Word: se
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...concertgoers at Manhattan's Town Hall did little more than wince, or cringe in their seats. When the last cataclysmic sound had died away, they gave a standing ovation to the sturdy, craggy-faced composer who made his way to the podium. At 75, Composer Edgard Varèse (rhymes with fez) was finally receiving the acclaim he deserves as the U.S.'s Grand Old Man of electronic music...
Bread & the Wafer. Varèse began experimenting with sounds of the machine age-coaxing unconventional sonorities out of conventional instruments-long before such European electro-composers as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen had spliced their first tape. But partly because his output is so sparse (eleven compositions in 40 years), partly because his European counterparts had electronic equipment to work with before he did, Varèse for a long time remained, by his own definition, "a musical bum." Large-scale recognition did not come until 1958, when his Poème Electronique, his only completely noninstrumental composition, thundered...
...program. Scored for soprano, men's chorus and assorted instruments, it was based on a prose poem by Anaï's Nin. None of Nocturnal was taped, but its sounds-chittering strings, night-wailing flutes-were far out enough to fire up any Varèse fan. Its chanted, fragmented lyrics were appropriately opaque: "You belong to the night. . . Bread and the wafer. . . I have lost my brother. . . Perfume and sperm...
Organized Sound. Varèse achieves his effects by recording sounds on tape; then, with the aid of complex electronic equipment, he breaks the sounds apart, amplifies and filters them. He picked up his offbeat skills almost by indirection: his father, a Paris engineer, was so set upon an engineering rather than a musical career for his son that he kept the family piano locked. Varèse studied mathematics, taught himself music on the side, eventually got into the Paris Conservatory as a composition student. In 1915 he moved to New York, soon formed a little-appreciated orchestra devoted...
...painstaking worker ("The first instrument is the wastebasket"), Varèse creates his "organized sound" in a studio in Greenwich Village surrounded by the tools of his trade: gongs, sirens, whistles, drums. He is convinced that electronic music is clearly the music of the future, but he does not expect it to make more conventional composition obsolete ("Just because there are other ways of getting there, you do not kill the horse"). Still living modestly ("I am not an expensive animal"), he is as rigidly indifferent to the reactions of the public as he ever was. "My privilege," says Edgard...