Edgard Varèse, FX Roth, Berliner Philharmoniker

Edgard Varèse Night  - two concerts - at the Philharmonie, François-Xavier Roth conducting the Berliner Philharmoniker, with Pierre-Laurent Aimard.  By sheer coincidence, this waas the day after the death of Chou Wen-chung, Varèse's friend and foremost scholar. (Please read more here)   Thoughtful programming !  First off, Joseph Haydn Symphony No. 59 in A major “Fire Symphony”an early work, from the 1760's.  The connection to Edgard Varèse?  Haydn was a court composer, obligated to turning out music for his employer,  Prince Nikolaus Esterházy. Yet Haydn created the modern symphony, paving the way for many others.  Varèse was a lone figure, pioneering new forms in a new world. The first concert featured Béla Bartók, another highly individual personality, who didn't write conventional symphonic works, but forged new approaches to other forms.

Pierre-Laurent Aimard played Bartók's Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 3, Sz 119 (1945), followed by Roth and the Berliners with Bartók's Dance Suite, Sz 77(1923). Stylish ! Varèse's Arcana for large Orchestra completed the set. Arcana is the biggest of Varèse's works, and relatively accessible.  The original version,from 1925-7,is scored for massive forces, roughly 120 players altogether,  68
 strings, 20 woodwinds, 20 brass and a phalanx of percussionsts playing 40 different instruments from timpani to castanets.  It's also very visual : watching is very much part of the experience.  It's not every day you see rows of trumpets and trombones, some muted, some not playing together, or 8 horns raised heavenwards. This time,we heard the more compact  revision from 1960, which balanced more neatly with Haydn and Bartók. Arcana is big, but its bigness springs from its musical function. It proceeds like a gigantic beast, its component parts articulated to move in stately formation, groups of instruments impacting on each other in constantly varying combinations. Whatever Varèse meant by its title, the piece moves as if it were a mythical creature brought to life by arcane spells and incantations. Varèse might be called the Wild Man of Modern Music, but he was aware of the importance of structure and progression. 

Logically then to the Late Night concert with members of the Berliner Philharmoniker in smaller ensemble. Varèse Density 21.5 for solo flute, emerging mysteriously like primeval sound, a single melodic instrument developing many different motifs. In Intégrales the piercing cry of the clarinet is answered by rumblings and fractured tappings in the percussion, the other winds picking up on the clarinet's long lines. At moments a snatch of a vaguely familiar tune, almost like Ravel Boléro which was not published at the time Intégrales was completed in 1923. Hyperprism, for winds and percussion, experiments with new sounds, the "klaxon" of Amériques, just one of the procession of timbres, textures and rhythms. Ionisation is orchestrated solely for percussion instruments. The concept, though, is ancient, since much non-western music is percussion based.  It connects, too, to the “primitive” that fascinated modern artists like Braque, and the ethos of Africa, "the Dark Continent" to New York audiences who were horrified by the piece at its premiere in 1933. Ions are particles that build up to form larger units. so Ionisation foresees the idea of cells of sound multiplying to form more complex structures, while fragmenting and re-forming.  Octandre for seven Winds and Double Bass is a group of three miniatures. In the first movement, marked assez lent, an oboe calls, answered by clarinet, both pitched closely so their sounds seem to vibrate off each other. This vibration becomes even more marked in the second movement, marked Très vif et nerveux, the dichotomy developed still further in the last movement marked Grave-Animé et jubilatoire. Nothing primitive in this tightly crafted orchestration.  Sarah Aristidou was the soloist in Offrandes from 1921, soon after the groundbreaking Amériques.  The instrumentaion is relatively conventional, but the vocal lines are freer and more modern, pitched high like the instruments the voice imitates. The texts come from Vicente Huidbrodo and José Juan Tablada.

Chou Wen-chung : the passing of a true Man of Culture

Chou Wen-chung

Chou Wen-Chung (周文中) has died aged 96.  He was a man of great integrity and mental strength.  Now, perhaps, he'll meet up again with Edgard Varèse : the two of them both pioneers, totally original and courageous. No wonder they got on so well, even though they were so very different. A man of great integrity and mental strength. Now, perhaps, he'll meet up with Varèse : the two of them both pioneers. Varèse was not the kind of person who tolerated mediocrity, in himself or in anyone else.  He was also the kind of teacher who expected those he worked with to find their own way, like he had to do himself.  Like Varèse, Chou left his homeland for a new world, and Chou, even more so than Varèse was a man with deeply rooted cultural foundations, who bridged boundaries all through his life.  He was a great composer in his own right, but also more than a composer in the sense that everything he did expressed the wholeness of human creativity and experience. Please watch the video below, made earlier this year, which explains things better than I possibly can.  Chou exemplified the Confucian idea of 文人, a person who understands the concept that culture and learning have a role to play in the betterment of society. (look at the characters in his name - Learning + Central). Culture in its widest sense makes for a healthy society : no-one can suddenly disclaim their heritage without paying a price. (Please see my piece The World Belongs to Society)  So below, the video by Spiralis Music Trust - essential listening on so many levels !

Simon Rattle's musical challenge : Koechlin, Varèse and William Walton

Sir Simon Rattle, photo : Doug Peters

Simon Rattle Prom with the London Symphony Orchestra, programmed with typical intelligence  - Koechlin, Edgard Varèse and Walton's Belshazzar's Feast.  Disparate pieces that did work together in context, enlivened by a conductor with a genuinely inquisitive musical mind.  What does Charles Koechlin's Les Bandar-log op 176 (1939-40)  have in common with Edgard Varèse's Amériques ? and with William Walton's Belshazzar's Feast ?

Koechlin 's Les Bndar-log is a late work, writtn towards the end of the composer's life. Koechlin was bitter that the world had moved on, nearly 40 years after Debussy and Stravinsky. In Rudyard Kipling's poems, the monkeys of Bandar-log are scrawny  - brown - upstarts - put in their place by a bullying bear.  The racist implications of the piece are never far away. Koechlin's subtitle "the scherzo of the monkeys " isn't meant to be Disney-cute, it's a scherzo. Some composers of Koechlin's period blamed modernity on Jews, (Schoenberg and oddly enough Kurt Weill, who wasn't particularly modern), so the racist implications of the piece are relevant.  It's ironic that it's become the work by which Koechlin is best  known ! By placing it together with Varèse's Amériques, Rattle, with his gentle sense of humour, brings out strange similarities. Both pieces are composites, smaller units put together like a mosiac to form something bigger. Koechlin veers from style to style, waywardly, like monkeys move in the jungle.  Varèse builds blocks of shape as a cubist painter might do, adding vivid impressionistic detail, creating a virtual city in sound, full of life and incident.  Here, we heard the original 1921 version, with a larger orchestra, and extended percussion, which includes klaxon. For him, the modern represented hope, and his music has endured, its influence far-reaching. Amériques was effectivelyVarèse's opus one, and the work expresses the thrill of moving to a new continent, full of promise. Hearing the 1921 original is a reminder of how strikingly innovative the piece is, still fresh and vibrant after nearly 100 years.

Walton's Belshazzar's Feast (1931) has been done numerous times at the Proms, including two First Nights, and for good reason. It's a blockbuster, the LSO augmented by Orfeo Catala, Orfeo Catala Youth Choir, the London Symphony Chorus and soloist Gerald Finley.  The setting is ostensibly Babylon and biblical, but Walton's approach was modern and secular.  It's a thrilling piece - long lines that zig zag and extend wildly, against thunderoyus timpani. The score is quasi Hollywood, maximizing excess, with brass bands thrown into the heady mix.  Biblical as its context may be, it's hardly pious, but very much a piece of its time (1931) when the jazz age still prevailed and the Bright Young Things partied like there'd be no tomorrow.  Long, zig zag vocal lines swaying exuberatantly, punctuated by timpani, heightended by brass.  Belshazzar's having a rave.  "Babylon was a great city" sang Finlay with solemn portent, enumerating the treasures: "...chariots, slaves and the souls of men". Singing with unbridled delight, the choir let rip, with great freshness.  "Praise thee !, Praise thee !"  But as we know, parties don't last forever.  Ominous sounds from the orchestra. The King sees a hand writing on the wall "Mene, mene tekel upharsim". The  "Hebrew" sound of trumpets. the choir emphasising the baritone's words with dramatic finality "Slain! Slain”. Then we're back to zany 30's celebration. "Hallelujah ! Hallelujah!" Flamboyant riffs give way to ecstatic swoons.  "And the Light of  e Lord shall shine on us".  Yet more ecstatic Hallelujahs. "Make a joyful noise!"  A wonderful, vivid performsnce: Rattle understands the modernity and freedom that makes this piece so much more than  yet another British oratorio. Most animated Belshazzar's Feast in years, and there's been lots of competition.

Edgard Varèse Total Immersion, Barbican

On Saturday at the Barbican, London, there'll be an Edgard Varèse Total Immersion : a major retrospective, augmented by a talk, a film and a reconstruction of Varèse’s Poéme électronique.  This is the third big festival featuring Varèse in recent years, following on from the excellent Total Immersion on Xenakis at the Barbican in 2008  (read more here) and the  Varèse 360˚ weekend, at the South Bank in 2010 (read more here), plus other performances of individual works over the years.  In his lifetime,  Varèse was a cult figure. Now he's practically mainstream.  The time has come, for the "First Wild Man of Music".

The film will be The One All Alone, Frank Scheffer's documentary from 2009, including  interviews with Elliott Carter, Pierre Boulez, John Cage, Morton Feldman,  Riccardo Chailly and Prof Chou Wen-Chung who worked closely with the composer and produced performing versions of incomplete pieces.  The installation of  Poème électronique.is important, too, because it makes concrete, or rather non-concrete, Varèse's ideas on the confluence of all sensory experience.  Written for tape, it was a pioneering moment in the development of electronic music.  Through multiple images, aural, visual and atmospheric, Varèse hoped to create a universe spanning space and time. In 2008, the Barbican recreated Poème électronique.as closely as possible to the original in 1958, at the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World's Fair, where the performance took place in a structure specially designed for the occasion by Xenakis,who was then best known as an architect.  Sound operating in many dimensions, structurally held together in myriad,intricate patterns.  Poème électronique is unique, and an excellent key to understanding the music of Xenakis's and Boulez. Read more here about Xenaki's designs for realising this piece. 

The evening concert in the Barbican Hall will be conducted by Sakari Oramo, with the BBC SO, the BBC Singers and Alison Bell.  Featured are the "big" works, Arcana, Nocturnal, Étude pour Espace, Déserts, Tuning up  and  Amériques.  The afternoon concert in Milton Court with the Guildhall New Music Ensemble features Un Grand Sommeil Noir, Offrandes, Hyperprism, Octandre , Intégrales , Ionisation, Density 21.5  and Dance for Burgess. Though Varèse is extremely influential, his output isn't huge, so the two concerts, cover nearly all he wrote, except alas, the amazing Equatorial.  The two benchmark recordings are the sets by Pierre Boulez and Riccardo Chailly, quite different yet both authoritative, though I keep returning to Boulez who brings out the quirkiness in the music more.incisively.  

Arcana is the biggest of Varèse's works, and relatively accessible.  It's scored for massive forces-   roughly 120 players altogether,  68 strings, 20 woodwinds, 20 brass and a phalanx of percussionists playing 40 different instruments from timpani to castanets.  Every performance is a feat of logistics, so it doesn't get done as often as it should be.  It's also extremely visual : watching is very much part of the experience.  It's not every day you see rows of trumpets and trombones, some muted, some not playing together, or 8 horns raised heavenwards. Arcana is big, but its bigness springs from its musical function. Arcana proceeds like a gigantic beast, its component parts articulated to move in stately formation, groups of instruments impacting on each other in constantly varying combinations. I've never quite been sure what Varèse  meant by its title, but I've often imagined it as a mythical creature brought to life by arcane spells and incantations.

Even more thrilling, Amériques, featuring klaxon and dramatic percussion effects - a collage of found sound and formal,  which represented a breakthrough in modern music.  Pretty shocking, considering it was first written between 1918 and 1921.  I don't know if Oramo and the BBCSO will be doing Déserts as a multi media event, though I hope so, since when I've experienced it before: the link between visuals and sound can be very rewarding.  The afternoon concert isn't as high profile but the music is superb. I'm particularly fond of Ionization, Octandre, and Intégrales. 

Feral Varèse Arcana Andris Nelsons Berlioz Debussy

Edgard Varèse Arcana with Andris Nelsons and the Berliner Philharmoniker, from the Musikfest Berlin, available til 31/12 in the Digital Concert Hall.  Grab the chance !  Arcana (1925-7)is scored for massive forces-   roughly 120 players altogether,  68 strings, 20 woodwinds, 20 brass and a phalanx of percussionists playing 40 different instruments from timpani to castanets.  Every performance is a feat of logistics, so it doesn't get done as often as it should be.  It's also extremely visual : watching is very much part of the experience.  It's not every day you see rows of trumpets and trombones, some muted, some not,playing together, or 8 horns raised heavenwards. Arcana is big, but its bigness springs from its musical function. Arcana proceeds like a gigantic beast, its component parts articulated to move in stately formation, groups of instruments impacting on each other in constantly varying combinations. I've never quite been sure what Varèse  meant by its title, but I've often imagined it as a mythical creature brought to life by arcane spells and incantations. 

Compared to Varèse's more esoteric innovations,   most for smaller ensembles,  Arcana is relatively easy to follow since it's constructed like a series of variations with interlocking inner cells and permutations thereof.  Although it isn't by any means electronic, it functions like a machine, where different sections operate in parallel and together towards a common purpose.  Very much the Zeitgeist of the 1920's of Futurism and things to come.  Andris Nelson's approach is deliberately unhurried, allowing the monster to waken and walk at its own pace without being pushed. I get a kick from speedier tempi but Nelsons reveals the textures and colours.  Watch him beat the inaudible passages bar by bar showing how silence is part of the structure.  Instinctively, Nelsons half-crouched, like a feral animal, listening to the world around him before making a move. This was intuitive and almost certainly unconscious,  but definitely in tune with the spirit of Arcana and also with the Debussy Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune which preceded it. Consider the connections between the two pieces, and their elusive physicality.  Someone could do Arcana as ballet, though they'd need a big budget.  It would certainly lend itself to visual patterns and recurring images.

Nelsons' Berlioz Symphonie fantastique op 14, was thus coloured by being heard in conjunction with Varèse and Debussy. Symphonie fantastique is so dramatic that lesser conductors cheat by playing up the dramatic kitsch.  We've all heard this piece so often that it's easy to coast along.  Not Nelsons. He instead  emphasizes the intelligence in the orchestration.  Berlioz's genius lay in the way he could use instruments to create myriad textures and colours. He studied instruments for their own sake, and was open to new, innovative sounds like that of the saxophone.  Not really all that far from Varèse and his experiments with klaxons and ondes martenot.  Yet again, Nelsons emphasized the underlying musical logic and the finesse with which Berlioz built up his palette.  The Berliner Philharmoniker are so good that they can do refinement with natural, unforced élan.  Like a composer using the tools available to him, Nelsons knows this orchestra well enough to inspire them so they play as if the work were fresh and vivid.

Listen out specially for the quiet passages, like in the third movement, where the shepherd  listens to the gentle rustling of leaves and contemplates a moment of solitude. Gradually more complex feelings rush in, but to understand, we must listen attentively, picking up every nuance.  Shepherds, like animals in nature, listening acutely to the sounds around them : the faun again, the "creature" in Arcana  ?  Noisiness dulls the senses.  The Dream of the Night of the Sabbath was vivid because our minds had been cleared of detritus.  Listen to those crazed winds! Some audiences think music exists to serve the listener, and like conductors who deliver in that way. True artists, though, are more likely to think that they (and their audiences) exist to serve the music. Nelsons and the Berliner Philharmoniker belong in the latter category, most definitely. 

Edgard Varèse - Birthday Boy!

Somehow it's hard to imagine Edgard Varèse as a babe in swaddling, but he was born on 22 December 1883.  He's more John the Baptist,  "The First Wild Man of Classical Music".  Varèse is interesting for more than his music. He knew everyone from Ferruccio Busoni to Pierre Boulez who championed him long before most had even heard of him.(Boulez has recorded the complete works of Varèse - outstanding). Varèse is generally creditted as the founder of electronic music even though hew didn't have electronic means of making music. He didn't even have a reel to reel tape until around 1955. He's not difficult listening. In fact I think it helps to know Varèse to understand the times he lived in.  Technology and the machine age pitted against exotic primitivism.  Think Picasso, Braque, Matisse. Even Elliott Carter (whom he also knew) There's plenty on Varèse on this site - quite a lot of clips, links, lots on the Philips Pavilion and Xenakis, and even a full download of the 20's movie Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in which the composer appears. Enter Varèse in the search or follow the links on right. I've reviewed nearly all Varèse concerts in the UK in the last few years, several of them here (Varèse 360 South Bank, for example).

Lewis Smoley on Varèse New York

A little late but here's an account of the Edgard Varèse concert at the Alice Tully Hall in New York in July, by Lewis Smoley. LOTS more on Varèse on this site, please explore! Even a link to a full download of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, where  the composer appears as an actor.

Boulez Aldeburgh Ensemble Intercontemporain Carter Ligeti

Pierre Boulez brought Ensemble Intercontemporain to Aldeburgh. This is a major coup, which London venues can't easily arrange. But Aldeburgh can bring Boulez and his amazing orchestra to a hall seating barely 500, in a small country town, because Pierre-Laurent Aimard is Festival Director. They go back together since Aimard was a boy.

This grand finale to the Aldeburgh Festival was much more than a concert, it was a consecration. Ligeti, Boulez, Carter on the programme, but many others invisibly present because of their close connections: Messiaen, Stockhausen, Kurtág and so on. Boulez may not have conducted at Aldeburgh before - he's too expensive - but his "family" of composers have been an integral part of the Festival for years.

Edgard Varèse was the "First Wild Man of Modern Music". Boulez was one of his earliest champions. Varèse didn't have electronics or computer facilties: Boulez created IRCAM so composers of the future would have access to the best technology and support from other creative minds.  It was fitting that the concert should start with Varèse's Octandres. It's not his most famoue piece, but perhaps the most "classically" pure. Seven winds, one double bass -- no klaxons, so no extramusical baggage, but thoughtful exploration.

It was a good prelude to György Ligeti's Chamber Concerto (1969-70) expanding the concept of single instrument protagonists develops into music of delightful but deft complexity. Technically, Ensemble Intercontemporain are of course flawless, but this was truly inspired.  Superb musicianship is liberating, These players don't need to "think",  they play with instinctive freedom. Boulez's conducting style is understated, the merest jerk of a finger, the most refined twist of the wrist, but Ensemble Intercontemporain are so much in tune with him, they catch every nuance.

Some of the most amazing playing in the quieter passages, where the line floats seamlessly even though it's taken up by different instrument.. Perhaps another example of what Ligeti meant when he said his music levitated, like a helicopter. Catch this performance when it's broadcast on BBC Radio 3 online, on demand, internationally for 7 days from 30 June. Studio recordings may be more perfect, but this live performance had élan, vivacity, sparkle. "Breathtaking" is an over-used cliché, but in this case it was apt: you didn't want to breathe lest you miss a moment.  A very well kmown composer/conductor was sitting near me. He sat transfixed.

What are Years is the title of  Elliott Carter's new song cycle, an Aldeburgh commission, in association with the Lucerne Festival and Tanglewood. Aldeburgh is now up there with the biggest. Britten would be thrilled, though some of the British press would rather it became a provincial backwater.  The cycle is to poems by Marianne Moore. Five songs, a group of four which cohere, the final song leading into an unknown, new direction.

Moore's disjointed combinations of phrases without structure suit Carter's vocal writing. Although he was a singer himself (glee clubs and chorals in college)  he doesn't set text in a "singerly" way. Instead, he makes much of Moore's jerky rhythms, sudden bursts of expression, deliberate holdings back and silences. What are Years is certainly not poetry reading but music revealing itself through the framework of text. The voice acts like an instrument, probing and eliding, stretching and pulling the words as if they were abstract music. Claire Booth has the measure of the piece, interacting well with the orchestra, whose role here is critical, enveloping the fragmented nature of the text with a flowing, serene line that suggests the passage of time.

Natural then that Boulez and Ensemble Intercontemporain ended with Boulez's Dérive 2, written for Carter's 80th birthday, nearly a quarter of a century ago. Now Boulez himself is older than Carter was then. But age is irrelevant when a mind is fertile.  Perhaps that's why Dérive mutates, growing in the imagination. Boulez's music is strongly organic, in the sense that it evolves from deep roots, and grows vigorously. following a definite trajectory, excursions spiralling outwards and growing branches of their own. Again, Ensemble Intercontemporain played vivaciously, energetic but elegant. For me, one of the joys of Boulez's music is the sense of inventiveness and renewal. It may look "difficult" on the printed page, but musicians like Ensemble Intercontemporain reveals its innate liveliness.

Anthèmes II is another Boulez growth-piece, where the violin is augmented by electronics. Jeanne-Marie Conquer and the IRCAM sound desk make sounds that twine round each other symbiotically: which is which, who's leading whom? It's a sophisticated piece, yet approached with wit.

Hearing Dialogue de l'ombre double in the intimate performance space of the Britten Studio at Snape was wonderful. because seeing the movements intensifies the impact of the shifts in sound. It's like a dance bwetween clarinet (Jérôme Comte) and electronics, so seeing Comte change position marks stages in the ritual. The tiniest change of position means a change in sound dynamics. It's a concerto that uses the acoustic of performance space, and sound inaudible to the human ear . Hence the electronics, which pick up things that exist, but we couldn't otherwise hear. It's a multi-layered work, where the boundaries  between clarinet and electronics are deliberately blurred, teasingly up-ended. You have to listen acutely to pick up the subtle shifts and counterbalances, but it's immensely rewarding, especially enhanced by darkness and light as in this performance. Comte emerges from the shadows. Is he playing or is it the sound desk? Again, it's playful and organic, formidable but not at all frightening. If only Varèse, John The Baptist of modern music, could have been with us, too!

Varèse 360˚ South Bank (1) London Sinfonietta

Queues for returns at a “new” music concert? David Atherton conducted the London Sinfonietta in the first concert of the Edgard Varèse 360˚ weekend at the South Bank. Judging by the crowds at Queen Elizabeth Hall, Varèse could have filled the RFH. Eighty years ago, Varèse really was shockingly avant garde but now he’s permeated modern culture and reaches a wider audience. No Varèse, no IRCAM, no experimental music or art. Musical archaeology come alive!

Ionisation was surprising in 1933 because it’s orchestrated solely for percussion instruments. The concept, though, is ancient. Much non-western music is percussion based, so the seeds for Ionisation were sown decades before, when non-western music first became known in Europe. It connects, too, the “primitive” that fascinated modern art.

Ions are tiny particles that build up to form larger units. Ionisation foresees fragmentation, the idea of cells of sound multiplying into complex structures. Atherton emphasized the point further by following Ionisation with Density 21.5 for solo flute. Michael Cox showed how a single melodic instrument can develop many different simple motifs. Dances for Burgess fits well with this group, because it’s relatively delicate. Chou Wen-chung, who worked closely with Varèse, noted that it was sketched during work on the much more ambitious Déserts. As Chou says, “This whiff of a dance is like a wildflower, swaying in the wake of a desert storm”

John Tomlinson is a much greater artist than the sort of fans who simply chase celebrity for the sake of celebrity will ever realize. Those who admire his Minotaur, though, will appreciate why he sang Varèse‘s Ecuatorial. He doesn’t need the money, he does it because the voice part is interesting. The whole piece is a work of intertwined contrasts. Sometimes Tomlinson sings, sometimes intones speech, veering towards abstract chant. His dark bass adds ballast to the two cellos Theremin (Jonathan Golove, Natasha Fanny). Their surreal, ethereal wails represent an alternative to conventional instruments, and bridge the gap between acoustic and electronic music. Ecuatorial refers to the lost tribes of the Maya, so a performance links mysterious past with the incomprehensible present, which is “primitive” in its own way.

Exaudi is a wonderful ensemble, equally adept in medieval polyphony as in ultra contemporary music. In Études pour Espace, they intone the different moods of the fragmented texts, weaving words with orchestration.

Varèse’s music is theatrical, so enhancing it with visuals is very much in keeping with his ideas about connecting the senses. Déserts was thus the triumph of the evening. .The Queen Elizabeth Hall became a giant 4 dimensional theatre, visual projections covering walls and ceiling. This highlighted the flow between physical and non-physical music. We’re so used to electronic music now that the shock value has long worn off. Experiencing Déserts like this is a reminder that multimedia is a very old idea indeed. Like many artists of his time, Varèse believed there was a connection between different art forms. The video started with images vaguely suggesting sand particles thrown up in a sandstorm. Yet again, the concept of small particles making up a larger whole.

There’s LOTS MORE on Varèse on this site, use the search facility and labels. There’s even a full download of the 1921 silent film Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The film’s being shown at the South Bank with a newly composed soundtrack, but you can watch it here wihile listening to recordings by Varèse himself. (I picked multiple Nocturnales because that fits amazingly well.

Edgard Varèse meets Jekyll and Hyde

Edgard Varèse 360 weekend coming up at the South Bank in London. This is a major retrospective, first experienced last year at the Holland Festival. Everything about Varèse will be included - nearly all his known works (his output wasn't huge), plus films, workshops etc. Included is the famous film Poème électronique, made with Le Corbusier and Xenakis for the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Expo in Brussels. (You can see it free in advance here on this site) But what's less well known is how Varèse was interested in the movies. Film was avant garde in 1920. No way was someone like him going to miss out on something that was both new art and new technology.

Varèse apparently appears in Adolf Zukor's 1920 silent movie Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. I'm not sure which part he plays, since there are several actors who look garishly gaunt and haunted in this movie. Since it's a silent film you can switch off the sound and listen to Varèse's own Nocturnal, which fits the movie perfectly..In fact it's so in tune with the film, it's scary. (mute sound on film, view full screen, repeat the sound from the audio clip above) Try it,

Varèse - the First Wild Man of music

Coming up soon, Edgard Varèse 360 weekend at the South Bank Queen Elizabeth Hall. Varèse was the first Wild Man of modern music. He was a huge, ferocious man, so the "untamed" image fits his life, too. LOTS ON VARESE on this site including clips and FULL download of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Modern art was a rebellion against the overstufffed sofa respectability of the 19th century. Instead, artists (of all types) became interested in things that weren't bourgeois. Gauguin quits France for Tahiti and paints dusky (non Christian) maidens in lurid colours. Picasso discovers the "primitivism" of African art. Cezanne looks at French landscapes, deconstructing them tio their essentials and reforms them in craggy, non-literal forms.

So much nonsense is written about modern music being "unemotional" and rule bound. The whole point of modernism was to react against the monolith of convention. So Debussy gets into Japanese art, Baudelaire into forbidden lusts, and the Jugendstil movement generates rebellion. The Second Viennese School is no more than a product of that loosening of restrictiveness, and a search for new forms.

So Varèse is a good symbol of modernism because his music's readily accessible, especially to people who don't necessarily have a grounding in classical form. People who've grown up with rock, jazz and progressive music can relate to Varèse. Frank Zappa was one of his biggest fans.

Some of Varèse's music like Ecuatorial and Amériques is immediate and graphic, kind of Braque in sound. He loves "unknown" territories, jungles in dark continents and concrete urban jungles, complete with car sirens.  He has rough edges, but that's part of his appeal.  Connect to Varèse, and the rest of modernity falls into perspective.

Elliott Carter lived round the block, for example. Carter's work is much more complex and intellectual, but at heart, he too imbibes from that same wild, unrepressed source of creativity.  Nowadays it's fashionable to knock Pierre Boulez because he has no time for being "popular" and dumbing down. But his reserve masks intensely passionate innovation. Boulez was one of Varèse's champions, before most anyone else.  There are two completish box sets of Varèse, Boulez and Chailly, both essential. I find, though, that I keep going back to Boulez becxause he hears the fundamental intelligence in Varèse, beneath the wild man surface, which to some extent was carefully cultivated. There's plenty on this site on Varèse and composers (and architects) connected to him, so please use labels at right and search.

Faust - Ferruccio Busoni Thomas Hampson Goethe

Ferruccio Busoni is a strange figure who doesn't fit into neat boxes. He was a child prodigy, whose virtuostic displays astounded Europe. Privately, he was a polymath, exceptionally well read and thoughtful. Indeed, his real legacy may lie in his ideas, and the way they inspired men whose music in no way resembles his own. No less than Edgard Varėse called him “a figure out of the Renaissance”, who “crystallised my half formed ideas, stimulated my imagination, and determined, I believe, the future development of my music”. Busoni believed that “music was born free and to win freedom is its destiny”, and that it was just in its infancy as an art form.

Busoni deserves a lot more attention than he gets. So read this review of his opera, Doktor Faust, by Jim Zychowicz. This is an excellent performance, as you'd expect with Thomas Hampson in the leading role. Recordings are not thick on the ground. There are two recordings with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Much as I love DFD as a father figure, he's never been the most convincing of opera singers. He doesn't let go enough, he's always DFD singing a role rather than inhabiting the character. Both recordings (Leitner and Nagano) come from the tail end of his career, when he's not quite as unwooden as he might be. So Hampson really is the way to go. He can act, too, wonderfully and is in top form vocally. The staging is very good, and the conductor is Philippe Jordan, son of Armin. Jordan fils is definitely a conductor whose work is worth hearing. He's very clear, precise yet animated and lyrical. He is still barely 40, so will go a long way.

Busoni's Faust is one of the "need to know" operas of the 20th century. This DVD is so good it's also one you want to know. Sadly, this isn't based on the new edition prepared by Anthony Beaumont but instead uses the rushed completion made in 1925 immediately after the composer's death. Busoni did, however, leave enough material to allow a less hurried completion by Anthony Beaumont, based on Busoni's own notes. Beaumont wrote the book, Busoni and his music, still the basic text after 30 years years. He's also the Zemlinsky expert, who cleaned up Zemlinsky scores for new editions. The wonderful, ecstatic score of Zemlinsky's Lyric Symphony is his. See a review of the Eschenbach recording : it's outstanding, nothing else comes remotely close.

Xenakis Total Immersion

Of the three Total Immersion Days at the Barbican this year, this was the most demanding as it connected with the on-going Le Corbusier exhibitions at the Barbican and RIBA. Yet for that very reason, Xenakis Day was the most satisfying because it meant “thinking outside the box”, architecture people connecting to music, music people connecting to architecture.

Xenakis didn’t give up architecture for music. Both architecture and music were, for him, different aspects of creative expression. Just as architecture is a way of enclosing space, music is a way of ordering sound.

The day (12 hours!) began with Mark Kidel’s film Something Rich and Strange. It was made in 1991, and Xenakis himself features. As in all good film, some of the most revealing moments are impromptu. Xenakis and his wife visit his old school. She’s thrilled. Until that time, Xenakis had been a political exile : Greece was a part of his life she’d not known. He’s more sanguine. “It’s all in the past”, he says. He was pragmatic, a man who sought solutions.

Hence Anastenaria, from 1953, when Xenakis was still working full time with Le Corbusier. The first part, Procession aux eaux claires refers to ancient Thracian mysteries. The male voices represent the Anasthenarides, priests, who lead the populace to sacred waters. The music evokes chant but made abstract, angular layers of sound building up to density. The second part, Sacrifice, employs slow glissandi which will become one of the composer’s trademark.

But it’s the third section, Metastaseis, where the interface with architecture is most apparent. Diagrams for the score resemble diagrams for the building. It was used to “introduce” audiences to Varèse’s Poème Électronique as they entered the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958. The Pavilion went even beyond Le Corbusier’s ideas about free form buildings. It was conceived as a unit of three surfaces, curved, rather than flat, which enclosed the space within in a womb-like embrace. Xenakis was less poetic, describing the concept as “cow’s stomachs”. The surfaces weren’t even solid but composed of small panels individually pieced together. What shocking sci-fi it must have seemed to people used to buildings as rectangular boxes !

Metastaseis grows from simple sustained pitch, from straight line to curve, long arcing glissando stretching and bending, like the planes of the Philips Pavilion..It’s a relatively straightforward miniature, though, so Tracées, from 1987, opened the evening concert where Martyn Brabbins conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Tracées employs ninety-five musicians, yet is tightly constructed. Brabbins understands why, conducting with discipline. Here, the woodwinds imitate glissandi, although they aren’t designed for such things. Without good performers of this calibre, these sections would collapse into mush. Congratulations are due to the musicians involved – this took expertise and Brabbins let them do it without fuss.

In the Marc Kindel film, Xenakis stands in his old school and recites from memory, apparently spontaneously, Ariel’s song from The Tempest, “Full fathom five, thy father lies….”. Perhaps he had been meditating on the poem, for he set it in 1994 for the BBC Singers as Sea-Nymphs. They’ve performed this often, and with Stephen Betteridge conducting, it was nicely polished. Less polish, though, would have been preferable in Nuits, which Xenakis dedicated to political prisoners from antiquity to the present. It’s a horrific protest, written from personal experience. The words are tortured like the prisoners are, yet when they can, fragments leap out like vocal glissandi, before subsiding into the complex polyphony, intensified by non verbal sounds like whistles and low hums. Exaudi, which has performed Nuits several times in the past few years, has a more acute feel for the tense anguish of the piece.

It was good to separate Sea Nymphs from Nuits with Mists for solo piano, for it made a bracing interlude, throwing the different techniques into high relief. In the programme notes, Ivan Hewett describes the mathematical theories behind the work. I can’t explain them nearly so well, but simply enjoyed the clean, uncluttered lines and clusters of notes which Rolf Hind played with rapid-fire tempi.

In Troorkh, Xenakis explores “extreme glissando”. Hewett’s notes describe it so well that they’re worth quoting. Xenakis, he says “treats the trombone as a kind of superhuman Homeric bard, recounting some tempestuous tale in wordless song”. The technical and physical demands are such that even Christian Lindberg, for whose skills the piece was written, collapses visibly from exertion after each of the two most demanding passages. It is an elegaic piece, as expressive as Greek tragedy. The trombone is supported by a group of brass, written with character. The trombone in the orchestra cannot possibly hope to match the virtuosity of the solo part, but responds in simpler mode. The tuba part is expressive : it can’t match the trombone’s stretching slides, but its tone is darker and profound.

Antikhthon again demands a huge orchestra. One of its characteristics is a long, shrill chord, like an air raid siren, or perhaps the drone of an aircraft taking off. It doesn’t matter, the effect is eerie, menacing, out of this world. If the chord is mega-glissando, it’s balanced with clouds of densely layered pointillist sound. There’s so much disparate activity it’s hard to make individuals out clearly, like finding a single insect in a swarm of locusts. Pithoprakta springs to mind, though this is later and more sophisticated. . Like the multiple panels on the planes of the Philips Pavilion, the different units function together. Sometimes the cloud clears, to reveal details, like the first violin (Andrew Haveron) tapping staccato on wood, before the orchestra wells up again. Brabbins’s strategy of keeping textures clean and clear paid off well. Like good architecture, an elegant structure doesn’t need fussy curlicues.

This was a magnificent concert, and would be quite an event at the Proms. Like the South Bank Xenakis series some years ago, audience numbers were healthy. Total Immersion Days aren’t just about blockbusters, though. Not all Xenakis is mind bendingly difficult.

Earlier in the day there was a special concert of Xenakis’s works for percussion ensemble. Sanforta, a specialist percussion ensemble played Okho for three djembas. In Africa, these drums really can “speak” as they’re played with much improvisation. Notated music is never going to be quite so fluid. Catherine Ring, still in her final year at the Guildhall, impressed as soloist in Rebonds, cheered along by the Guildhall Percussion Ensemble who performed Persephona. It was good to hear these musicians and these pieces because they reveal how Xenakis’s more elaborate works grew from “simple”, direct roots.

Please look at this link for more detail, and more photos

READ my piece on Xenakis's designs for Varese Poeme electronique

http://www.musicalpointers.co.uk/reviews/liveevents09/XenakisDay.html

Architecture as music Kowloon Walled City

In 1965, my friend went to a talk by Xenakis. Yesterday we went together to the big Le Corbusier exhibition at the Barbican. First weekend - queues for tickets, packed with earnest looking students and a few familiar faces, not that architects are as high profile as rock stars.

The Poème Électronique room is particularly good because you can see the whole film in its original black and white starkness - clips of Godzilla, ancient art, Belsen, Madonnas. Profound and found objects, thrown together. Sit where you can see both the film and the colour overlay on the other side of the room. At the Philips Pavilion both were shown together : at the Barbican, use your imagination to put them together and in the context of the undulating, walls not made of solid concrete but shards attached to a metal frame, hanging in the air, defying gravity rather than solidly ignoring it.

So, a few random and non-technical thoughts. Mandelbrot patterns are supposed to show how all creation evolves in a systematic sequence even though it may look infinitely chaotic. One striking thing about the patterns in Le Corbusier's work is the way simple grids multiply themselves, becoming ever more complex. It's really not so different from so much new music. Which is why for me new music is as organic as nature, cells dividing and expanding in sequence. And why I don't buy rigid tonality versus atonality doctrines which inflict labels on what is beyond classification. Time to reverse dogma and simply listen.

Architecture is a way of "enclosing space" even when they integrate light, air and landscape. Xenakis described the three planes of the Philips Pavilion as a "cow's stomach", an inner space where ideas are digested. Music too is a way of enclosing sound in structure, creating sculptures with sound. More on this soon after Xenakis Immersion Day on March 7.



Architecture isn't just buildings. The exhibition featured a lot on Le Corbusier's thing for urban space. Cities don't usually grow by planning. except when there's a disaster like the Lisbon Earthquake, or the upheavals in Paris in the 19th century. In the third world there are/were lots of urban environments which defy any principle of urban order - people just build where and how they can. The "traditional" Third World city is a maze-like warren of random structures. Electricity is "borrowed", sewers connect to water supply. There used to be a place in Hong Kong called the Kowloon Walled City which was a vertical burrow of conjoined structures where you never had to reach street level, if you knew how to navigate corridors, illegal bridges etc.

Note in the photo above, extensive gardens were created by the government - not the city inhabitants - to counteract the claustrophobia of the Walled City. (the photo enlarges if you click on it). The gardens acted as a kind of cordon sanitaire around the conurbation. Previously, it had been surrounded by multi storey building, only separated by a narrow city street. Had fires broken out or plague or cholera, it would have easily spread to the rest of the area. Moreover, since the Hong Kong government had no legal jurisdiction, triads ruled : the Walled City was a crime hotspot. Surrounding it with public gardens meant that police surveillance was possible. When the Triads ventured out, they could be stopped. In theory, anyway. The gardens weren't about aesthetic design, but served a grim, practical purpose. Town planners with their drawing boards sometimes don't understand.

Eventually the Chinese and Hong Kong governments made a deal to end the historic anomaly that allowed the Walled City to exist, and the whole place was razed.

So back to my beef with the Barbican. Originally the idea was that the mini-Metropolis should reflect the warren that was medieval London. The ancestors of my friend who heard Xenakis in 1965 lived under what is now the Barbican Hall. The difference is that, in a medieval village people knew their way around because they didn't travel far, and adapted to the higgeldy-piggledy maze by habit, not optimum convenience. People don't build warrens for fun, they just come about piecemeal. Ordinary people don't have big budgets they just improvise. "Traditional" cities aren't a "model" for anything.

The Barbican's systems are utterly counter intuitive to logic and rational movement. Even the lifts (elevators) when they condescend to appear, don't all go to the same floors. And when you get in them they decide for themselves where they are going to go, complete with sado-mechanist voice machinery. The Barbican was not designed for the disabled, elderly, children, or anyone who wants to get from point A to B without going round the block ten times. here's no natural flow of movement. And the feng shui is hopelessly stagnant. The Barbican complex is a structure that actively hates people.

Prom 45 Varèse Harvey IRCAM Messiaen

I just had a message from someone (not Mark) saying "Just up on Mark's blog Boulezian is a WONDER
FUL review of last night's fantastic Prom". Read it even if you don't care about the composers. This is what music writing can be like. Pass it on !

Whoever devised this Prom should get a medal, too, as it was a masterpiece of intelligent programming. The very idea of electronic music terrifies most people, but it's really no more than using new means to expand the palette of possibilities in sound. Varèse was a fascinating visionary who imagined things beyond the technology of his time. He wrote for ondes martenot 17 years before Messiaen did, and used "found sound" like sirens. Boulez was his first big champion. Five years after Varèse's death, Boulez created IRCAM, giving composers the means to take music into an altogether new dimension. Indeed, IRCAM musicians are creating things that expand the very concept of music as multi-dimensional sound in space. Varèse was a rough-hewn John the Baptist heralding what was to come. Déserts and Poème eléctronique are well known enough I don't need to describe them. Read Mark's review and listen to the BBC broadcast of this Prom. The editorial filler is extremely well informed and accessible. There are little odds and ends I'd tweak but it's a wonderful introduction. Listen and understand how electro-acoustic music can be a natural evolution, opening new horizons. In fact, tape it "for study purposes" as there is a lot to take on board on one hearing.

The broadcast was almost compensation for not being there live. I didn't go because I didn't like Jonathan Harvey's Body Mandala, an earlier part of the series to which the new piece, Speakings, belongs. This proves why it's not smart to dismiss what's strange and new. I will have to listen again and buy the recording ! Speakings is beautiful, ethereal. It's a good introduction to this kind of music because it's about "how" speech evolves, what communication is, why music "happens". Lots of tentative questing sounds, reaching out into space and silence. I suspect this sense of sound physically searching out through the auditorium would have been quite palpable in live performance. When the sounds connect, there's a spark, like electricity, and gradually the connections build up. There's another unexpected connection, to Elliott Carter's Caténaires, heard on the First Night, also about reaching out and finding links. Speakings is based on baby noises, the way babies learn to speak. Electro-acoustic music, or whatever you call it, is a whole new language we haven't yet come to terms with.

This isn't"difficult" either. Technology is used in the service of creating something expressive, not for its own sake. Mortuos plango, vivos voco is an earlier Harvey piece where his son's singing voice mixes with the tolling of bells in a cathedral. The Latin inscription refers to the bell mourning the dead while calling the living to prayer - past and present together. Hearing this with Messiaen's final, unfinished quartet and Tombeau de Messiaen, Harvey's early homage to his teacher, makes further connections, such as to Messiaen's ideas of time existing on many levels. In fact, listening to Messiaen's unfinished Concert á quatre on the BBC's listen again facility was a good idea because, having heard Harvey's open-ended, non-static music, it didn't matter so much that Messiaen never completed it. Instead, it hovers, tantalising us with what might have been. The old man was right. You're not dead just because your body packs in. Nor is Varèse. His spirit lives on in IRCAM.