Word: se
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When Edgard Varčse (rhymes with fez) was a boy in Paris, the piano in his family's apartment was kept locked. His father, an engineer, did not want him to become a composer. Though Varčse went on to study music at some of the world's best schools and eventually made a name for himelf as a fierce and formidable modernist composer, there are those who believe that his father's wish was fulfilled...
Contemporary musical composition, like other modern art forms, has shown two contradictory trends: it has sought to 1) come closer to reality than it ever has before; and 2) destroy reality or transmute it beyond recognition. In this sense, Composer Varčse is a typical 20th century artist. He goes about with a tape recorder, picking up very real sounds that may range from a factory whistle to an organ note to a kissing sound captured right at home. Then, by using electronic machinery that might have baffled his father, he takes the "raw" sounds, breaks them up into components...
Last week, at Manhattan's Town Hall Composer Varčse exhibited his latest composition, a piece for orchestra and tape recorder entitled Deserts. Onstage was a 20-man orchestra, five of whose members played percussion. Backstage, peering out under beetling brows, was Composer Varčse himself, one hand on the controls of an Ampex tape recorder, the other giving the beat to Conductor Jacques Monod onstage. Nobody could miss the fact: about to turn 70, Varčse is as unreconstructed a rebel as he was 35 years...
Tumultuous Labors. "Why do I compose the way I do? Because it pleases me," says Varčse amiably, and will say no more. But there is evidence that Varčse writes that way as a protest. First there was his antimusical father to protest against, then (although his early work earned Debussy's admiration) an indifferent or hostile public. Again and again, his career ran into difficulties. Just as he was beginning to work on an opera with Librettist Hugo (Rosenkavalier) von Hofmannsthal...
...more than four years, Señora Zelmira Anchorena de Gainza Paz, now 81, has phoned Buenos Aires' La Prensa almost every week and demanded of the switchboard operator: "When are you going to give La Prensa back to the owners?" Last week, the switchboard girl answered: "Soon, Señora." Next day, by decree of President Aramburu, La Prensa was taken from the custody of the government, which had expropriated it, and returned to Owner Doña Zelmira and the Paz family. The paper's seizure by Perón, said the decree...