Edgard Varèse

Edgard Var?se (December 22, 1883 – November 6, 1965) was a French-born composer, who moved to the United States in 1915, and took American citizenship in 1926. Var?se's music features an emphasis on timbre and "organized sound." 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."

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He spent the first few years in the United States meeting important contributors to American music, promoting his vision of new electronic art music instruments, conducting orchestras, and founding the New Symphony Orchestra. It was also about this time that Var?se began work on his first composition in the United States, Am?riques, which was finished in 1921. It was at the completion of this work that Var?se along with Carlos Salzedo founded the International Composers' Guild, dedicated to the performances of new compositions of both American and European composers, for which he composed many of his pieces for orchestral instruments and voices, specifically, during the first half of the 1920s, he composed Offrandes, Hyperprism, Octandre, and Int?grales.

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In 1928, Var?se returned to Paris to alter one of the parts in Am?riques to include the recently constructed Ondes Martenot. Var?se followed Am?riques by composing his most famous non-electronic piece about 1930 entitled Ionisation, the first piece to feature solely percussion instruments. Although it was composed with pre-existing instruments, Ionisation was composed as an exploration of new sounds and methods to create them. In 1933, while Var?se was still in Paris, he wrote to the Guggenheim Foundation and Bell Laboratories in an attempt to receive a grant to develop an electronic music studio. His next composition, Ecuatorial, completed in 1934, contained parts for theremins, and Var?se, anticipating the successful receipt of one of his grants, eagerly returned to the United States to finally realize his electronic music.

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Var?se wrote his Ecuatorial for two fingerboard Theremins, bass singer, winds and percussion in the early 1930s. It was premiered on April 15 1934, under the baton of Nicolas Slonimsky. Then Var?se left New York City, where he had lived since 1915, and moved to Santa Fe, San Francisco and Los Angeles. In 1936 he wrote Density 21.5. By the time Var?se returned in late 1938, Leon Theremin had returned to Russia. This devastated Var?se, who had hoped to work with Theremin on a refinement of his instrument. Var?se had also promoted the theremin in his Western travels, and demonstrated one at a lecture at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque on November 12 1936. The University of New Mexico has an RCA theremin, which may be the same instrument.

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When, in the late 1950s, Var?se was approached by a publisher about making Ecuatorial available, there were very few theremins--let alone fingerboard theremins--to be found, so he rewrote/relabelled the part for Ondes Martenot. This new version was premiered in 1961.

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Var?se's best known student is the Chinese-born composer Chou Wen-Chung (b. 1923), who met Var?se in 1949 and assisted him in his later years. He became the executor of Var?se's estate following the composer's death and edited and completed a number of Var?se's works. He is professor emeritus of composition at Columbia University.

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Edgard Varèse related Images and Photos (experimental)

Composer Edgar Varese Attending Art Exhibit