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Edgard Verese was a modern French composer who spent most of his life in America. He is known as The Father of Electronic Music. This week you will learn about this strange man, whose personality might remind you of the more “eclectic” artists we have studied, such as Warhol or Dali.
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Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse was born in Paris on December 22, 1883. When he was only a few weeks old, he was sent to be raised by his great-uncle and other relations in the small town of Le Villars in the Burgundy region of France. There he developed a very strong attachment to his maternal grandfather, Claude Cortot. His affection for his grandfather outshone anything he felt for his own parents.
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When he was ten, his parents reclaimed him and relocated to Italy. There he had his first musical lessons and soon composed his first opera, “Martin Pas”, which has since been lost.. However, his father, an engineer himself, didn’t approve of Edgard’s interest in music. He sent the boy to the Polytechnic University of Turin to earn a degree in engineering. This did not make Edgard very happy, but he later used what he had learned in engineering school to help him compose his music.
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Edgard Varese wanted people to think of music as “organized sound.” He had very definite ideas of how he believed music should be defined. He didn’t want to be bound to “rules” of musical composition, even though he respected the works of those who did. Edgard stayed in engineering school until his mother passed away in 1900. Three years after her death, he moved to Paris to begin his musical education and career.
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Edgard Varèse was, and is still considered to be, one of the most visionary and influential musical mavericks of all time. Someone even described him as “a volcanic, uncompromising pioneer in modern and electronic music.”
In 1918, Varese made his debut as a conductor in America. This was the beginning of a whole new life for Varese. He spent many hours in the famous “Romany Marie’s Cafe” in Greenwich Village. There, he met with other creative people who liked to share their ideas and inspire each other. |
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Virtually all the works he had written in Europe were either lost or destroyed in a Berlin warehouse fire, so in the U.S. he was starting again from scratch. He spent hours at the cafe meeting new composers and telling them all about his ideas for new electronic instruments he would use for his newest compositions.
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Henry Cowell playing the shakuhachi with Edgar Varese
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As we learned earlier, Edgard Varese studied engineering in his younger years. He took that knowledge and applied it to his idea of how music should be composed. Varese said that it was through science that he began to see music in his own way. He saw it as spatial. Like molecules, and how they move….that is how he saw music and sound.
Varese’s dream was to create music using electronic instruments. He dreamed up these instruments and did drawings of them, much like Da Vinci did for his imaginings and inventions. Some would say that Varese spent his whole life waiting for technology to catch up to him. |
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