Amériques: Music for a New World
One more old essay I wrote for a graduate research class with Dr. Deanna Bush at NTSU (now UNT).
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AMÉRIQUES: MUSIC FOR A NEW WORLD
“I dream of instruments obedient to my thought and which with their contribution of a whole new world of unsuspected sounds, will lend themselves to the exigencies of my inner rhythm.”
Edgard Varese, June 1917, New York
Edgard Varese, dreamer and “sound-magician” was a Romantic artist in the true sense of the word. As a composer, he straddled the old and the new more than any other composer of this century. In his compositions, one can glean the influences of Debussy, Richard Strauss, and Stravinsky and see the seeds of the avant-garde of the 60s, notably Ligeti and Stockhausen.
In his lectures and writings, Varese constantly alluded to the theme of liberation and of a new world of sound. To him, the old concepts of melody or interplay of melodies were no longer valid. Instead, he envisaged a music that will “flow as a river flows” and only the “movement of sound masses, of shifting planes, will be clearly perceived.” In this regard, he revealed himself to be a greater radical than Schoenberg or even Boulez. The latter two composers were still preoccupied with the micro-structure of music—the melody, the counterpoint, the harmony, whereas Varese was more interested in the macro-structure, the forest rather than the leaves, so to speak.
In 1915, at the age of 32, Varese decided to cut his ties with the old world and strike out for the new. He arrived in New York with eighty dollars in his pocket, a score of “Bourgogne,” his only composition which he felt worthy enough to salvage (and which he later destroyed) and a burning idealism. This move was to prove pivotal to Varese’s art. It was as if Europe, with all its established institutions and traditions had rendered him sterile and impotent. For it was in New York that the germ of a new composition took root. Working in his apartment, he was especially mesmerized by the sound of “the lonely foghorns, the shrill peremptory whistles the whole river symphony . . .” emanating from the Hudson River nearby. He decided to title it “Amériques” because the word “America meant all discoveries, all adventures.” It symbolizes “new worlds on this planet, in outer space, and in the minds of man…”
“Amériques” was completed in 1922 and given its premiere by the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Stokowski on April 9, 1926. The initial reaction to the piece was hisses and boos from a normally staid and self-contained audience. On April 13, Stokowski performed the piece in New York which caused a reviewer to comment caustically on the boos and hisses that broke out again after “Mr. Stokowski finished Edgard Varese’s symphonic genuflection to the Fire Department and the Pneumatic Riveters’ Union.”
What was it about “Amériques” that could elicit such a controversial reception? First of all, the work is massive in scope and conception. The original version called for one hundred and forty two instruments including twenty one percussion instruments which include, among other things, two sirens. Although it has been analyzed to be in sonata form, there is little to warrant that label. Indeed it would be far easier to understand the work in the context of Varese’s own words; “The entire work will be a melodic totality. The entire work will flow as the river flows.” Later, he would define his concept of form as the result of a process, rather than a preconceived pattern to be slavishly followed.
Although “Amériques” looks to the future with its masses of colliding sound, of shifting timbres rather than harmony, it nevertheless remains solidly rooted in the established tradition of western music. There are echoes of Debussy’s “Prelude a l’apres-midi d’un faune” in the opening alto flute motif. There are references to Stravinsky’s “La Sacre du Printemps” in the violent bursts of sound-blocks and to the “Five Orchestral Pieces” of Schoenberg in its orchestration. However the work still remains unique in its primitivism, its sheer power and energy, in the slow and inexorable climb to the final climax.
One of music’s greatest pioneers, Varese fortunately lived long enough to enjoy world wide recognition. He died on November 7, 1965 at the age of eighty-two, in time to see the wonders of his “new world” realized, both in the advent of the space age and in the electronic revolution which has produced new instruments capable of more than anything he had ever dreamt of.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bloch, David. “The Music of Edgard Varese.” (Ph.d. dissertation, University of Washington, 1973)
Boretz, Benjamin, and Edward Cone. Perspectives on American Composers. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1971
Peyser, Joan. The New Music. New York: Delacorte Press, 1971, p.125-161.
Varese, Lousie. Varese, Looking-Glass Diary, Vol. I: 1883-1928. New York: .W. Norton & Company, 1972
—Denton, Feb 12, 1987