Conversation with Varèse

Author(s): Gunther Schuller and Varèse

Source: Perspectives of New Music , Spring - Summer, 1965, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Spring -
Summer, 1965), pp. 32-37
Published by: Perspectives of New Music

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/832501

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 CONVERSATION WITH VARESE

GUNTHER SCHULLER

GS: What were your most important early musical expe

EV: When I was eleven I wrote an opera on Jules Verne

which I was already involved with sonority and un
detested the piano and all conventional instruments, a
learned the scales, my only reaction was, "Well, they
Up to then, I had studied entirely by myself; my fat
my studying music and wanted me to go into mathem
at the Polytechnic in Ziirich. He even locked the pian
that I couldn't touch it. But when I was seventeen, Bolz
the Turin Conservatory, became interested in me and e
go back to Paris (my birthplace). There I went first to
torum, where I studied with Roussel and D'Indy. D'I
petty nobility, calling himself "Le Vicomte D'Indy," an
had been against Dreyfus, and a terribly pedantic mu
when he was analyzing Parsifal, he said "Il n'a pas modu
was capable of such stupidities.
So I left the Schola after a year and went to Widor,
open-minded musician and a marvelous organist. I still
by the way, that admitted me to his class at the Conse
time I was already disenchanted with the tempered syst
could never understand why we should be limited to it
ments can give us anything we want, and why it shoul
prescriptive, as if it were the final stage of musical develo
fields, like chemistry or physics, the basic assumption is t
ways something new to be discovered. So I left the Con
after a couple of years (although the immediate cause f
rather nasty exchange of unpleasantries with Faur6 who, a
of the Conservatoire, kicked me out).
By the time I was twenty, I had an enormous amount of
pieces like Rhapsodie Romaine, Bourgogne, Gargantua (writte
agement of Romain Rolland), Mehr Licht, on a Goethe
others. At that time Goethe was very important to my
Ho6ne Wronsky, an officer in Napoleon's army, w

. 32"

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 CONVERSATION WITH VARESE

physicist and philosopher, who created a phrase I n

is the corporealization of the intelligence that is in sou
The composers I admired in those early days were
for his Pelleas, and then Strauss and Busoni, both
influential in my career after I went to Berlin in 1905
composers like Satie and Scriabin. Satie was not on
influence on Debussy by pulling him away from th
Prix de Rome atmosphere, thus really broadening
but Satie also wrote some rather remarkable music
from his Messe des Pauvres, a music which always re
Inferno and strikes me as a kind of pre-electronic mus
I found Scriabin's orchestral pieces simply overwh
has such a powerful seductive atmosphere, that it g
of technique. I know that Scriabin's music is often c
of polyphony, for example. But my answer to that
polyphony?
But above all I admired Debussy, primarily for his economy of means
and clarity, and the intensity he achieved through them, balancing with
almost mathematical equilibrium timbres against rhythms and textures
-like a fantastic chemist. Sometimes Strauss also had that kind of
clarity; the final scene of Salome, for example, or the Recognition
in Elektra have that same combination of transparency and inte
Debussy and Strauss both had a wonderful sense of using silence an
suspense and intensity latent in the musical pause.
The essential touchstone for me was Busoni's prophetic book, En
einer Neuen Aesthetik der Tonkunst. This predicts precisely what is happ
today in music-that is, if you pass over the whole dodecaphonic de
ment, which in my view represents a sort of hardening of the ar
I find the whole 12-tone approach so limiting, especially in its use
tempered scale and its rigid pitch organization. I respect the 12-
discipline, and those that feel they need such a discipline. But it re
me of Beckmesser's Tablatur, and it seems much more fruitful to use
total sonic resources available to us. Although there are certain wo
Schoenberg that I find magnificent-the Five Orchestra Pieces esp
-his orchestration often seems quite thick and fat. Compare this
transparency and lyricism of Webern!

GS: Eduard Steuermann was the only person I ever met who hear
of your early music, all of which I understand was lost or destroy
remembered your Bourgogne from its 1912 Berlin performance, espec
a section with a lot of multiple divided string parts.

EV: I was trying to approximate the kind of inner, microcosmic li

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 PERSPECTIVES OF NEW MUSIC

find in certain chemical solutions, or through the filter

these strings unthematically as a background behind a g
and percussion.

GS: How did your music of this period compare wi

Octandre or Integrales, for example?

EV: The earlier works were what I would call more a

working with blocks of sound, calculated and bal
other. I was preoccupied with volume in an architectu
projection.

GS: How did your ideas of architectonic form and structure arise? Cer-
tainly other composers were thinking along totally different lines at that
time-Debussy and Stravinsky appear to have arrived at similar concepts
considerably later than you did.

EV: I was not influenced by composers as much as by natural objects and

physical phenomena. As a child, I was tremendously impressed by
the qualities and character of the granite I found in Burgundy, where
I often visited my grandfather. There were two kinds of granite
there, one grey, the other streaked with pink and yellow. Then there was
the old Romanesque architecture in that part of France: I used to play
in one of the oldest French churches-in Tournus-one that was started
in the sixth century and built in purest Romanesque style. And I used t
watch the old stone cutters, marveling at the precision with which the
worked. They didn't use cement, and every stone had to fit and balance
with every other. So I was always in touch with things of stone and with
this kind of pure structural architecture-without frills or unnecessary
decoration. All of this became an integral part of my thinking at a ver
early stage.

GS: Did the special kind of static continuity in your music, and its use of
repetition and near-repetition of the same elements in constantly new
juxtapositions and successions, arise mainly as a result of such funda-
mental structural preoccupations?

EV: Yes. In 1905, when I composed Rhapsodie Romaine, I was thinking o

Romanesque architecture, not Rome! I wanted to find a way to project
in music the concept of calculated or controlled gravitation, how one ele-
ment pushing on the other stabilizes the total structure, thus using th
material elements at the same time in opposition to and in support of one
another. I think I would characterize my early music as granitic!

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 CONVERSATION WITH VARESE

GS: What made you come to America in 1916, and h

musical climate here?

EV: After I was discharged from the French Army, I came to America
because the war conditions had really interrupted all normal musical
activity. When I came here, the climate for modern music was really
quite terrible. Musical organizations were run entirely by society ladies,
who certainly did not want to hear any modern music. As a conductor,
my programs were constantly interfered with. It was as a result of this
situation, that Salzedo and I formed the International Composer's Guild,
where we could perform whatever we wanted. We were very fortunate
in having the disinterested collaboration of such conductors as Stokowski,
Klemperer, and Goosens. It was for these concerts that I composed
Octandre, Hyperprism, and so on.

GS: How do these compositions of the twenties compare with your

earlier works?

E V: I believe they reflect a greater refinement of my earlier conceptions.

I also became increasingly interested in internal rhythmic and metric
relationships, as in Ionization. I was also interested in the sonorous aspects
of percussion as structural, architectonic elements. But this was not my
first percussion piece. I had already done some in Berlin and Paris,
especially in connection with the choruses I conducted in Berlin. These
works used special percussion instruments that I had collected myself,
which the singers often played themselves.

GS: Why did you compose so little in the period after Ionization?

E V: In those days the situation really seemed hopeless. I'm afraid I de-
veloped a very negative attitude toward the entire musical situation.
After all, great men like Mahler, Strauss, Muck, and Busoni had given
me my professional start with their encouragement and esteen for my
scores. By the thirties, these men had all been replaced by-in most cases
-much lesser musicians. Mahler, for example, was kicked out by the
New York Philharmonic and replaced by a nonentity, Stransky, and still
later by that enemy of modern music, Toscanini, and the only conductor
who had shown an interest in my music, Stokowski, stopped playing it.
But the frustration of having my music ignored was only a part of it.
I had an obsession: a new instrument that would free music from the
tempered system. Having been closely associated with scientists of the
Bell Laboratories, with Bertrand, inventor of one of the first electronic
instruments, the Dynaphone, and with Theremin, who made two elec-
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 PERSPECTIVES OF NEW MUSIC

tronic instruments for my Ecuatorial, I knew what th

I wanted to work with an electrical engineer in a w
tory. Individual scientists became interested in my
panies did not. I tried here and in Hollywood but n
however, not exact to say that I deliberately stopp
working on a score that I called Espace, but I would te
I had written during the day or vice versa.

GS: Did the new possibilities in electronic musi

composition?

EV: Yes, first with Deserts in 1954, and then with the Poime Electronique in
which the resources offered by Le Corbusier and Philips--11 channels,
425 speakers, all related to the acoustics and architecture of the building
-were irresistible. I am not, however, impressed by most of today's
electronic music. It does not seem to make full use of the unique possibili-
ties of the medium, especially in regard to those questions of space and
projection that have always concerned me. I am fascinated by the fact
that through electronic means one can generate a sound instantaneously.
On an instrument played by a human being you have to impose a musical
thought through notation, then, usually much later, the player has to
prepare himself in various ways to produce what will-one hopes-
emerge as that sound. This is all so indirect compared with electronics,
where you generate something "live" that can appear or disappear in-
stantly and unpredictably. Consequently, you aren't programming some-
thing musical, something to be done, but using it directly, which gives
an entirely different dimension to musical space and projection. For in-
stance, in the use of an oscillator, it is not a question of working against it
or taming it, but using it directly, without, of course, letting it use you.
The same pertains to mixing and filtering. To me, working with electronic
music is composing with living sounds, paradoxical though that may
appear.

GS: Your position then would seem to be directly contrary to that o

Milton Babbitt?

EV: I respect and admire Babbitt, but he certainly represents a completely

different view of electronic music from mine. It seems to me that he wants
to exercise maximum control over certain materials, as if he were above
them. But I want to be in the material, part of the acoustical vibration,
so to speak. Babbitt composes his material first and then gives it to the
synthesizer, while I want to generate something directly by electronic
means. In other words, I think of musical space as open rather than
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 CONVERSATION WITH VARESE

bounded, which is why I speak about projection in

simply to project a sound, a musical thought, to initia
it take its own course. I do not want an a priori contr

GS: Are you interested, then, in the other directi

so-called aleatory music?

EV." For me, these means are simply too accidenta

met in California during the thirties (he had been a p
beginning to study music), is very intelligent, ta
imaginative. But his way of making music isn't for
that I can't see the necessity for a composer! Actually
sound as living matter, raw material, but he want
with music in order to reach the public. I don't ca
public as much as I care about reaching certain m
nomena, in other words, to disturb the atmosphe
sound is only an atmospheric disturbance!

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