Varese: Arcana / Integrales / Deserts

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Cat No: 8554820

Release Date: 07 January 2001

Label: Naxos / Naxos Classics

Packaging Type: Jewel Case

No of Units: 1

Barcode: 636943482025

Genres: Classical

Composer/Series: VARESE

Description
Edgard Varèse (1883-1965)The fact that the French-born American composer Edgard Varèse is deemed to be one of the most innovative and influential composers of the twentieth century is all the more remarkable when one considers that his œuvre consists of just a dozen works, the majority of which were written between 1920 and 1936. Yet his novel developments in the field of rhythm, form and timbre, his works often featuring richly coloured ensembles of wind and percussion, acted as a significant model for composers as diverse as Stockhausen, Xenakis and Birtwistle. The composer himself merely remarked that ‘Contrary to general belief an artist is never ahead of his time but most people are far behind theirs’. Varèse was born in Paris on 22nd December 1883, the first of five children, and spent most of his early childhood with his maternal grandparents in Burgundy. In 1904 he entered the Schola Cantorum in Paris, where his teachers included Roussel, Bordes and d’Indy, only to leave the following year to study composition under Widor at the Conservatoire. In 1907 he moved to Berlin, establishing a close friendship with the composer Busoni, whose influential Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst (Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music) had made a great impression on him. Busoni’s attack on traditional nineteenth-century music aesthetics and his advocacy of a new music ‘free …from architectonic, acoustic and aesthetic dogmas’ found a particularly sympathetic recipient in Varèse, whose mature output encapsulated a continuous search for new means of musical expression. Having returned to Paris by the outbreak of World War I, he lost most of his early works, written in a romantic idiom, which were subsequently destroyed in a fire in Berlin. On 18th December 1915 he emigrated to New York, making his conducting début with the Berlioz Requiem and also conducting concerts of new music with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and the orchestra which he himself founded, the New Symphony Orchestra. In 1921 he co-founded the International Composers’ Guild with the harpist Carlos Salzedo, to perform contemporary music. Until it folded in 1927 the ICG presented works by Schoenberg, Berg, Webern and Stravinsky amongst others, as well as premières of Varèse’s Offrandes, Hyperprism, Octandre and Intégrales. With Slonimsky, Ives, Cowell and Chávez he also helped co-found the Pan-American Association of Composers, dedicated to the performance and dissemination of contemporary music. Following a five-year sojourn in Paris, during which he worked on two unfinished projects, L’astronome and Espace, he returned to New York, having applied unsuccessfully for funding to continue his research into electro-acoustic music. His most fecund period of composition effectively came to an end in 1936 with the solo flute piece Density 21.5 after which, dispirited an
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