![]()
1. Arcana, for orchestra 18:46
Octandre, for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, trombone, and double bass
2. Assez lent 2:33
3. Très vif et nerveaux 1:51
4. Grave 2:24
Offrandes, for soprano & chamber orchestra
5. Chanson de là-haut 3:33
6. La Croix du Sud 3:44
7. Intégrales, for 11 winds & 4 percussionists 11:07
Déserts for brass, percussion, piano & tape
8. [Untitled] 3:57
9. First Electronic Interpolation (beginning) 2:57
10. First Electronic Interpolation (conclusion) 8:18
11. Second Electronic Interpolation (beginning) 2:11
12. Second Electronic Interpolation (conclusion) 1:53
13. Third Electronic Interpolation (beginning) 4:11
14. Third Electronic Interpolation (conclusion) 3:40 Maryse Castets - Soprano (Vocal)
Christopher Lyndon-Gee - Conductor
Polish Radio and Television National Symphony OrchestraAMG:"Varèse's passionate views concerning composition and the physicality of sound are expressed coherently in Arcana. In this work, a kind of a freely extended passacaglia, a basic 11-note musical idea is subjected to all kinds of permutations and variations, eventually returning in an echo of its original shape just before a coda. The musical continuity provided by this scheme allowed Varèse great freedom in orchestration, enabling him to frequently change instrumental combinations without much fear of confusing the listener behind. The works repetetiveness, revealing certain obvious patterns, also allows the listeners to better appreciate the painstakingly chosen and constructed timbres. The orchestra required for Arcana is enormous: 120 players on a greater number of instruments, including 40 different percussions that are a constant presence in the overall sound. Disliking the lack of pitch-precision in the strings, Varèse uses the string section quite idiosyncratically. While Varèse described Arcana as a symphonic poem, his critics, perhaps more astutely, have relied on visual analogies to describe the work, evoking such objects as paintings and frescoes. The harmonic stasis of the piece and its emphasis on color - it is a kind of visualized music - do invite such analogies. In their efforts to describe the music vividness, writers have reached for extreme images. describig, for example, describing Arcana as Mount Etna blazing in the night. Not quite volcanic, however, Arcana is nevertheless something like a series of orchestral eruptions, as a result of melodic continuity, exciting rhythmic displacements, and novel coloristic choices. This is easily one of Varèse's most approachanble pieces. The title points to to the arcane writings of Paracelsus (1493 -1541). While Paracelsus didn't inspire Arcana, Varèse has compared his dream world to the mystical insights found in the works of Paracelsus. Thus, the symphonic poem is named Arcana not after Paracelsus, but in homage to him, of whom Varèse once remarked: 'You can count Paracelsus among my friends'.
Varèse often insisted that music is both a science and an art. With his ingeniously inventive orchestration in mind, through which he put many sounds into the world that had never existed before, perhaps he should have summed it up as 'alchemy'; he certainly did love the symbolism of arcane religions. Octandre is a brilliant, purely technical study of the inexplicable abracadabra of sound that Carlos Chávez rightly called gold. With this accomplishment, Varèse moved significantly closer to his ideal of a purely material music of 'spatial projection.' But although Octandre could be by no other composer, it is unlike Varèse's other works in a couple of significant ways. The piece is in three movements, labeled according to tempo - Assez lent, Très vif et nerveux, Grave-Animé et jubilatoire. Each opens with a different instrument to announce its particular character - oboe, piccolo, and bassoon - and is essentially a revisitation of the same structural concepts from a unique angle. More significant, however, is the absence of percussion, which usually forms the very core of his sound. Anyone familiar with his other pieces so feels the absence that their ears prick up every couple of beats expecting percussion noise, as if the violent drums are only waiting in ambush. By the time of Octandre, 1923, he'd already composed several pieces - Amériques, Offrandes, Hyperprism - that extensively used percussion. Sonic researcher that he was, he perhaps wanted to test his ability to work without his favorite tools and so, deliberately limited himself. He knew such an exercise could only increase his knowledge and bring him that much closer to realizing the mysterious, unheard-of music of his waking visions. And so it did. Varèse did not, however, abandon his usual aesthetic in Octandre: the winds, brass, and double bass are conspicuously made to fill in, against their instrumental natures, for the absent percussion. They're often used only to articulate nervous rhythmic motifs that unexpectedly accumulate from solo passages into massive, weapon-like pounding in shattering, prismatic colors. Wherever somewhat extraneous melodic lines surface, usually in lonely solo passages, they get pureed before long in the blades of emphatic rhythm, especially in the clamor of the shimmering brass that comes in like the attacking sword of an imaginary sun god.
The mesmerizing two-part Offrandes is possibly the most direct statement of his tormented inner world Edgard Varèse ever made. It's that tremor of personal pain pulsating through all the vividly colored din that Stravinsky was reacting to when he said that the first harp attack in part two nearly gives him a heart attack. He called it 'the most extraordinary noise in all of Varèse.' Offrandes is for soprano and a representative chamber orchestra, with harp and eight percussion instruments. These are used in ever-changing combinations (emphasizing percussion, winds, and brass) and with a constantly varied dynamic. Except for the vocal part, there's no melody as such. The accompaniment is all built on flinty little rhythmic gestures that sometimes mutate into a fragment of a tune. The stormy instrumental parts could almost make up a Varèse piece by themselves. They often go into a howl or die down to nervous mutterings of percussion - ominous rattles of snare drum, woodblocks, castanets - under the heavily chromatic vocal line. In part one, 'The Song From Above,' it seems as if he is suppressing a wish that the voice was a more flexible instrument, reaching so high he strains her range. In part two, 'The Southern Cross,' however, on a dreamlike, apocalyptic poem by José Tablada, he's in complete control and makes the precariousness of her top notes into a potent source of dramatic tension. The point, as in all of Varèse's mature music, is color, intensity, and instrumental attack, which here evoke a vivid, haunted internal world. As Tablada says in his Apocalyptic text: '...the murdered women are awakening.' Although listeners always feel that Varèse's music is poetically composed from his subjective center, his instrumental aesthetic is more mechanical (or machine-like) than organic. The lyricism that the soprano brings to Offrandes illuminates the organic/mechanic dialectic of struggle that powers Varèse's music: the diminishing scale of the human individual in relation to humanity's rigid bureaucracies and its machines. Varèse certainly looked forward to the future, especially the musical freedoms it would bring, but the tragic sense of humanity in retreat before the brutal steamroller of conformity was a source of great spiritual suffering to him, which he movingly expressed in Offrandes.
Edgard Varèse completed Intégrales in 1925. It is scored for woodwinds, brass, and 17 different percussion instruments played by four percussionists. Varèse's term 'spatial music' was first applied to this work, which broadly denotes a concept that pertains to all of his surviving output. It was his way of depicting music as a collection of coexisting sound properties (melody, harmony, rhythm, etc.). Instruments are chosen for the specific aspect of music they do best (the composer preferred winds and percussion) and they appear in sonic groupings that occur in different temporal durations from one another. This was dubbed 'spatial' music because it is easier to describe it in terms of physical and temporal space; the durations among the different blocks of sound drift closer and further apart while appearing and reappearing in variations of themselves. Tensions vary in accordance the proximity of the sound blocks.
Intégrales is dedicated to Juliana Force, and its title is not meant to denote an association with anything extra-musical. One of Varèse's former students pointed out that this work was written in spite of the limitations of conventional instruments and notation, that the world of sound contained in this piece is not about the instruments, but the distinction of the timbres between them. Instruments are intended to either blend or contrast with other instruments depending on whether or not they are in the same sound 'block.' Many listeners feel that this ambivalence to instruments made Varèse better suited to music that excludes them, such as tape music, which he eventually turned to. He said that the future of sounds required composers and electrical engineers to find the solution to the outdated means of generating notes. This geometric and abstract approach to music came to him while listening to the scherzo of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, which inspired in him a sense of, in his own works, 'projection in space.' Intégrales lends itself to visual impressions of celestial bodies in motion. The composer said that mathematics and astronomy inspired him; the motion of planets revolving around a star is comparable to the blocks of sound heard in this piece.
The premiere of Intégrales was peculiar because it was so well received by the general public. At the Aeolian Hall in New York, Leopold Stokowski conducted it on March 1, 1925 to an enthusiastic crowd. This was not a group of avant-garde enthusiasts, but a more or less traditional audience who enjoyed the work so much that Stokowski was obliged to perform it again that evening. However, other than a few admiring writers, the critics hated Intégrales and mocked the piece at length. It is possible that this work offended the sensibilities of a writing community that had spent years building a meaningful way of talking about new music. Varèse's output still eludes easy description and the vast majority of musical terms and ideas available to listeners and writers do not pertain to his style. His own descriptions of his works are often opaque. Listeners without an extended musical vocabulary have the advantage of not instinctually attempting to turn the experience of Intégrales into words.
This powerfully moving work, created between 1950 and 1954, was the first piece for magnetic tape - two-tracks of 'organized sound' - and orchestra. Possibly first conceived when Varèse lived in the deserts of New Mexico in the mid-1930s, it was imagined to be a score to which a film would have been subsequently made - a film consisting of images of the deserts of Earth, of the sea (vast distances under the water), of outer space (galaxies, etc.), but above all, the deserts in the mind of humankind - especially a memory of the terrors and agonies from the world wars of the first half of the twentieth century, including concentration camps, atomic warfare, and their continuing resonances. The taped music (originally planned for an unrealized work called 'Trinum') primarily presents those images in three interpolations that separate the music for the acoustic orchestra - winds, brass, a resonant piano, and five groups of percussion. This orchestra part expresses the gradual advance of mankind toward spiritual sunlight. The orchestra music is built from intense aggregates of sound, rather than scales for melody, and rhythm is treated not as a continuous pulse, but as a support for the sound-form, rhythm as a vibration of intensity. Of course, this highly dramatic work, in touch with the deeper, repressed emotions of world society at the time it was created (and powerful still), caused protest and violent reactions in many concert halls. It is now recognized as an exceptional example of truly humanistic music."
Arcana / Intégrales / Déserts or
Arcana / Intégrales / Déserts
