This is Edgard Varèse

Translation of Edgard Varèse 1959 interview

Interviewer (Jean Valran): Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. It is with extreme pleasure that we present to you tonight on Premier Plan Edgard Varèse, born in Paris in 1895, a student of Widor, Roussel and d’Indy, but above all a student of his own tenacity in rethinking musical art in a way that integrates and orders the entire sonic universe. Married to an American woman of letters, he came to settle in the United States during the First World War, where he still lives. Jean Valran is interviewing him in the garden of his home in Greenwich Village, New York.

Interviewer: why did you come to settle in America?

Edgard Varèse: Well, I had left all my things in Germany and there was nothing there ,no work to be found. You had to go somewhere, so I came here.

Interviewer: And why North America rather than South America?

Varèse: Because there was activity here: there were already established orchestras. There was a cultural life, and many European artists were already here. Also there was a very large Italian and German population, and since I did not speak English I could still get by and be understood with them.

Interviewer: But you arrived in New York with absolutely nothing?

Varèse: I arrived in New York with ninety dollars in my pocket and without speaking English.

Interviewer: How did you manage?

Varèse: By système D.

Interviewer: Concretely, do you have examples of that système D ?

Varèse: Yes. I did all kinds of odd jobs: little orchestrations, consultations on musical machines, small commercial machines.

Interviewer: You didn’t have to teach in New York?

Varèse: I did some teaching, yes, but I preferred doing small odd jobs to teaching properly. Why? Because the kind of musician I would have liked to teach didn’t exist. A musician doesn’t need a professor , they need books and to go and hear music. Nobody can hear for you. You get people who come and hand you compositions and you see they haven’t heard anything. They put it on paper because there is a staff to fill with notes. They rely on the tempered system that gives them the notes — what I call the tempered system, I call the dividing line of the octave.

Interviewer: So you found professional activity in New York?

Varèse: Yes.

Interviewer: But what kept you in New York? After all the war ended; you could have gone back home.

Varèse: I had made my little way here. I had made connections ,I had relations. In 1917 I conducted the Requiem by Berlioz with a choir of 300 and an orchestra of 150 , the Philharmonic combined with the Metropolitan and the choir was from the Oratorio Society of Scranton, Pennsylvania, a Welsh miners’ choir. There were women too, of course, but they had rehearsed for six months, an hour or two a day. We had hauled pianos down into the mine.

Interviewer: Some of your works provoked real fights.

Varèse: Yes , Hyperprism in 1923. It was here in the United States; people actually came to blows in the hall. They don’t know the etiquette here for such things .I saw it because I was conducting on the stage.

Interviewer: Do you think American audiences are as receptive to contemporary music as European audiences?

Varèse: Right now there’s been a very great development in America. There really is a musical public: many activities, many small ensembles that are extremely active and adventurous, presenting new music and reviving great masterworks of the past that aren’t played in every city.

Interviewer: That brings me to a general question ,I’m sure you will answer concretely. What is music for you?

Varèse: Music for me? First, it is sound. What people call “music” ,take Wagner, take Beethoven’s Ninth or Beethoven’s Fifth ,there have always been critics and fools who said stupid things and declared something was not music. They said that of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, for example. If the records hadn’t insisted and helped it continue, it might have been discarded.

Interviewer: Regarding your work as a composer, what is your artistic morale? Why do you write the music you write?

Varèse: I write it for myself first. Then others must hear it. Unfortunately, premieres can be like first-class funerals: a premiere means nothing ,it really starts to count after the tenth performance. I ask because many people imagine the contemporary composer deliberately wants to annoy listeners, or works in an abstract vacuum doing calculations.

Interviewer: That’s not true for you?

Varèse: Never. That’s not the case. Look at Bach when he was at St. Thomas his chapter was made of wealthy amateur churchmen; one day he played his music to them informed musicians and they said it was impossible. He joked he’d play so fast that they wouldn’t have time to hear it. But the work remains. Composers don’t do this to annoy people; the work endures. Wagner survived; Debussy survived; Ravel survived despite setbacks. Berlioz, who was scarcely appreciated in France at one time, had successes in Russia. In Germany there would not be a modern orchestra today without Berlioz. You write what you hear inwardly because you cannot do otherwise ,you must express it that way.

Interviewer: Is it true, as people say, that there is a divorce between the contemporary composer and the public?

Varèse: Before a divorce there must have been a marriage and before marriage the two must know each other. This is not a phenomenon unique to the 20th century. Take France: from the 12th–13th centuries up to the end of the 17th we had a magnificent school of music ,from Léonin and Pérotin to later masters. Today Paris is an international center, but truly there is no broad musical public in France. Why this reluctance towards music that isn’t of yesterday or the day before? Often organizers and performers say, “Let’s give the public what it wants.” How can the public know what it wants if you don’t give it choices? Can one love what one does not know? Leonardo da Vinci said, “The more knowledge, the greater the love.” Surprise works only once; familiarity must be established between composer and public the work is the link. Every link in tradition was forged by a revolutionary of his time; don’t confuse tradition with 20–30–40 years of bad habit.

Interviewer: How would you define tradition?

Varèse: Tradition is composed of people who became classics through the action of time. They were of their time, and later generations said they were “before their time,” but in fact they crystallized their era.

Interviewer: Do you think the composer’s role is moving toward a democratization of music, compared with the 17th–18th centuries?

Varèse: Certainly. There are many more opportunities now. Remember that in the Middle Ages the greatest music took place in churches and everyone heard it. Today there are great orchestras and publics ,even the upper gallery at Carnegie Hall is a very interesting audience. The major poets of our day are the scientists; the great marvels now are achievements of physicists; the great poets today can be mathematicians.

Interviewer: In your current work you sometimes do without the human performer the sound is organized electronically. Do you think music conceived and produced this way could completely replace the human performer?

Varèse: Why replace them? There is room for both. You can fly in an airplane and still ride a horse. The plane’s arrival doesn’t mean the horses get killed. The presence of music made without performers does not mean the performer disappears , especially not vocal or choral music. The machine itself can be a performer; there is no magical “electronic music” ,there is sound treated electronically and sound produced by human power. You put the sounds into the machine yourself; the machine simply gives back exactly what you put in.

Interviewer: Do you believe that in 25–30 years violinists or pianists might disappear?

Varèse: String players, instruments with strings are on the wane for two reasons. Historically, if you needed to pull something you used 20–30 horses; now you use a tractor. Why have twenty first violins? Doubling volume by adding players grows as a square: doubling four violins requires sixteen, and so on ,you get a muddy thickness. Today brass and woodwind often take a more prominent place. The orchestral balance is different; sometimes groups oppose rather than merge into a mass.

Interviewer: Will tomorrow’s public catch up with today’s music?

Varèse: It’s curious: radio has been very useful records played on the radio introduced many things we wouldn’t otherwise have heard. Almost everyone has a phonograph at home; stereo is coming and it will be different ,less precise in line than mono, but richer in sonic material. People are training their ears to these new sounds. Jazz has also helped enormously; many elements move toward a near-classical sensibility.

Interviewer: Will this habituation to contemporary music cause the public to forget masterpieces of the past?

Varèse: Not at all. Masterpieces do not die; actually there’s a renaissance. Personally I would like to see the reconstitution of Baroque instruments and the revival of the playing techniques appropriate to them, so the music is performed as it should have been at the time.

Interviewer: One of your most recent works was written for the Brussels International Exposition. Shall we talk about that?

Varèse: If you wish a little or a lot.

Interviewer: How did the idea come about?

Varèse: I received a letter from Le Corbusier who said, “I have something to propose; I think it will interest you.” It was to do something for Philips for the exposition. We met in Paris; Philips came to see us and we decided to do it. Le Corbusier said he would realize that Philips represent one of the most important organizations in the world for sound and light. So we would make an “Electronic Poem.”

Interviewer: What was that Electronic Poem like?

Varèse: We decided it would last 480 seconds eight minutes. In the pavilion Le Corbusier projected what he called “color atmospheres” lights that changed color and on the walls he projected images: a non-animated stereoscopic projection, not cinema. I had at my disposal fifteen “routes” on which I distributed the sound according to my composition, and this was relayed over a chain of 425 loudspeakers.

Interviewer: What do you mean by a “route”?

Varèse: A “route” is a path a sequence of placements, for example a row of loudspeakers built into the wall or the concrete of the building.

Interviewer: And the pavilion itself was it a standard box?

Varèse: Not at all. The base plan was like a cow’s stomach cut in two, with three hollows. On each hollow there was a kind of circular pyramid , a tower rising in a cone with differing heights. The sound traveled through it, rose to a peak, passed into another, went everywhere. A sound might seem to settle in one place and then be gone, already moving elsewhere.

Interviewer: How did people circulate in the pavilion?

Varèse: People didn’t move around much; everyone stood. You entered by one door and left by another; once the pavilion filled, it closed and the show ran. When it finished you exited by the opposite door. There was thus a directed route of the public through the architecture.

Interviewer: What was the reaction of visitors to this spatial music?

Varèse: We had almost two and a half million visitors , an average of 15–16 thousand a day and it ran for about six months. At first some people smiled awkwardly, then that went away. There was never applause; people left as if enchanted and in absolute silence. Many returned repeatedly; children of 10–12 told us they had already been four times and kept bringing friends who hadn’t heard it.

Interviewer: Could this work have consequences in “normal” contexts?

Varèse: Normal circumstances become normal by habit. What it brings is a true sense of spatial distribution , a three-dimensional treatment of sound: length, height and depth with modulation so that sounds move in space. It was conceived in function with the architecture, but you can recreate the same distribution elsewhere. You’d need a space that is acoustically dead (no reverberation) so you can create reverb artificially and control it.

Interviewer: So spatial music does not necessarily require a revision of concert hall architecture?

Varèse: Not at all. But man is anatomically inclined to turn toward the direction the sound comes from put a sound behind someone and they turn automatically. Sound is a living material, like light in the vibratory domain; it is a matter of wavelength and speed of propagation.

Interviewer: Have you presented similar spatial works elsewhere?

Varèse: The term “spatial music” arose when people heard works like Hyperprism, Intégrales and Arcana — critics spoke of “music in space, music moving in space.” You felt surrounded; music could inhabit part of the hall without interruption. Spatial music therefore necessitates the presence of the listener in the space where it is performed you can’t reduce a 425-speaker spatial work to a record; at best a disc gives you a snapshot or an idea of the thing.

Interviewer: So spatial music tends to restore music to its social reality?

Varèse: Exactly. Think of planetariums: people go and experience the movement of the stars. In the future there will be halls with loudspeakers built into the walls and the building itself so you can distribute sound as you wish. Technically, today nothing is impossible.

Announcer: Tomorrow evening at 8:00 p.m., excerpts from Edgard Varèse’s Déserts will be heard on the French network of Radio Canada during the program European Festivals.