Edgard Varèse: A Few Observations of His Music

Author(s): Milton Babbitt

Source: Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Spring - Summer, 1966), pp. 14-22
Published by: Perspectives of New Music
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/832209
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EDGARD VARESE:
A FEW OBSERVATIONS OF HIS MUSIC*

MILTON BABBITT

THIS IS, to the best of my knowledge, only the second occasion on

which I have been granted the somewhat unnerving privilege of
speaking publicly of a composer's music in that composer's presence.
On the first such occasion, the composer was Igor Stravinsky, being
done homage in his 80th birthyear; now, on this second occasion,
the composer is Edgard Varese, in his 80th birthyear;1 and it was
of Varese that Stravinsky has predicted: "His music will survive;
we know that now, for it has dated in the right way." Although I
have no direct knowledge of Stravinsky's survival theory of music,
I infer from this statement that it derives from Darwin rather than
from Gresham, and, having been obliged to have the temerity to
speak of Stravinsky's music in his presence, it requires relatively
little courage to conjecture as to the meaning of his prose in his
absence, particularly since, for those of us who regard it as far less
remarkable when Varese's music was composed than that it was
composed at all, it is not difficult to interpret Stravinsky's observa-
tion to our satisfaction. Surely, the most critical factor of the "aging"
process has been the transformation of much of this body of music
from works little heard in the first quarter-century of their existence
to works widely heard in the past decade and a half. And just as we,
who pressed our mind's ear almost beyond its capacities in attempting
to re-create, or-more accurately-create, mentally the unprecedented
sonorous world of this music from those scarce scores to which we
had access thirty years ago, understandably measured its originality
primarily, if not solely, by the extent of the difficulty of this inference
from experienced and recalled sound to the sound of Varese, so the
first hearing and first rehearing of the music directed attention to the
striking singularities of the single events, and induced the ultimately
unjust appraisal, in the name of finally redressing injustice, that this
music was most remarkable in its insular originality, its absence of
* This article consists mainly of selected and slightly altered portions of a talk
given at Peterborough, New Hampshire on August 21, 1965, on the occasion of the
presentation of the Edward MacDowell Society Medal of Achievement to Varese.
1 Varese's birthyear is usually reported as 1885, but 1883 appears to be correct.

14
 VARiSE: OBSERVATIONS OF HIS MUSIC

significant ancestry or possible progeny. Yet, it appears now to be

acceptably deferential and appreciativeto say that, now that those
coruscatingsonoritiesand dazzling rhythmicwebs have become more
familiar, we can penetrate beneath and beyond them, and-if they
have lost a little of their breathtakingimpact with time and repeti-
tion-we can now value the music for other, more durableproperties,
not excluding those of historical precedence and chronological orig-
inality. But I prefer to assert that the sonorities have lost nothing of
their luster, the rhythmsnothing of their fascinationpreciselybecause
we have penetratedfrom the local to the global, from the event as
separable and independentto its temporal and spatial dependencies,
relationships, and influences. If we have identified possible ancestral
sources, this seems of far less consequencethan that we have recog-
nized the extent to which Varese's music engages the same issues,
representsthe same kind of stage in a mainstreamof musical devel-
opment as that of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Webern, and Berg, and
that its eventual originality is thus most fruitfully and justly gauged
in the light of its shared connections, as "competitive"rather than
as insular. If this music has already outlived its most skillful imita-
tions, it is because the only satisfactory imitation must be total
duplication,for the attributesof the surface are structurallycompre-
hensible not so much as primitives from which the remainder of a
compositionmay be said to derive, but as themselves derived from
other dimensions of the composition. The "new sounds," it is now
manifest, were less new as things in themselves than as new infer-
ences from compositionalpremises.
This, in turn, affects the very mode of presentation of such a
compositionalpremise, idea, donnee, which is, in its turn, a central
characteristicof Varese's style, for it involves the setting forth of a
contextual,referentialnorm for an entire work. This crucial function
is defined not only by the customary emphasis of priority, but by
simplicity and-often immediate-repetition, repetition not of all
dimensions of the musical idea, but exact repetition of one or more
dimensions. By "simplicity,"I mean brevity, the minimal motivic
form in which the idea appearsin the work, linearityratherthan poly-
phony, and-often-a greater internal homogeneity than later forms
of the "same"material. I shall refer to and recall for you Octandre,2
because it is probably Varese's best known and most widely per-
formed ensemble work, as an instance of these characteristics.The
2 Neither performed nor notated musical
examples were available during the talk;
to employ them here would prejudice the necessarily informal and general nature of
the original discussion.

15
 PERSPECTIVES OF NEW MUSIC

opening four-note statement, clearly articulated by a pause, and by

immediate pitch and attack rhythm repetition (Varese always re-
garded grace notes as on the beat), functions in the work much less
as a total motive than as a unit of harmonic content, for, as the
work unfolds, these initial four notes are interpreted as representa-
tives of an unordered collection of four pitch-classes, to within trans-
position. This collection, not insignificantly, is one of the simplest
all-combinatorial tetrachords, simplest in the sense that it is one of
the two such tetrachords generated by a single interval. At the outset,
this tetrachord is presented by temporal proximity (immediate suc-
cession), equally clearly, the dominant motive of the work, extracted
from the tetrachord by spatial proximity (registral association, in
a reasonably unambiguous sense of the slippery word "register")
appears throughout in its initial ordering, under customary trans-
formations. The three-note succession G-flat-E-D-sharp is verified
immediately by twofold repetition, and a disjunct transposition (still
stated within, and registrally extracted from, the tetrachord) and
then stated explicitly by direct succession, conjoining spatial and
temporal proximity, by the entrance of the clarinet as an "answer"
at the "fifth above." The prominent foreground thematic role of this
succession in the rest of the work is perfectly clear: in the trumpet
and horn at the end of the first movement, divided between the two
highest instruments (flute, with the first note, and clarinet, with the
following two, this division into one and two corresponding to the
linear division of the motive in the original tetrachord) on the first
of the reiterated chords of the second movement (eight statements
beginning with the first measure after rehearsal 5), and in the
trumpet throughout the sixteen measures of the "repeated" chord in
the third movement (where the F-sharp that completes the tetra-
chord is heard in the lowest note of the chord).
The ordered, tritone-transposed return of the initial tetrachord at
the end of the first movement ends with the elision of the fourth note,
clarifying the origin of the three-note figure of the piccolo which
opens the second movement as the tritone pitch-class transposition
of the first three notes of this terminating tetrachord, and-there-
fore-as a duplication of the opening three pitch-classes of the compo-
sition, reordered as a retrograde. The chord-forming entrances which
follow the piccolo on the clarinet and trombone present the same
trichord, now in the initial ordering. This trichord, the only possible
three-note extraction from the tetrachord other than the forms of the
previously discussed three-note thematic unit, is a primary articulative
and unifying element in the second and third movements, and sug-
* 16
 VARtSE: OBSERVATIONS OF HIS MUSIC

gests why these two movements are performed without separation.

The final chord of the second movement, which is the chord of
maximal registral dispersion in the entire work, includes the pitch-
classes of the opening tetrachord of the first movement as the highest
four notes, and those of the closing tetrachord of the movement as
the lowest four notes, with immediate succession thus transformed
into immediate simultaneity, again, in its own way, the horizontal
and the vertical. The tetrachord is stated linearly, early in the third
movement, as the theme for imitation in the oboe, but now reordered
so that the original three-note theme, inverted, is presented by linear,
rather than by spatial, proximity; at this point, too, the pitch dyad
F-E returns in the registral placement it occupied in the opening
tetrachord, and-finally-occurs in thirteen consecutive measures in
the last section of the movement, until the piccolo takes over these
pitch-classes as a trill. The final sound of the composition is the
trichord that opened the second movement, sounded as a simultaneity
and transposed to the level presented linearly by the double-bass at
the beginning of the third movement.
If I have spent what may appear to be a disproportionate amount
of time identifying some of the modes of occurrence and adaptive
transformations of the pitch content of the assumptive source, I have
done so in order to attempt to show the structural basis of certain of
Varese's style characteristics. An analogy with spoken, or printed,
language may serve to clarify the issue. If one were to ask: how
large a sample of an unfamiliar "natural" language would have to be
observed before phonemic, or graphemic, constraints could be inferred
and employed to predict language events with an accuracy reasonably
reflecting the redundancy of the language, obviously the answer
would have to be that the sample would have to be large. But, if an
"artificial" language were constructed, of but few phonemes and a
limited number of possibilities of concatenation of them, then a small
sample should suffice. The Varesian opening statement is such a
sample; its repetition is a reiteration and an emphasizing of the rele-
vant elements in defining a work's constraints. Also, and most impor-
tant, it is of such a character as not to suggest that it is itself an
instance of a familiar "language" system, whose associated constraints
would then be inferred, mistakenly and, for the coherent hearing of
the rest of the work, disastrously.
Varese, like Webern, directs one's ears to the structural and as-
sociative relevance of every dimension of the musical event, not, as
does Webern, by isolating the event, by framing it with silence,
above, below, before, and after, but by isolating the singularity that
*17-
 PERSPECTIVES OF NEW MUSIC

such initially defined determinacycan bestow upon the event, even in

the most elaborate of vertical complexes, and the most varied of
linear configurations.
If immediate repetition, as reinforcement, characterizes the Va-
rtsian opening, it also and therefore characterizes the means of
continuation, of achieving delineation and contrast within a single
dimension, and total climax. But even at its most strikingly extreme,
as at the entire 21-measure moderatosection of Integrales, only one
measureis totally repeatedand but once, and-at the conclusionof the
section-a two-measureunit is immediately repeated twice (I over-
look the probablyerroneouschange of the dynamic indication of the
first piccolo on the first repetition). From such parsimonywith regard
to total repetition could be inferred the almost total abstinencefrom
conjoined, all-dimensionalrepetition as "architectonic,"the determi-
nant of external"form"patterns.In this Varese reflects, and probably
antedates, the contemporaryconcern with "polyphonic"rather than
phased repetitions. In his case, this is achieved far less often by
holding one factor (say, the rhythmic) fixed, while another (say,
pitch) is altered, than by employing differentperiods of repetitionin
individual-usually, instrumental-lines; the result is different en-
semble rhythms, dynamics, simultaneities, etc. associated with indi-
vidual componentrepetitions. Even where this specific procedure is
made impossible by the medium, as in Density 21.5, the principle
is still maintained.There are, I believe, no two identical measures in
Density. The durationalsuccession associated with the attack points
of the initial three pitches occurs, in the same metrical orientation,
only at two furtherplaces in the work, and at those places is associated
with the opening interval succession also, but the pitch succession is
alteredin each case by transposition.The transpositionchoices, in one
sense, reflecttraditionalcriteriaof similitude, in that they are the two
which secure maximum pitch-class identification (beyond identity)
with the initial statement; but in a further sense, the choices are
"serial,"in that the order of occurrenceof these transpositionsreflects
the pitch-classorderingof the initial three-notesuccession. Obviously,
neither this nor any other work of Varese's is serial in any extensive
sense, or even much beyond the sense in which traditionalworks are
thematically "serial."And in the single instance of Density, where
it might be observedthat the orderedmotive is not further embedded
in an unordered collection, the serialism representedby the motive
and its transpositionsis combinational,not permutational,pitch-class
serialism. That Varese is not a "serialcomposer"is, clearly, not to be
construed as a normativestatement, but it is an importantreminder
18
 VARESE: OBSERVATIONS OF HIS MUSIC
that one of the fundamental aspects of the musical revolution in which
Varese was so primary a figure is that it was a struggle to create a
world of musics, not a struggle between one music and another, serial
and nonserial, tonal and "atonal." It is this that conveys the impression
that what the dominant composers of Varese's generation shared in
common was a lack of, an avoidance of, communality.
Linear repetitions create a rhythm of durations between such repe-
titions, so that there is also the sense in which repetitions of different
periodicities in simultaneous instrumental statements create "poly-
rhythms," and in which the individual rhythmic lines constitute a
partitioning of time units corresponding to the partitioning of smaller
units by pitch repetition in the individual line, or by repetition of
simultaneities in the ensemble. These analogies suggest means of
rhythmic linearization and delinearization as a mode of rhythmic
development, while still not involving the intricate and largely un-
resolved questions of rhythmic relatedness in terms of related trans-
formations, for such means are identity transformations, or-perhaps
more informatively-they are transformations among dimensions
rather than within a single dimension. Even so, the perception and,
correspondingly, the verbal formulation of such interdimensional
rhythmic relationships are complicated by the dependence of pro-
tensity perception not only upon duration but upon other dimensions
of the musical event. Now we know how dangerous and, often, inde-
fensible it is to speak of the "same rhythm" when the associated
pitches are different or different in number or different in contour or
associated with different dynamics or associated with different timbres.
Therefore, Varese is one of those composers, and the tribe has in-
creased many times and in many ways in the past thirty years, whose
music has necessarily directed our attention to the inadequacies of our
analytical concepts with regard to rhythm, by decreasing composi-
tional rhythmic redundancy, by increasing the number of rhythmic
configurations, and the dimensions in which these configurations are
made to appear.
Although it is probably the voluminous, strident sonority, dom-
inated by broad registral dispersion and acoustically "unconventional"
proportional ranges within the dispersion that is the primary associa-
tion with the name of Varese in the mind of the casual listener, in this
respect, as well, he is more parsimonious than would be guessed by
even a less casual listener. In all of Octandre, there are only eight
locations, associated with twelve nonidentical chords, and constituting
only some thirty-five measures, where all eight instruments are sound-
ing. Here, again, there is the avoidance of conjoined repetition: in no
19-
 PERSPECTIVES OF NEW MUSIC
two of these chords is the very ordering of instruments from top to
bottom the same, although in each of these chords the lowest note is
heardon the double-bass.Therefore,the effect of different"harmonies"
is by no means dependententirely on the explicit pitches presentedby
each instrument, but most importantly, on the strikingly different
spectra associated with these instruments, individually, and in all
constituent combinations,as a result of the different registral place-
ment of the "fundamental"in each instrumentand the differentregis-
tral relations among the instruments.It is clear that, for Varese, the
invariantaspect of an instrument,in some importantsense, the timbre
of an instrument, is to be identified with its formant, that fixed,
"amplificatory,"resonance region of an instrument, which operates
upon the spectrum of the input sound, resonating, according to the
characteristicsof the formantregion, those partialswhose frequencies
fall in this region, and-thereby-attenuating those whose frequencies
do not. So, only when a specific pitch (not just pitch-class) has been
assigned an instrument can we speak of the spectrum (and, to this
extent, the timbre) associatedwith the particularevent. The distribu-
tion of pitches in a chord, although the pitch-classes are contextually
derived, taken together with associated dynamics, is determined by
the degree of resultantdensity (the relationsamong all the component
frequenciespassed by the formantregion) desired,or-given a desired
dynamic level-a distribution is chosen that makes such a dynamic
level attainable, which is itself a matter of the relation of input
spectrum to formant characteristics.Crescendi, such as those in the
tres vif section of Octandre,producenot what can be most accurately
describedas a change in loudness of a fixed sonority,but a continuous
alterationof the number, relations, and densities of the partials of the
total spectrum; the percussion instruments themselves constitute
timbral resonanceregions sliced out of the frequencycontinuum.The
performanceinstructionsrequiredfor such controlledresults place the
performersin the most responsible and demanding of roles, that of
reproducing with the greatest possible accuracy and precision the
most explicit and subtle of specifications.
Such concern with and structural utilization of the timbral conse-
quences of dynamic, registral, and durational values approach the
condition of nonelectronic "synthesis,"and if the presence of such
procedures suggests one of the many musical dispositions that led
Varese to the need for the electronic medium, then his eventual ex-
periences with and compositionfor that medium seem to have "fed
back"into his instrumentalprocedures.The synthetic
separabilityof
the attack and "steady-state"portions of the event (or, in the case of
*20 *
 VARtSE: OBSERVATIONS OF HIS MUSIC
the percussive sound, the attack and decay portions) suggested the
analogous construction of instrumental sounds combining constituent
instruments into a resultant instrumental totality. For example, at
the beginning of Deserts, the eventual "steady-state" G of the piccolo
and F of the clarinet are compounded with an attack provided first
by piano, chimes, and xylophone, then by chimes, xylophone, and
high and low cymbals; then this latter attack is associated with
"steady-state" continuations in muted trumpets, and-finally-an at-
tack of chimes and vibraphone is associated with a "steady-state" in,
again, piccolo, but an octave higher, and flute. Throughout, the
piano provides a continual decay. In this way, too, percussion instru-
ments of "indeterminate pitch" acquire temporary, local pitch by
collocation, just as, conversely, instruments of definite pitch serve, on
occasion, primarily as vehicles of rhythmic projection.
I eagerly anticipate detailed discussions of Varese's music, which
concern themselves with the analysis of total progression, the motion
toward and from points of conjoined climax, by means of the trans-
formation of rhythmic components, particularly in the sense of the
number of attacks per unit time, the pitch content and range of
extrema, the dispersion and internal distribution of the elements of
similitudes, the total spectrum, and other compound concepts, for the
possibility of such discussion, if it is to be more than mere translation
from musical to verbal notation, depends upon the formulation of
scales to measure degrees of similitude applicable to such concepts.
Or, assuming that temporal progression and proximity define, in
Varese's music, his assumption of relatedness in these respects, to
what extent can such contextually defined norms of relatedness pro-
vide, in the course of a work, unambiguous adaptive scales?

IN ACCORD with Var~se's strong feelings on the matter, which cor-

respond to my own, I have tried to pay homage to Varese the man by
honoring the man's music. But, in conclusion, I shall allow myself a
few personal words about Varese, the colleague. Although, for
chronological and geographical reasons, I was unable to profit directly
from the International Composers' Guild, of which he was a cofounder,
we all have profited eventually, if indirectly, from that remarkable
pioneer of organizations for the performance of contemporary music.
But I have been privileged to observe Varese as the colleague of, the
champion of, and-most consequentially-the enthusiastic audience
for his younger colleagues, and as the eternal musical youth,
pursuing
and shaping the future at the Bell Laboratories and at the Columbia-
Princeton Electronic Music Center.
? 21 *
 PERSPECTIVES OF NEW MUSIC

As composers, as informed listeners, we can all express our deep

gratitude for Varese the composer; those of us who were fortunate
enough to have known him dare now to express our further gratitude,
our great affection for him, as colleague, as friend, as a man.

* 22 *