Edgard Varèse  

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"In 1928, when Edgard Varèse was asked about jazz, he said it was not representative of America but instead was, "a negro product, exploited by the Jews. All of its composers here are Jews," meaning Gruenberg and Boulanger students including Copland and Blitzstein." --Sholem Stein

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Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse (also spelled Edgar Varèse; December 22, 1883 – November 6, 1965) was a French composer who spent the greater part of his career in the United States.

Varèse's music emphasizes timbre and rhythm. He coined the term "organized sound" in reference to his own musical aesthetic. Varèse's conception of music reflected his vision of "sound as living matter" and of "musical space as open rather than bounded". He conceived the elements of his music in terms of "sound-masses", likening their organization to the natural phenomenon of crystallization. Varèse thought that "to stubbornly conditioned ears, anything new in music has always been called noise", and he posed the question, "what is music but organized noises?"

Although his complete surviving works only last about three hours, he has been recognised as an influence by several major composers of the late 20th century. Varèse saw potential in using electronic media for sound production, and his use of new instruments and electronic resources led to his being known as the "Father of Electronic Music" while Henry Miller described him as "The stratospheric Colossus of Sound".

Varèse actively promoted performances of works by other 20th-century composers and founded the International Composers' Guild in 1921 and the Pan-American Association of Composers in 1926.

Works

  • Un grand sommeil noir, song to a text by Paul Verlaine for voice and piano (1906)
  • Amériques for large orchestra (1918–1921; revised 1927)
  • Offrandes for soprano and chamber orchestra (poems by Vicente Huidobro and José Juan Tablada)(1921)
  • Hyperprism for wind and percussion (1922–1923)
  • Octandre for seven wind instruments and double bass (1923)
  • Intégrales for wind and percussion (1924–1925)
  • Arcana for large orchestra (1925–1927)
  • Ionisation for 13 percussion players (1929–1931)
  • Ecuatorial for bass voice (or unison male chorus), brass, organ, percussion and theremins (revised for ondes-martenots in 1961) (text by Francisco Ximénez) (1932–1934)
  • Density 21.5 for solo flute (1936)
  • Tuning Up for orchestra (sketched 1946; completed by Chou Wen-chung, 1998)
  • Étude pour espace for soprano solo, chorus, 2 pianos and percussion (1947; orchestrated and arranged by Chou Wen-chung for wind instruments and percussion for spatialized live performance, 2009) (texts by Kenneth Patchen, José Juan Tablada and St. John of the Cross)
  • Dance for Burgess for chamber ensemble (1949)
  • Déserts for wind, percussion and electronic tape (1950–1954)
  • La procession de verges for electronic tape (soundtrack for Around and About Joan Mirò, directed by Thomas Bouchard) (1955)
  • Poème électronique for electronic tape (1957–1958)
  • Nocturnal for soprano, male chorus and orchestra, text adapted from The House of Incest by Anaïs Nin (1961), revised and completed posthumously by Chou Wen-chung (1968)




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Edgard Varèse" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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