No Apology

In the balcony, a lion roared. Power saws wailed, chains rattled, sirens shrieked, horns blared. A door squeaked shut on unseen hinges. Onstage, the members of the orchestra sat in slack-jawed silence. A woman's sepulchral voice boomed through the house. "Oh, God!" it moaned.

Twenty years ago--or even ten--such disturbances might have incited an audience to riot. Last week, concertgoers at Manhattan's Town Hall did little more than wince, or cringe in their seats. When the last cataclysmic sound had died away, they gave a standing ovation to the sturdy, craggy-faced composer who made his way to the podium. At 75, Composer Edgard Varese (rhymes with fez) was finally receiving the acclaim he deserves as the U.S.'s Grand Old Man of electronic music.

Bread & the Wafer. Varese began experimenting with sounds of the machine age--coaxing unconventional sonorities out of conventional instruments--long before such European electro-composers as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen had spliced their first tape. But partly because his output is so sparse (eleven compositions in 40 years), partly because his European counterparts had electronic equipment to work with before he did, Varese for a long time remained, by his own definition, "a musical bum." Large-scale recognition did not come until 1958, when his Poeme Electronique, his only completely noninstrumental composition, thundered twelve times a day over 400 loudspeakers in a Brussels Fair pavilion designed by his friend Le Corbusier (TIME cover, May 5).

Poeme was repeated at last week's concert, along with five other works: Integrates, Ecuatorial, Offrandes, Deserts, Nocturnal. The first three were mostly intricate rhythmic exercises for conventional instruments (plus a leather cushion that was whomped with paddles), while Deserts mixed orchestral sounds with clangorous thunderclaps from the speakers. Nocturnal was the one new work on the program. Scored for soprano, men's chorus and assorted instruments, it was based on a prose poem by Anai's Nin. None of Nocturnal was taped, but its sounds--chittering strings, night-wailing flutes--were far out enough to fire up any Varese fan. Its chanted, fragmented lyrics were appropriately opaque: "You belong to the night. . . Bread and the wafer. . . I have lost my brother. . . Perfume and sperm."

Organized Sound. Varese achieves his effects by recording sounds on tape; then, with the aid of complex electronic equipment, he breaks the sounds apart, amplifies and filters them. He picked up his offbeat skills almost by indirection: his father, a Paris engineer, was so set upon an engineering rather than a musical career for his son that he kept the family piano locked. Varese studied mathematics, taught himself music on the side, eventually got into the Paris Conservatory as a composition student. In 1915 he moved to New York, soon formed a little-appreciated orchestra devoted to contemporary works. He refused to submit himself, he said, "to sounds that have already been heard," indignantly rejected an offer of $14,000 a year to conduct at the Capitol Theater in New York. "What do you think I am," asked Varese --"a whore?" After turning out such ear-wrenching but nonelectronic works as Arcana and Ameriques, he fell silent for 18 years while he speculated on the musical possibilities of electronic noise. In 1953 he began putting on tape the sounds that he was hearing in his head.

A painstaking worker ("The first instrument is the wastebasket"), Varese creates his "organized sound" in a studio in Greenwich Village surrounded by the tools of his trade: gongs, sirens, whistles, drums. He is convinced that electronic music is clearly the music of the future, but he does not expect it to make more conventional composition obsolete ("Just because there are other ways of getting there, you do not kill the horse"). Still living modestly ("I am not an expensive animal"), he is as rigidly indifferent to the reactions of the public as he ever was. "My privilege," says Edgard Varese, "is not to explain and not to apologize."

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