its very clear sky . . . and the stars that sparkle as in legends. I'm tired of schools, of styles, of modernisms. More than ever only the epic interests me—and the great cries into space. For no one—or only for those capable of understanding the signal."68 Although Varese does not mention Espace in this letter, he writes to Louise two days later, "Espace is beautiful."69 The desert also symbolized to him the mythologies of its original American inhabitants: the Indians. Indian mythology had been an important personal theme for the composer since the age of twelve, when he composed Martin Pas, an opera based on Jules Verne's adap- tation of an Indian folktale. It reemerges in the text of Ecuatorial and in the scenario of The-One-AU-Alone. Indian mythology attracted Varese because it represented for him a fundamental and ancient layer of human consciousness. Varese was always attempting to tap the "primitive" aspect of the human mind, as he acknowledged in his preface to the score of Ecuatorial. Once in New Mexico, the composer immediately sought to establish contact with the elders of the region's principal tribes and became especially friendly with a Santo Domingo elder named Pita- chi.70 On 20 July 1936 he wrote to Jolivet:

INDIAN Already seen several pueblos, and ceremonies. It's magnificent. But the most beautiful is to come. Will go camping in the plains, and on the plateaus, officially invited by the NAVAJOS, APACHES, Varhe's D&erts 575

HOPIS AND ZUNIS. I wouldn't dream of touching their music. Mag- nificent, when it forms a part of their rites; outside of that context it is meaningless. As for their rites, no white man knows, ever knew, nor will ever know anything. Hatred of the white man persists. Those who pretend the contrary are liars. I shall approach them more closed, more silently, more distantly polite than they.71 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/76/4/557/1081086 by guest on 29 September 2021 Varese sent Jolivet postcards of Indians and pueblos (Figure 2). In one of these the printed caption reads, "Of the mysteries that take place here practically nothing is known for in spite of the fact that the Indians of New Mexico and Arizona are nominally Catholic they are intensely conservative regarding their ancient religious rites." Varese added to this text the following commentary, "This confirms what I told you in my letter. Will tell you about my visits to different tribes. Am especially interested in the Apaches and Navajos that are the nomads and the warriors."72 The Santa Fe years marked for Varese a turn away from organized musical activity, towards self-exploration, philosophizing and pedagogy. Over the course of two years he delivered seven lectures and numerous interviews.73 The pieces on his mind were Ecuatorial, which he was reworking; lonisation, which had just been recorded; and Espace: the amorphous magnum opus which preoccupied him. Varese's definition of the "zones of intensities" comes from his important Santa Fe lecture:

Today with the technical means that exist and are easily adaptable, the differentiation of the various masses and different planes as well as these beams of sound, could be made discernible to the listener by means of certain acoustical arrangements. Moreover, such an acoustical arrange- ment would permit the delimitation of what I call zones of intensities. These zones would be differentiated by various timbres of colors and different loudnesses. Through such a physical process these zones would appear of different colors and of different magnitude in different perspectives for our perception. The role of color or timbre would be completely changed from being incidental, anecdotal, sensual or picturesque; it would become an agent of delineation like the different colors on a map separating different areas, and an integral part of form. These zones would be felt as isolated, and the hitherto unobtainable non-blending (or at least the sensation of non-blending) would become possible.74

"Color or timbre . . . would become ... an integral part of form." This is the lesson to be gleaned from Espace and Deserts. Until the Varese Archive becomes available for study by scholars, we will not know to what extent the score of Diserts is based on 5 76 The Musical Quarterly

the unfinished Espace, but we can suppose that the title Espace represents not only astronomical space, for astronomy was an avid hobby of the composer's, but also the unbroken terrestrial expanse of the southwest, as well as the spaces, what Varese called the "deserts," of the mind. One understands from his descriptions that each concept, "desert" and "space," is at once a literal representation and a psycho- logical symbol, and that the two words were for him interchangeable Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/76/4/557/1081086 by guest on 29 September 2021 terms. They both represent a frontier to be crossed, and it is precisely this struggle that Deserts expresses.

It is well known that Varese had a lifelong obsession for the creation of new instruments that would permit the generation of sounds never before heard. In a program note to describe Espace he writes, "I want to encompass everything that is human . . . from the primitive to the farthest reaches of science."75 Varese said to Ray- mond Creuze that his two most significant pieces are lonisation and Diserts. These represent the two Varesian poles: primitive/percussion and advanced/electronic. The two poles are, of course, really one, as they both represent his endless quest for new, unheard sounds. But what is not generally known is the extent of Varese's other obsession: to create a total work of art, a Gesamtkunstwerk, that would overwhelm his audience by combining projections of lights and images with music of epic proportions. As we have seen, in 1955 Varese did finally write music for a film: Thomas Bouchard's documentary on the painter Mir6. And in 1958, he participated in a multimedia spectacle, the Pokme Electronique, which Varese wrote for Le Corbusier's and Xenakis's Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World's Fair, in which images and colored lights crisscrossed the room in counterpoint to the music, while the images succeeded one another much in the manner Varese described in the Charbonnier interview. Although Poime Elec- tronique lasts only eight minutes, not the six hours of the projected Diserts film, it was at least a partial realization of the composer's goal. He said after the fair, "For the first time I heard my music projected into space."76 Nevertheless, he never stopped searching for something more. On 27 March 1959 Varese received a letter from Max Mathews and Newman Guttman at Bell Labs, which began, "Here is the information you wanted regarding the control from a disk recording of lights simultaneous with music."77 One must ask, then, why traditional musical means of expression did not satisfy Varese. Recall the letter to Louise of 1930, in which Varese describes the scenario that he wishes her to write for The-One- All-Alone: "Don't forget the aspect of returning to the primitive: Varix's D&erts 577

pounding dance of fear, almost voodooistic prophetic cries, shaking, twitching, and the ending as grand as the heavens. Apocalypse. Apocalypse." Over twenty years later, with Deserts, he was still trying to express "a sense of timelessness, legend, Dantesque apocalyptic phantasmagoria." No wonder that musical means were not enough for his grand goals; in fact multimedia seems not even to have been enough, as the goals themselves were ultimately impossible to realize. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/76/4/557/1081086 by guest on 29 September 2021 Varese's wish that the spectator "bring his contribution" and thus participate in the creative act indicates that the act of creation assumed for him an almost religious significance. He is not the romantic artist who expresses the solitary human experience; his locus of expression is on a much grander scale: tornadoes, deserts, the mythologies of civilizations. Some critics had already recognized this intent in the mid-1920s: "This music is raucous with a frenzy of challenge and ebullition, as of some monstrous mechanism in parturition, with its screaming sirens and its ecstacy of din, as if Mr. Varese had deter- mined to set a cosmic building boom to music, or the upheaval of the Sierra Nevadas out of the prehistoric slime, or, if you will, a birth of planets in the blue."78 But the Varese story is much more complex than a rejection of romantic ideals. Joan Peyser comments that "despite his advanced ideas, Varese was a romantic man. The day after the performance [of Am&riques] he described his work as the 'interpretation of a mood . . . the portrayal of a mood in music' It is interesting to note that, in the 1950s, Varese confided that he did not delight in the technology that had materialized. Louise Varese reports that he was an emotional man and wanted his music to produce an 'emotional effect.' "79 He wrote to Louise on 8 September 1931, "I think that, as Russolo suggested and as Vuillermoz wrote, that one does not remember the human point of view, the spiritual essence, . . . above the scientific and mechanical contained in my zizic [music]."80 And again on 16 Sep- tember 1931, "Darling, as I have asked you, I would like very much to have the Russolo view point emphasized i.e. the spiritual, human, which is [what] few people seem to be touched by in my work."81 Varese's conception of the "human point of view" was the quest— indeed his own personal quest—for the unknown, the unheard and the unseen. Diserts survives as a great and monumental work, a milestone in twentieth-century music, and the documents presented in this essay are not put forward to suggest that the piece as we know it is some- how lacking or deficient or incomplete. They are meant to show a hidden, spiritual dimension of this work, whose spatial and visual 578 The Musical Quarterly

components formed a part of an apocalyptic vision that had preoccupied the composer for many of his productive years. Varese was a highly autobiographical composer, and the "spatial projection" which he described was a metaphor for a personal trek, as evidenced by statements like "To the student of music I should say that the great examples of the past should serve as springboards for him to leap free, into his own future."82 Varese confessed on several occasions, "To all Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/76/4/557/1081086 by guest on 29 September 2021 artists it sometimes happens to see very far—so far that the mind refuses to follow, as though it were afraid, and all he [the artist] can do is to approach in his work what he has perceived a long way off. He never quite reaches it. Whatever the medium, all artists are united in the same search."83 This obsessive vision may indeed have para- lyzed his creative life and helps explain why the complete catalogue of Varese*s works spans scarcely a baker's dozen.

Notes For Leonard and Inge Ratner. A version of this paper was presented at the national meeting of the American Musicological Society in Austin, Texas on 26 Oct. 1989. The writing of it was largely done in Paris while I was a Georges Lurcy Foundation Fellow during 1988-1989. My heartfelt thanks go to Diane Bouchard, Chou Wen- chung, Raymond Creuze, Newman Gunman, Calla Hay, Louise Hirbour, Christine Jolivet-Erlih, Ann McMillan, Pierre Schaeffer, Carolee Schneemann, Nicolas Slonim- sky and Claude Varese, all of whom contributed essential documents and information for this study. The libraries and their sigla cited in the article are: Library of Con- gress, Washington (LC), Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Austin, Texas (HRHRC), Sophia Smith Women's History Archive, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts (SC), National Library of Canada, Ottawa (NLC), and Centre National d'Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, Paris (GP). All translations except where noted are my own. 1. It even took place in the Theatre des Champs-Elysees, the same locale as that other famous riot of 29 May 1913, Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps. 2. Pierre Schaeffer, interview with author, 6 Mar. 1989, Paris. 3. Nicole Hirsch, " 'Desert', oeuvre electrosymphonique, a 6t6 accueilli par des sif- flets, des chants de coq et des aboiements au theatre des Champs-Elysees," France- Soir, 4 Dec. 1954. 4. Georges Allary, "La Radio," Dimanche-Madn, 12 Dec. 1954. 5. Edgard Varese, Ecriu, ed. Louise Hirbour, trans. Christiane Leaud (Paris: Chris- tian Bourgois, 1983), 98. 6. Varese to Andr£ Jolivet, 10 June 1952, New York, Jolivet family archives. 7. Reproduced in Fernand Ouellette, Edgard Varese (Paris, 1966/1989); trans. Derek Coltman (New York: The Orion Press, 1968), following 114- 8. Varese, "My Titles," TS, n.d., Femand Ouellette Collection, NLC. 9. The dates are usually erroneously given as 1950 and 1954. 'S D&erts 579

10. The Ampex was purchased by Louise Varese and L. Alcopley, and offered to Varese as a gift from "anonymous friends." For the full circumstances of this story see Olivia Mattis, "Alcopley Talks About Himself, Varese and Others," in Alex Silber- berg, ed., One Man, Two Visions: L AlcopJey-A. L Copley, Artist and Scientist (Oxford and New York: Pergamon Press, 1991), 209-20. 11. Ouellette, Varese, 181.

12. Scherchen's annotated score of Deserts is housed in the archive of the Akademie Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/76/4/557/1081086 by guest on 29 September 2021 der Kiinste in Berlin. 13. Varese to Claude Varese, 13 June 1949, New York, Collection Claude Varese. My warm personal thanks go to Claude Varese for placing the many letters from her father at my disposal. 14- Raymond Creuze, interview with author, 5 Sept. 1989, Paris. 15. Varese to Slonimsky, 21 June 1952, New York, Slonimsky Collection, LC. 16. Varese to Slonimsky, 5 July 1952, New York, Slonimsky Collection, LC. 17. Varese to Merle Armitage, 28 July 1952, New York, Armitage Collection, HRHRC. 18. Varese to Merle Armitage, 11 June 1941, New York, Armitage Collection, HRHRC. 19. Varese, "DESERTS," unpublished TS accompanying letter from Varese to Merle Armitage, 4 July 1952, New York, Armitage Collection, HRHRC. 20. Abraham Skulsky, "Varese Set to Launch Electronic Music Age," New York Herald Tribune, 24 Jan. 1954, sec. 4, p. 5. 21. Varese, "Music and the Times," 23 Aug. 1936, Santa Fe. 22. Here Varese echoes Picasso's thoughts expressed in a 1935 interview, "There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterwards you can remove all traces of reality. There's no danger then, anyway, because the idea of the object will have left an indelible mark. It is what started the artist off, excited his ideas, and stirred up his emotions. . . . Nor is there any 'figurative' and 'nonfigurative' art. Everything appears to us in the guise of a 'figure.' Even in metaphysics ideals are expressed by means of symbolic 'figures.' See how ridiculous it is then to think of painting without 'figuration.' " From Christian Zervos's interview, "Conversation avec Picasso," trans. Myfanwy Evans, in Alfred H. Barr, Picasso, Fifty Years of His Art, Exhibition Catalog (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1946); repr. in Dore Ash- ton, ed., Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views (New York: Viking Press, 1972/Da Capo Press, 1988), 9.

23. This notion is similar to Duchamp's remark, "All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the exter- nal world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act." In Marcel Duchamp, "The Creative Act," Art News 56:4 (Summer, 1957); repr. in Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson, eds., Salt Seller. The Writings of Marcel Duchamp [Marchand du Sel] (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 140. 24- This idea is akin to Le Corbusier's metaphor of art as the open hand that gives and receives. Varese and Le Corbusier were acquainted in the 1920s, and renewed 580 The Miisiad Quaneriy

contact around 1950. Prior to the Charbonnier interview, they had been seeing each other on a regular basis and had become close friends. 25. Georges Charbonnier, Entretiens avec Edgard Vartse (Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1970), 65-67. 26. Jean Cocteau to Albert Gleizes, [Nov. or Dec. 1915], GP. 27. Varese to Sophie Kauffmann and Claude Varese, 19 Apr. 1920, Chicago, Col- lection Claude Varese. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/76/4/557/1081086 by guest on 29 September 2021 28. Louise Varese, Varese, A Loohing-Glass Diary, vol. 1, 1883-1928 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), 151. 29. The letters from Varese to Louise Varfae are being prepared for publication by Professor Louise Hirbour, of ['University de Montreal, who was given access to them by Louise Varese in the early 1980s. My own citations of these letters are from Profes- sor Hirbour's transcriptions, and I gratefully acknowledge her making them available to me. 30. Richard S. James, "Expansion of Sound Resources in France, 1913-1940, and Its Relationship to Electronic Music" (Ph.D. dissertation, Musicology, The University of Michigan, 1981), 159. 31. James, 206. 32. James, 205. 33. James, 205-206. 34. William Moritz, "Abstract Film and Color Music," The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1890-1985 (New York: Abbeville Press, 1986), 297. 35. Moritz, 301. 36. Moritz, 301. 37. Jozef Marja Hofine Wronski in Camille Durutte, Esthiaque Musicak (Paris, 1855), vii, quoted in Anne Parks, "Freedom, Form, and Process in Varese: A Study of Var£se's Musical Ideas—Their Sources, Their Development, and Their Use in his Works" (Ph.D. dissertation, Musicology, Cornell University, 1974), 16. 38. Varese, lecture at Sarah Lawrence College, 20 Feb. 1959, Bronxville, New York. 39. Varese to Harvey Fletcher, 1 Dec. 1932 [Paris], Fernand Ouellette Collection, NLC. 40. Louise Varese, Looking-Glass, vol. 1, 278. 41. Varese to Andr£ Dumonceau, 22 Apr. 1940, Hollywood, Fernand Ouellette Collection, NLC. Varese, at the end of that year, published this text in Commonweal under the title, "Organized Sound for the Sound Film." And in 1955 the French journalist Georges Charbonnier translated this text, interpolated questions, and made it thus appear to be one of his celebrated Varese interviews (Jonathan Bernard, The Music of Edgard Varese [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987], 260). 42. Alejo Carpentier, Vartse Vivant, supplement to Le Nouveau Commerce 45-46 (1980): 15. Vorese's D&erts 581

43. Harold Schonberg, "An from the Shoulders Up," The Musical Digest (Mar.- Apr. 1946): 10. 44. Thomas Bouchard to Femand Ouellette, 23 May 1960, Fernand Ouellette Col- lection, NLC. 45. Frank Wigglesworth, interview with author, 23 Sept. 1989, New York City. 46. The players included Lucile Lawrence, harp; Edward Weiss, piano; Maurice Blanc, voice; Julio Prol, guitar. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/76/4/557/1081086 by guest on 29 September 2021 47. Thomas Bouchard to Ouellette, 23 May 1960, Femand Ouellette Collection, NLC. 48. Diane Bouchard to author, 16 Jan. 1988. 49. As did Scriabin before him with his imagined Mysteriitm. It is not known whether Varese was acquainted with Scriabin's theosophical theories. On his music, Varese remarked to Gunther Schuller, "I found Scriabin's orchestral pieces simply overwhelming. His music has such a powerful seductive atmosphere, that it goes beyond questions of technique. 1 know that Scriabin's music is often criticized for its lack of polyphony, for example. But my answer to that is: why must it have polyphony?" (Gunther Schuller, "Conversation with Varese," Perspectives of New Music 3, no. 2 [1965]; repr. in Benjamin Boretz and Edward T. Cone, eds., Perspectives on American Composers [New York: W. W. Norton, 1971], 35). On 27 Mar. 1927, the League of Composers produced Scriabin's ballet, Visual Mysticism, at the Jolson The- atre in New York, conducted by Tullio Serafin, a performance that Varese may well have attended. It is an interesting coincidence that Scriabin's daughter, music critic Marina Scriabine, reviewed the premiere of Deserts in La NouveUe Revue Francaise in Jan. 1955.

50. Gunther Schuller, "Conversation with Varese," repr. in Boretz and Cone, eds., Perspectives on American Composers, 35-36. 51. Varese to Louise Varese, 9 Oct. 1925, fees, in Louise Varese, Looking-Gloss, vol. 1, plate facing 147. 52. This information comes from Varese to Louise Varese, 6 Oct. 1938, Los Ange- les, and Varese to Louise Varese, 11 Oct. 1938, Los Angeles, Varese archive. 53. Louise Varese, Loolcing-Glasj, vol. 1, 267. 54. Varese, manuscript sketch, [1928], copy in Femand Ouellette Collection, NLC. Translation from Ouellette, Varese, 115-16. 55. Varese to Louise Varese, 15 July 1930, Divonnes-les-Bains, France, Varese archive. 56. Louise Varese, "The-One-All-Alone," TS scenario, n.d., in Louise Varese Col- lection, SC. 57. BrassaT, "Edgar Varese ou la Musique Siddrale," Arts-Spectacles, 8-14 December 1954, 4. 58. Louise Varese discusses this project in her as yet unpublished Varese: A Looking' Glass Diary, vol. 2. A draft of a chapter of this book resides in the Louise Varese Collection at SC. A portion of another chapter, "Excerpt about Santa Fe," was published in Soundings 16 (1990): 26-29. 582 The Musical Quarterly

59. Dorothy Norman, "Edgar Varese: Ionization-Espace," Twice a Year 7 (1941): 259-60. A version of Espace, titled "Etude for Chorus, Percussion and Piano (study for a work in progress)," was performed on Sunday evening, 20 Apr. 1947, at the Greenwich House Music School in New York, with vocal soloists Barbara Gibson, Edith Klein, Radiana Pa:mor and Edward Caldicott; percussionists Josephine Cnare, Pompy Dobson, Daniel Epstein, Albert Mockler and Mimi Wallner; pianists Maro Ajemian and William Masselos; and a subset of the Greater New York Chorus con-

ducted by Varese. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/76/4/557/1081086 by guest on 29 September 2021 60. "Projet pour Espace dans une version pour orchestre," TS, Femand Ouellette Collection, NLC. In many ways the opening ceremony of the recent Barcelona summer Olympic Games, in which the "Ode to Joy" from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was accompanied by blinding pyrotechnics and broadcast all over die world, was a fulfillment of Varese's dream. Varese had intended Espace, his own Beethoven's Ninth, to be performed in a magnificent multimedia festival, the Quatrieme Interna- tionale des Arts —to be held in Barcelona! (For a discussion of this festival, see my Ph.D. dissertation, "Edgard Varese and the Visual Arts," Stanford University, 1992, 183-186.) 61. Varese to Salzedo, 1933, qtd. in Louise Hirbour, "La Correspondance de Varese," La Revue Musicale 383-384-385, Varese issue (Dec. 1985): 174. 62. Louise Varese, Looking-Glass, vol. 1, 100-101. 63. Ouellette, 37. 64. Varese, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, et al., "La Mecanisation de la Musique," Bifur5 (Apr. 1930): 126. 65. Varese, "Music and the Times," lecture at Mary Austin House, Santa Fe, 23 Aug. 1936. His Santa Fe lecture, that has been widely excerpted and anthologized, was given twice: first on Sunday, 23 Aug. 1936, at the former home of writer Mary Austin, under the auspices of the New Mexico Association on Indian Affairs; and repeated on 12 Nov. 1936 at die University of New Mexico, in Albuquerque. At the first lecture at least, he used a blackboard to illustrate the evolution of musical notation. At the second one in Albuquerque he demonstrated the theremin. The lecture's title was "Music and the Times," not "New Instruments and New Music," as it has been termed in the anthologies. 66. Varese to Jolivet, 20 July 1936, Santa Fe, Jolivet archive. 67. Chou Wen-chung, telephone conversation with author, 9 Feb. 1988. 68. Varese to Louise Varese, 14 Nov. 1936, Santa Fe, Varese archive. 69. Varese to Louise Varese, 16 Nov. 1936, Santa Fe, Varese archive. 70. Varese to Jolivet, 29 Aug. 1936, Santa Fe, Jolivet archive. 71. Varese to Jolivet, 20 July 1936, Santa Fe, Jolivet archive. 72. Varese postcard to Jolivet, [postmarked 22 July 1936], Santa Fe, Jolivet archive. 73. The reporter who conducted most of these interviews for the Santa Fe New Mex- ican, Calla Hay, still resides in Santa Fe. She is also the author of die anonymous write-ups diat followed each installment of Varese's 1937 lecture series on instrumen- tation, "Music as Living Matter." These important articles are die only known surviving record of die content of these lectures. Varise's Deserts 583

74- Varese, Santa Fe lecture, 23 Aug. 1936. 75. Dorothy Norman, Twice a Year, 260. 76. Varese, lecture at Princeton University, 4 Sept. 1959. 77. Max Mathews and Newman Guttman to Varese, 27 Mar. 1959, Collection Newman Guttman.

78. Lawrence Gilman, "Concert of the Philadelphia Orchestra with Leopold Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/76/4/557/1081086 by guest on 29 September 2021 Stokowski," The New York Herdd-Tribune, 14 Apr. 1926. 79. Joan Peyser, The New Music: The Sense Behind the Sound (New York: Delacorte Press, 1971), 153. 80. Varese to Louise Varese, 8 Sept. 1931, Cavalaire, France, Varese archive. Futurist painter/composer Luigi Russolo and Varese had a complex artistic relationship. In 1916 and 1917 Varese lambasted the Italian futurists' tendency to exalt noise for its own sake, rather than molding it to expand the horizons of musical expression. But years later, when Varese was back in Paris in the late 1920s, he often met Rus- solo, and on 28 December 1929, at the opening in Paris of the futurist exhibition at Galerie 23, Varese even hosted a futurist manifestation. This event was a demonstra- tion of two of Russolo's instruments, the rumorarmonio, called russolofono in the exhibition catalogue, and the arco enarmonico. Music critic Emile Vuillermoz wrote two articles on Varese in 1931: one on 15 June for the Parisian journal Excelsior, the other on 18 June for he Candide. 81. Varese to Louise Varese, 16 Sept. 1931, Cavalaire, France, Varese archive. 82. Varese, lecture at the University of Southern California, 5 June 1939, Los Angeles. 83. Varese, "By the Dozen," Eolus 11 (Apr. 1932); qtd. in Ouellette, Varese, 141; and lecture at Princeton University, 4 Sept. 1959.