(Marcel
DUCHAMP, Louise NORTON et Beatrice WOOD). « The
Richard Mutt Case » ;
Louise NORTON. « Buddha of the Bathroom ». The Blind Man, numéro
2, mai 1917.
Louise (NORTON) VARÈSE, Edgard VARÈSE, Suzanne
DUCHAMP, Jean CROTTI et Mary REYNOLDS. Photographie, Paris,, vers 1923
Edgard Varèse: The Idol of My Youth
By Frank Zappa
Stereo Review, June
1971. pp. 61-62
I have been asked to write
about Edgard Varese. I am in no way qualified to. I can't even pronounce his
name right. The only reason I have agreed to is because I love his music very
much, and if by some chance this article can influence more people to hear his
works, it will have been worthwhile.
I was about thirteen when I
read an article in Look about Sam Goody's Record Store in New York. My memory
is not too clear on the details, but I recall it was praising the store's
exceptional record merchandising ability. One example of brilliant salesmanship
described how, through some mysterious trickery, the store actually managed to
sell an album called "Ionization" (the real name of the album was
"The Complete Works of Edgard Varese, Volume One"). The article
described the record as a weird jumble of drums and other unpleasant sounds.
I dashed off to my local
record store and asked for it. Nobody ever heard of it. I told the guy in the
store what it was like. He turned away, repulsed, and mum- bled solemnly,
"I probably wouldn't stock it anyway . . .nobody here in San Diego would
buy it."
I didn't give up. I was so
hot to get that record I couldn't even believe it. In those days I was a
rhythm- and-blues fanatic. I saved any money I could get (some- times as much
as $2 a week) so that every Friday and Saturday I could rummage through piles
of old records at the juke Box Used Record Dump (or whatever they called it) in
the Maryland Hotel or the dusty corners of little record stores where they'd
keep the crappy records nobody wanted to buy.
One day I was passing a
hi-fi store in La Mesa. A little sign in the window announced a sale on 45's.
After shuffling through their singles rack and finding a couple of Joe Houston
records, I walked toward the cash register. On my way, I happened to glance
into the LP bin. Sitting in the front, just a little bent at the corners, was a
strange-looking black-and-white album cover. On it there was a picture of a man
with gray frizzy hair. He looked like a mad scientist. I thought it was great
that somebody had finally made a record of a mad scientist. I picked it up. I
nearly (this is true, ladies and gentlemen) peed in my pants . . . THERE IT
WAS! EMS 401, The Complete Works of Edgard Varese Volume I . . . Integrales,
Density 21.5, Ionization, Octandre . . . Rene Le Roy, the N. Y. Wind Ensemble,
the Juilliard Percussion Orchestra, Frederic Waidman Conducting . . .liner
notes by Sidney Finkelstein! WOW!
I ran over to the singles
box and stuffed the Joe Houston records back in it. I fumbled around in my
pocket to see how much money I had (about $3.80). 1 knew I had to have a lot of
money to buy an album. Only old people had enough money to buy albums. I'd
never bought an album before. I sneaked over to the guy at the cash register
and asked him how much EMS 401 cost. "That gray one in the box? $5.95 -
"
I had searched for that
album for over a year, and now . . . disaster. I told the guy I only had $3.80.
He scratched his neck. "We use that record to demonstrate the hi-fi's
with, but nobody ever buys one when we use it . . . you can have it for $3.80
if you want it that bad. "
I couldn't imagine what he
meant by "demonstrating hi-fi's with it." I'd never heard a hi-fi. I
only knew that old people bought them. I had a genuine lo-fi . . . it was a
little box about 4 inches deep with imitation wrought-iron legs at each corner
(sort of brass-plated) which elevated it from the table top because the speaker
was in the bottom. My mother kept it near the ironing board. She used to listen
to a 78 of The Little Shoemaker on it. I took off the 78 of The Little
Shoemaker and, carefully moving the speed lever to 33 1/3 (it had never been
there before), turned the volume all the way up and placed the all-purpose
Osmium-tip needle in the lead-in spiral to Ionization. I have a nice Catholic
mother who likes Roller Derby. Edgard Varese does not get her off, even to this
very day. I was forbidden to play that record in the living room ever again.
In order to listen to The
Album, I had to stay in my room. I would sit there every night and play it two
or three times and read the liner notes over and over. I didn't understand them
at all. I didn't know what timbre was. I never heard of polyphony. I just liked
the music because it sounded good to me. I would force anybody who came over to
listen to it. (I had heard someplace that in radio stations the guys would make
chalk marks on records so they could find an exact spot, so I did the same
thing to EMS 401 . . . marked all the hot items so my friends wouldn't get
bored in the quiet parts.)
I went to the library and
tried to find a book about Mr. Varese. There wasn't any. The librarian told me
he probably wasn't a Major Composer. She suggested I look in books about new or
unpopular composers. I found a book that had a little blurb in it (with a
picture of Mr. Varese as a young man, staring into the camera very seriously)
saying that he would be just as happy growing grapes as being a composer.
On my fifteenth birthday my
mother said she'd give me $5. 1 told her I would rather make a long-distance
phone call. I figured Mr. Varese lived in New York because the record was made
in New York (and be- cause he was so weird, he would live in Greenwich
Village). I got New York Information, and sure enough, he was in the phone
book.
His wife answered. She was
very nice and told me he was in Europe and to call back in a few weeks. I did.
I don't remember what I said to him exactly, but it was something like: "I
really dig your music." He told me he was working on a new piece called
Deserts. This thrilled me quite a bit since I was living in Lancaster,
California then. When you're fifteen and living in the Mojave Desert and find
out that the world's greatest composer, somewhere in a secret Greenwich Village
laboratory, is working on a song about your "home town" you can get
pretty excited. It seemed a great tragedy that nobody in-Palmdale or Rosamond
would care if they ever heard it. I still think Deserts is about Lancaster,
even if the liner notes on the Columbia LP say it's something more
philosophical.
All through high school I
searched for information about Varese and his music. One of the most exciting
discoveries was in the school library in Lancaster. I found an orchestration
book that had score examples in the back, and included was an excerpt from
Offrandes with a lot of harp notes (and you know how groovy harp notes look). I
remember fetishing the book for several weeks.
When I was eighteen I got a
chance to go to the East Coast to visit my Aunt Mary in Baltimore. I had been
composing for about four years then but had not heard any of it played. Aunt
Mary was going to introduce me to some friend of hers (an Italian gentleman)
who was connected with the symphony there. I had planned on making a side trip
to mysterious Greenwich Village. During my birthday telephone conversation, Mr.
Varese had casually mentioned the possibility of a visit if I was ever in the
area. I wrote him a letter when I got to Baltimore, just to let him know I was
in the area.
I waited. My aunt
introduced me to the symphony guy. She said, "This is Frankie. He writes
orchestra music." The guy said, "Really? Tell me, sonny boy, what's
the lowest note on a bassoon?" I said, "B flat . . .and also it says
in the book you can get 'em up to a C or something in the treble clef." He
said, "Really? You know about violin harmonics?" I said, "What's
that?" He said, "See me again in a few years."
I waited some more. The
letter came. I couldn't believe it. A real handwritten letter from Edgard
Varese! I still have it in a little frame. In very tiny scientific-looking script
it says:
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
VII 12th/57
Dear Mr. Zappa
I am sorry not to be able
to grant your request. I am leaving
for Europe next week and will be gone until next spring. I am
hoping however to see you on my return. With best wishes.
Sincerely
Edgard Varese
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
I never got to meet Mr.
Varese. But I kept looking for records of his music. When he got to be about
eighty I guess a few companies gave in and recorded some of his stuff. Sort of
a gesture, I imagine. I always wondered who bought them besides me. It was
about seven years from the time I first heard his music till I met someone else
who even knew he existed. That person was a film student at USC. He had the
Columbia LP with Poeme Electronique on it. He thought it would make groovy
sound effects.
I can't give you any
structural insights or academic suppositions about how his music works or why I
think it sounds so good. His music is completely unique. If you haven't heard
it yet, go hear it. If you've already heard it and think it might make groovy
sound effects, listen again. I would recommend the Chicago Symphony recording
of Arcana on RCA (at full volume) or the Utah Symphony recording of Ameriques
on Vanguard. Also, there is a biography by Fernand Oulette, and miniature
scores are available for most of his works, published by G. Ricordi.
Frank ZAPPA avec Louise VARÈSE, Halloween, 1974.
Frank Zappa on Edgar Varèse
By John Diliberto and Kimberly Haas
If any composer has come to epitomize the neglected genius, it is Edgar Varèse. Born in France in 1883, Varèse
was a student protege and friend of 20th century masters such as Debussy, Busoni, Richard Strauss, Ravel, Picasso, and Rodin. His quest for artistic
freedom and a release from the traditions and dogmatism of the classical music
hierarchy placed him on a search for the "liberation of sound" that
culminated in his moving to America. This search led him to the use of new and
found instruments in the from of sirens, Chinese blocks and countless other
percussives, a break from traditional tonalities and structures, and eventually
to the use of magnetic tape constructions – "musique concrete" – in composition
and performance.
Until the last decade of his life
(he died in 1965), Varèse created in relative obscurity. His works were
performed only as controversial premieres by the likes of Leopold Stokowski, and they never entered
into the standard classical repertoire. In spite of a lack of recognition in
his lifetime, Varèse's influence was widely felt by those who subsequently
questioned the creativity and meaning of music. Composers such as John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and George Crumb have all sought answers based at least partially on Varèse's work. Charlie Parker begged to be taken on as a pupil of Varèse, and in recent years his
shadow has hung over Joe Zawinul, whose dynamic
percussion figures in "Unknown Soldier" are derived from Varèse's
"Ionisation". Many artists from the AACM,
such as the Art Ensemble Of
Chicago and Anthony Braxton, have Varèse as a
precursor in the use of "little instruments" and atonal structures.
In rock, Pink Floyd's earlier works, such
as "Atom Heart Mother" and the studio album of "Ummagumma",
employ the use of tape constructions interpolated with real time playing a la
Varèse's "Déserts".
But for many people the first
knowledge of Varèse's name came from a 1966 LP entitled "Freak Out!" by the Mothers Of Invention, in the form of a quote
attributed to Varèse: "The present day composer refuses to die" (He
actually said "The present day composer in America ..."). Though he
has been one of Varèse's most ardent public supporters, the Varèse influence is
not always evident in Frank Zappa's rock songs. It turns up in his more serious
music, tape constructions, and arrangements, especially on "Lumpy Gravy" and the "200 Motels" soundtrack. It is
more Varèse's spirit of breaking from conventions and finding your own voice
that one finds in Zappa's work.
This past spring, Zappa served as
master-of-ceremonies at a Varèse retrospective conducted by Joel Thome with the Orchestra Of Our
Time, playing to an audience for whom Zappa was the principle draw at New
York City's Palladium Theatre. Zappa's obvious regard for Varèse's music served
him well in a role reduced to keeping the audience quiet during the
performances. The day before the concert, Kimberly Haas and John Diliberto
interviewed Zappa, during which he elucidated a contemporary perspective on
Varèse and his music.
John Diliberto: How did
you first find out about Edgar Varèse?
That's
a very simple story. I read an article in Look magazine in the early '50s which
was a feature saying what a great guy Sam Goody was because he was such an exciting merchandiser and he could sell
anything, he could sell any kind of record. And to give an example of what a
great merchandiser he was, it said that he was even able to sell an album
called "Ionisation" which had a bunch of drums
banging, and it described the album in very negative terms. When I read that, I
thought it sounded exactly like the kind of album that I wanted to hear because
I had been playing drums since I was 12. So I went looking for the album and I
finally found it after a couple of months' search, and I took it home, put it
on, and I loved it as soon as I heard it.
JD: What year was that?
'53
JD: So Edgar Varèse was
still really active at that time?
Well,
as a matter of fact he was just becoming active again. He stopped composing
pretty much around 1940 because nobody would play his music, and he couldn't
earn a living. So he was messing with various other odd jobs trying to keep
himself afloat, and he just stopped writing. When I called him up in 1955, he
had either just finished or was in the process of working on "Déserts", which according
to his wife Louise (I talked to her last night) he just sort of did bits and pieces
on for 15 years. That was the one he started around the '40s and just didn't
have any urge to complete because he knew nobody was going to play it.
JD: Do you think the
fact that Varèse was alive and relatively active during the time when you were
getting into his music affected you differently than if he was an older
composer?
He was
already quite old at that time, and I just liked it because of the way it
sounded. It didn't have anything to do with the splendor and charm of all the
folklore that goes with being a composer. I was dealing with it just as
something that I heard that provided enjoyment for me.
JD: Do you think that
your response would be different if you were hearing it for the first time now,
with the background that you have?
No, the
only difference would be that the background I have now is probably stronger in
the technical field, and I'd be able to listen to a recording, say, and make
judgments about the quality of production, the quality of the pressing, the
quality of the engineering, and the quality of the performance. Whereas at that
time I didn't know any of those kinds of things, and I just accepted it and
liked it. Today I would make more critical distinctions between one performance
and another; I have just about every record of any of his pieces that's
available, and I do have my favorites among those.
JD: Do you think that
people in general would have a different reaction if Varèse's music was
happening now as opposed to 70, 60 years ago?
People
would have a different reaction to it today depending on the packaging in which
it was presented. For instance, if he suddenly jumped on the scene with his
fingernails painted black, shocking orange hair, some funny-looking sunglasses,
maybe a skinny tie and pants that were too short, pointed shoes, and he bopped
around a little bit while the thing was being performed, it would probably
register as very exciting and new. But if a man who looked like Varèse actually
walked out and presented this to today's world, I don't think that people would
be too stimulated by it.
JD: What aspects of his
music do you think have been absorbed into contemporary music now? On one
level, say, the contemporary pop level or the rock level and on another level
the contemporary classical music level?
Anytime
you watch a show on television and there's a scary scene and there's one
sustained chord and one or two tiny little percussion bips in the background,
you'll know the guy who wrote that movie score, that TV score, never would have
thought of it unless Varèse had done it first, because percussion just wasn't
used that way, and he proved that one little knock on the claves or one little
boop on the temple block against a tense chord told so much about a certain
topic; nobody had done anything like that before. He just said hey, this will
work, and he did it and a lot of people when they hear that scary music don't
know where a lot of the mechanisms of scary music came from. But he didn't
write the things to be scary, I don't think, he just wrote them because he was
dealing with the musical raw materials in a very individualistic way.
JD: I think Varèse often
said he wanted to liberate sound from the limitations of the keyboard. Do you
think that he succeeded in doing that in his music?
I don't
know.
JD: Do you think he
would have succeeded more so had he had access to a current synthesizer?
No, not
necessarily, I mean he would have written a different kind of music. But the
thing that is fantastic about what he wrote for normal instruments is that he got
sounds out of them that nobody had dreamed of before. For instance, "Déserts", which is
probably the starkest of the pieces in terms of the way they deal with the raw
material, there're special overblown chords that produce difference tones,
which you wouldn't be able to get any other way – you know what I'm talking
about? If you take two intervals and play them very loudly on a woodwind
instrument – for instance, this one spot where two piccolos are playing either
a Major second or minor second apart, very high octave – when you blow it real
hard you hear a third note that's not there. To know in advance what's going to
come out and to plan your composition to achieve effects like that was
something that people just hadn't thought of doing before.
JD: Do you think that
Varèse's work with electronics was very influential on the academic level and
on the pop level?
No,
because the things that he was doing with electronics were probably related
more to sculpture than they were to electronics. The tapes that he did were
collages of sound sources and not necessarily electronic music as people think
of it today.
JD: It was musique
concrète.
Yeah,
it was musique concrete.
JD: But he was still
breaking into new territory at the time with "Poème Electronique" and "Déserts".
Well, I
don't know historically who came first – the chicken or the egg – in that
realm. I know there were some other composers working in that medium at that
time – I don't know who fired the first shot, so to speak – but he didn't
really have good equipment to do it on. I mean some of the tapes were
distorted, and I don't think that he wanted to hear that rough kind of sound. I
think that some of the effects are gotten just by over-modulating input and
saturating the tape. To me it's like a guy who didn't really know how a tape
recorder worked and wanted this part to be really loud, he didn't know that if
you just cranked it up it wouldn't get really loud, it would just get really
shitty. I mean that's what it sounds like to me, he might have had something
else in mind, but the equipment that he had access to was not very elaborate –
things were pretty crude back then.
JD: In Varèse's
biography there are times where Louise seems to indicate where Edgar, like Stravinsky, didn't like emotion in
his music.
Well,
it depends on how you're going to use the word "emotion". I think
that from a scientific standpoint the way that materials are put together you
wouldn't think of as an emotional procedure, but the materials have a very
emotional impact when you hear them put together. And there are certain
indications in the score that aren't just "play this loud, play this
soft." There's one part in "Hyperprism" where the trombone player is
instructed to say "ho ho ho" through his horn. That's not much of an
emotion, but it's not exactly scientific either. And in either "Amériques" or
"Arcana" it has that little piccolo melody that's doubled with bells
dancing along up on the top, and when he wrote that she told me that he would
demonstrate it and whistle it and kind of dance around the room a little bit,
and it was a cheerful thing – not all deadly serious in the sense that these
are measured qualities being played against each other in order to yield this
scientific result at the end of the piece. I mean, it's human music, and that's
one of the reasons why I get such a good feeling from it – because it's not
based on a mathematical formula. It's not like that other sterile kind of music
that's really pretty hard to take. He's dealing with SOUND; he writes that
stuff because it SOUNDS good.
JD: That's one aspect
that I wanted to get into, Varèse's breaking away from common melodies, common
rhythms, and the way he was dealing with SOUNDS. Could you talk about that a
little bit?
Well, a
lot depends on how much you understand about ordinary music, you know, music of
the so called "real world" and what people normally think of as being
"acceptable" classical music and what they think of as being
"quality" classical music – the good stuff that had gone before. My
theory about all that runs something like this: as soon as it was discovered that
a man or anybody, even a dog, could write something down with symbols that
could be decoded by another person, or dog, later to produce music, it was
discovered right about that same time that you couldn't earn a living from
doing this. And it was also discovered that if you wanted to do this and hear
music, you had to be patronized – somebody had to pay the freight – this was
either the church or a king. If the church didn't like what you wrote, they got
out the red-hot tweezers and pulled out your toenails; if the king didn't like
what you wrote he'd chop your head off. The kings all had syphilis and were
crazy, and the church was, you know, the church. So, just because somebody is
paying to have a composition done or is paying to support a composer doesn't
necessarily mean that the music that is written to assuage the taste of the
paying entity is good, but all the music that survives that we call classical
music is based on the taste of either a clerical person or some crazy rich
person with a crown on his head. Those norms are perpetuated by music critics
who now stand in the shoes of the disgusting clerics and the crazy kings, and
they keep judging the music based on these norms which shouldn't be applied,
and it's unfortunate that the norms came into existence in the first place.
JD: So how did Varèse
move away from these norms?
He just
said that this is wrong. I never spoke with him about it, but I would imagine
from listening to the music that he just chucked the whole thing out the
window, and said "I'm going to do it my way." It sounds like that
because it doesn't depend on any of those mechanisms; it has a whole different
set of mechanisms that makes it work, and it's very ingenious the way it's put
together, and it's a very brave step to take.
JD: The one thing I
notice about Varèse's music is that you have to approach it with different ears
so you can feel what's going on.
Right!
I'll give you another quote that I got from talking to Louise yesterday. She
told me, "I'm not a musician, I don't have any technical skill and I like
his music," and she said that she asked Varèse to teach her some music,
and he said it's not necessary – "just be like a blotter and absorb
it."
Kimberly Haas: In
retrospect, I've seen musical historians call Varèse the most influential or
the most innovative composer of the 20th century. Do you think that is true?
Well, I
would say that he's not the most influential. He was probably the most
innovative in terms of one guy against the world setting out on his own and
doing individualistic-type things. Probably the most influential composer in
terms of how many people imitated his style, in recent years, that award would
go to Webern first, for being the founder of the "boop-beep" school and
also to Penderecki because of the "texture" music that a lot of people imitate.
But I think that even his music grows out of some of the textural experiments
that Varèse did.
KH: What about Aaron
Copland?
I think Aaron Copland probably did more to foster the stereotype of American music as being
any symphonic event that has a xylophone doubling the violin section. There is
so much American music that has been written by the American academic branch of
composition and you're going: "Hey, it's an American symphony they're playing
– it's a hoedown tune and there's a xylophone doubling the melody on top."
I mean there're certain things that Copland has written that I really enjoy,
like the "Fanfare For The Common Man" is one of the really hot tunes
of the century I think, but there's something too easy about it.
KH: It seems like he's
the mentor of many, many composer today.
Well,
if you want to be immediately accepted all you have to do is write those
American kind of tunes, put them in an orchestral setting, and then everybody
will say that you are really great. Or you write fugues – well who gives a shit
about that? That's not the problem anymore. I mean if you want to write a
fugue, fine, but to use all of those norms to judge the quality of what's being
done ... that's a bad thing because there're people working in other fields of
music looking to do other things, and as long as the music critics judge their
work by those other standards, they're always going to come up losers. And with
the public only being told negative things about new music, this image being
perpetuated of this music being something for the few, is bad; it keeps you
dumb; it keeps you mediocre. America should take pride in things that have been
produced here that are exceptional, that are different, that are daring, not
things that pretend to be artistic, things that pretend to be different, or
things that pretend to be daring. America should opt for the real shit. But
they don't because they never get exposed to it. The really dangerous stuff
never gets on the radio, and you never hear about it. Because everything you
hear about the so-called musical life in the United States is told to you in
newspapers and magazines by people who are not qualified to speak of it,
because they can't tell a good composition from a bad one, and they can't tell
the difference between a great composition that has been badly performed or a
mediocre composition that got the big MOLTO VIBRATO treatment by a major
American orchestra. There's no taste involved
there.
KH: I've never seen any of
Varèse's music performed in concert. Is it captured well on record, compared to
the performance?
It's
two different experiences. In the performance you can see what the people have
to go through in order to play it, and that's exciting; remember that when you
go to a concert, easily 50 percent of what you experience is visual. But on
record I would say that I've heard a couple of the pieces that I thought got
real good performances. But not all of them have been performed greatly, yet.
You know they're just sort of mediocre performances, because nobody spends the
amount of time to perfect the recording. You hear of groups like Fleetwood Mac spending $1,300,000 over 13 months in the studio to record
"Tusk", and they don't spend anywhere near that to get a good
performance of orchestral music because the records don't sell, and the
companies that put the records out don't want to invest a disproportionate amount
of money on something that's not going to bring them a return.
KH: It was the last
couple of years of his life, during the early '60s, when Varèse finally got
some acclaim here. The way it's always described, it's like he got his first
recognition fromColumbia Records, and then all of a
sudden everyone was applauding him.
I think
that in order for him to make it, he had to get on Columbia Records so that the
pieces could be heard, so that there could be some distribution of the pieces.
I know that if Columbia hadn't recorded the music and done a certain amount of
promotion for the release of those albums, then his royalties during the last
years of his life wouldn't have been what they were. He actually managed to
make $6,000.
KH: Do you think Varèse
might have achieved his acclaim earlier, or that his career might have gone
differently, if he had stayed in Europe?
If he
had stayed in Germany, I don't know, it's hard for me to speculate about that
because I'm not familiar with that part of his career. He did go to Europe for
a while and achieved more success in France during the '30s than he had
experienced in the United States. Even the critics that didn't like his music
didn't dismiss him as a buffoon. You know, he was written about in the United
States like he was some kind of quack who didn't know what he was doing, but even
the people who didn't really care for the pieces in Paris still admitted the
fact that he was a genius and he was definitely doing something that nobody had
attempted to do before. Americans don't give you that break; everything in
America is designed to be mediocre – everybody craves mediocrity here – and
it's the wrong way to do it. Life is more fun with a few things that are
excellent, that can be appreciated, you know. Life doesn't get better if
everybody is the same; that's boring. You want that, move to Russia. Put on a
grey suit and everybody do the same thing, work the same job. Being in a land
that is supposed to provide opportunities to do things that are personal and
individual – they're punished here. That's the temper of the times. You do something
that is really daring, and you take your life in your hands. Everybody goes for
the mediocre stuff.
