Varèse and the Technological Sublime; or, How Ionisation Went Nuclear more

Approaching Electronics 290 Varèse and the Technological Sublime; or, How Ionisation Went Nuclear Anne C. Shreffler The famous composer Varèse, Is chanting music’s new phase, It gloriously abounds; In Electronic Sounds, Which is really something these days. Carl Ruggles, undated letter to Varèse (1950s) The music of Edgard Varèse has been associated with science and technology since the beginning of its reception. He himself linked his music to the scientific sphere, and indeed in writings and statements from the early 1920s on, he carefully shaped and cultivated his image as a musician-scientist. “The emotional impulse that moves a composer to write his scores contains the same element of poetry that incites the scientist to his discoveries,” he wrote in 1936; 1 on other occasions he described music “as an Art-Science,” whose physical, acoustical properties should be as great a concern to the composer as its artistic content.2 As a self-described pioneer in the realm of sound, Varèse sought to create new sounds from both old and new instruments and to liberate sounds from the fetters of an outmoded musical language.3 Central to Varèse’s vision was the movement of sounds in space. Shaped into planes and blocks, sounds could shift, be transformed, and collide; in short, the frozen architecture that is music could be truly set free. The “scientific” titles of many of his works, such as Ionisation, Hyperprism, and Density 21.5, evoke the relationship between science and art just as they invite listeners to associate the music with scientific or mathematical thought. Such associations are not merely peripheral because of the enormous cultural weight that science carried throughout the twentieth century. Scientific progress is commonly linked to a wide range of positive and negative values, including, on the one hand, labor-saving devices, greater efficiency in production, and the exploration of new realms, and, on the other, anxieties about the mechanization of daily life, and, after 1945, awareness of the unprecedented and literally unimaginable destructive power of the atomic bomb. The enormous cultural value ascribed to technology in the twentieth century, as well as the mixture of awe, admiration, hope, fear, and even horror that people experience with regard to technology’s power can be described as the “technological sublime.” 4 It had become clear by the middle of the twentieth century that using science for rational advancement on the one hand and for uncontrolled destruction on the other were not opposite and contradictory positions, but rather points on a continuum. Technology, although often spoken of as a thing in itself, was seen as an instrument of mankind, whose ultimate irrationality and bloodthirstiness could after 1945 no longer be ignored. The much-discussed “dangers of technology” are actually the dangers we present to ourselves. The “technological sublime,” then, refers not only to an attitude that celebrates the possibilities, the power, and the dangers of technology, but also one that takes into account the heights and depths of the human soul. In the late 1940s and 1950s technology became a powerful symbol in the American popular imagination for deeper-seated anxieties about social change, the possibility of world destruction, and mankind’s capacity for evil. These anxieties are played out in the cultural realm as well. Music, as a site of deeply held cultural values, is an excellent canvas upon which to view the tensions and desires associated with science and technology. Since Varèse’s music, in its explorations of musical space and of new sounds, as well as his image as a tireless experimenter in sound, are congruent with those ideas commonly linked to science and scientists, a “scientific” mode of reception has been a productive and indeed a highly resonant one. 1 Edgard Varèse, “The Liberation of Sound” (Chou Wen-chung’s compilation of excerpts from five Varèse lectures in Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music, ed. Elliott Schwartz and Barney Childs [New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1967]), pp. 196–98, esp. 196. This passage is from a lecture given at Mary Austin House, Santa Fe, 23 August 1936, entitled “Music and the Times”; in Schwartz and Childs it is given the new title “New Instruments and New Music.” 2 Varèse, “The Liberation of Sound” (see note 1), pp. 198–201. This passage is from a lecture given at the University of Southern California, 5 June 1939, entitled “Music as an Art-Science”; it retains its original title in Schwartz and Childs. 3 See, for example, Winthrop P. Tryon’s interview with Varèse, “New Instruments in Orchestra are Needed,” Christian Science Monitor, 8 July 1922, p. 18. 4 See Eric Drott’s discussion of the technological sublime in “Conlon Nancarrow and the Technological Sublime,” American Music 22/4 (Winter 2004), pp. 533–63, esp. 542–47. Drott notes the significance of David E. Nye’s book American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). 5 Varèse, “Music and the Times,” (see note 1), p. 198. 6 There are no documented performances of Varèse’s music between the premieres of Density 21.5 on 16 February 1936 and Etude pour Espace on 20 April 1947. Ecuatorial, performed once in 1934, was not played again for twenty-five years. Therefore Ionisation, which Slonimsky conducted several times in 1933, had been the last Varèse premiere with any resonance until Déserts in 1954. Shreffler: Varèse and the Technological Sublime 291 When Varèse began composing for tape and electronics during the 1950s, this seemed like the culmination of his life’s dream. For the first time it would be possible, it seemed, for composers to create any kind of sound, unhampered by the limitations of instruments or performers. In Varèse’s case, expectations were even higher than usual because he had spoken of the possibility of electronic music long before it became practicable, writing for example in 7 Wolfgang Steinecke, quoted in Rein1936: “[T]he new musical apparatus I envisage, able to emit sounds of any number of frequenhold Brinkmann, “Varèse in Darmstadt: Dokumentarischer Bericht und kurzer cies, will extend the lowest and highest registers [...]. Not only will the harmonic possibilities Kommentar,” in Von Kranichstein zur of the overtones be revealed in all their splendor, but the use of certain interferences created Gegenwart: 50 Jahre Darmstädter Ferienby the partials will represent an appreciable contribution. [...]. An entirely new magic of sound!” 5 kurse 1946–1996, ed. Rudolf Stephan, When Déserts, a composition for fifteen instruments and percussion with three taped interLothar Knessl, Otto Tomek, Klaus Trapp, and Christopher Fox (Stuttgart: Daco, polations of “organized sound,” was premiered in 1954, this was the first time a major new 1996), pp. 87–93, esp. 92. Varèse work had been heard in public in almost twenty years (Etude pour Espace, an unpub8 Olin Downes, “Music,” review of lished fragment of the larger project Espace, had been performed in New York in 1947).6 This concerts given by the State Symphony was followed by the tape piece Poème électronique in 1958, transmitted over approximately 400 Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchesloudspeakers in the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair, in which Varèse’s vision of tra, The New York Times, 17 December sounds projected into space was also realized. 1924, p. 19 (“catastrophe in a boiler Because Varèse’s new works brought him again before the public eye, and also because of factory”), and Abraham Skulsky, “Varese Set to Launch Electronic Music Age,” a general revival of high modernist styles after World War II, Varèse’s music experienced a New York Herald Tribune, 24 January renaissance during the 1950s. The timing is important, as it led to typically 1950s-era concerns 1954, section 4, p. 5. about technological progress, especially about atomic energy and warfare, being applied not 9 Pierre Schaeffer, Karlheinz Stockonly to the current works, but also projected back onto the earlier music. The percussion piece hausen, and Pierre Boulez in Europe, and Ionisation (1931) especially was widely seen as “a bold anticipation of the sound world of elecOtto Luening, Vladimir Ussachevsky, 7 John Cage, and Bebe and Louis Barron in tronic music.” the US had all done significant work In the following I shall examine the “scientific” reception of Varèse’s music in the 1950s in tape or electronic music by the time of and early 1960s, particularly the prevalence of atomic and nuclear metaphors used to describe the Déserts premiere in 1954. Brinkhis music. The composer was increasingly viewed as visionary scientist, as a prophet of the mann’s hypothesis that Varèse first atomic age. The new image was an intensified and transformed version of the older one of the encountered the tape machine in Darmstadt in 1950 is quite probably true; musician-scientist, except that now of course, after the atomic bomb, the technological anaBrinkmann, “Varèse in Darmstadt” (see logy had an immediate relevance. Seen as a prophet of the new scientific thinking that was note 7), p. 92. Varèse’s inexperience with so influential after World War II, Varèse gained enormous prestige during these decades; tape composition has always been known after his death in 1965 his reputation grew even more. After decades of reviews such as the one in electronic music circles; see interview with the composer and engineer Max that compared Hyperprism to “a catastrophe in a boiler factory” it must have been deeply satisMathews in the Video Archive of Electrofying for Varèse to be praised thirty years later as the composer “set to launch the electronic Acoustic Musicians (Waltham, MA, Eric music age.” 8 Chasalow and B. Cassidy, 1996–2000). It has become clear in recent years that Varèse was not as technologically informed or as 10 Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto adept at tape and electronic composition as were many of his younger colleagues in the late Luening had collaborated on two works 1940s and early 1950s.9 Contrary to received opinion, Déserts was not even the first work to for orchestra and tape, Rhapsodic combine tape and instrumental music: Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening had already Variations (1953–54) and Poem in Cycles and Bells (1954): the first of these must done this.10 But in terms of how Varèse’s music was heard and understood at that time, it did have preceded Varèse’s work on the tape not matter that his alleged prowess with technology was largely a fiction, because the myth had part of Déserts, and the second preceded already taken hold. It resonated powerfully in the reception of Varèse’s music because, like all or overlapped with it. Varèse was acmyths, it contained a larger truth. quainted with Luening and Ussachevsky at this time and was well informed about their projects; Eric Chasalow, personal communication. 11 N[athan] B[roder], “Varèse, Edgar,” in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, fourth edition, ed. H. C. Colles (New York: Macmillan, 1944), Supplementary Volume, p. 664, and N[athan] B[roder], “Varèse, Edgar,” in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, fifth edition, ed. Eric Blom (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1954), vol. 8, pp. 669–70. The discourse on Varèse and his music changed rapidly during the decade after 1945, as a comparison of the article on Varèse in the supplement to the fourth edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians in 1944 with that in the fifth edition of 1954 reveals.11 The earlier article – the first one on the composer to appear in Grove’s – begins by relating his studies at the Schola Cantorum and with d’Indy and Roussel. His compositional style is described as “thoroughly unconventional” and extremely dissonant but still concerned with “the carefully planned disposition of the individual tones of each chord among the various instruments.” The next edition inserts the clause, “He studied mathematics and science at first.” The article ends with the newly-added sentence: “In later years Varèse came to believe that normal musical instruments are obsolete and that music should be written exclusively for electrotonic [sic] in- Approaching Electronics 292 struments.” 12 The conventionally schooled French composer has morphed into a wild-eyed mad scientist. Other ideas from the earlier phase of Varèse reception, for example Paul Rosenfeld’s view of Varèse’s music as an ideal expression of America’s urban landscape,13 were replaced by a new “scientific” image of the composer, which was articulated with remarkable clarity in the postwar Varèse literature in terms that continue to dominate the discourse about the composer today. This later reception, although it has various strands, can be subsumed under the general notion of the technological sublime. Varèse is seen alternately as a romantic genius, laboring for years in obscurity until the world finally caught up with him, as a composer-scientist, as a visionary of electronic music, and as a prophet of the atomic age. Although each of these strands – even the “atomic” one – had been anticipated in preceding decades, during which Varèse was hardly unknown,14 they took shape and solidified only during the postwar Varèse revival. This revival was marked by a succession of events, including the premiere of Etude pour Espace in New York in 1947, Varèse’s lectures at Columbia University in 1948, the lauded performance of Hyperprism at the Paul Rosenfeld memorial concert in New York in 1949, Varèse’s visit to Darmstadt in the summer of 1950, and the issuing of the EMS recording of Ionisation, Intégrales, Density 21.5, and Octandre the same year. Most of all, though, Varèse had begun to compose again. The fact that his newest works, Déserts and Poème électronique, made use of the technology that he had been dreaming about publicly for so many decades guaranteed him the spotlight. The reception of these works also converged with the general fascination with science and technology so prevalent in Western society in the wake of the atomic bomb. “This is really the music of the age of the hydrogen bomb,” wrote one critic of the tumultuous premiere and simultaneous stereo broadcast of Déserts in Paris in 1954.15 The image of the atomic bomb, with its dual associations of violence and scientific progress, was often used in connection with Varèse’s music after 1945. The novelist Henry Miller, who had been a friend of Varèse and his wife since the early 1940s and had written about Varèse in his book The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945), wrote to him in 1951: “I had the definite impression that 25 or 35 years before the horrible discovery of the powers of the atom, you were already in the new age. No one crossed the frontier with the courage and the integrity which your music reveals.” 16 (See Cat. 174, p. 392.) Walter Anderson wrote to the young conductor Werner Janssen of “Varese, – whom I for decades [...] esteem [as] The Only XXth Century Voice in music. In the sciences a New Guy has just cut the price of Uranium to $1.86 per mm; Ike’s Peace-Atom costs $16 per. That’s the Speed and the Dimension the world has long been moving in [...].” 17 Although there is some disagreement on exactly what caused the Déserts scandal – whether it was the unfamiliarity of the “organized sound” on the tape interpolations, or simply the length of the instrumental piece and its relative lack of drama – it seems clear that the piece caused some confusion, even among well-disposed critics.18 One possible reason is that the piece – particularly the interpolations – did not seem to live up to Varèse’s and others’ utopian pronouncements about the limitless possibilities of electronic music. Instead of “[a]n entirely new magic of sound,” 19 listeners heard “rumbles and buzzing, beeps and blurps, metallic growls and a kind of mechanical keening. There were combinations of noises like dentist drills, riveting, trains going over a rusty bridge, a monstrous bowling alley or rush-hour traffic gone wild.” 20 The expectations were all the higher since Varèse’s fallow period had been presented not as a period of low productivity, but as a time of concentrated scientific research, the fruits of which were about to be revealed. “Today the name of Varese is being heard again,” wrote Abraham Skulsky in the New York Herald Tribune in January 1954, “The composer who retreated from the public musical scene in the mid-thirties to explore electronic means of capturing sounds, is writing new scores which make use of his discoveries in new techniques.” 21 Although in a real sense Varèse had indeed imagined what electronic music might be capable of, he had only begun to use his first tape recorder on 22 March 1953.22 There was therefore an enormous gap between his idealized vision of a musical utopia and his actual experience with 12 Grove, fifth edition (see note 11), p. 670. 13 Paul Rosenfeld, An Hour with Ameri- can Music ([1929]; reprinted Westport, CT: Hyperion Press, 1979), pp. 160–79. 14 See Carol J. Oja, Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 25–44. 15 Nicole Hirsch, “‘Désert’ [sic], œuvre électrosymphonique, a été accueilli par des sifflets, des chants de coq et des aboiements au Théâtre des ChampsElysées,” France-Soir, 4 December 1954, p. 8F. 16 Letter from Henry Miller to Varèse, 19 April 1951; Edgard Varèse Collection, PSS. 17 Walter Anderson had been Secretary of the Pan-American Association of Composers and was a longtime friend of Varèse. Letter (carbon copy) from Walter Anderson to Werner Janssen, 30 December [1956?]; Edgard Varèse Collection, PSS. 18 Olivia Mattis describes the scandal in her article “Varèse’s Multimedia Conception of Déserts,” The Musical Quarterly 76/4 (Winter 1992), pp. 557–83, esp. 557. Dieter Nanz reports, on the basis of a recording of the premiere, that people were more restless during the instrumental parts than during the interpolations; Dieter A. Nanz, Edgard Varèse: Die Orchesterwerke (Berlin: Lukas, 2003), p. 558. Heinz-Klaus Metzger, who attended the premiere of Déserts, writes: “Déserts [...] was a bitter disappointment to me in 1954, and the technical dream of Brussels [Poéme electronique] is a massive yet really somewhat specious nightmare”; Heinz-Klaus Metzger, “Hommage à Edgard Varèse,” Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik, ed. Wolfgang Steinecke (Mainz: Schott, 1959), pp. 54–66, esp. 57. 19 Varèse, “Music and the Times,” (see note 1), p. 198. 20 Howard Taubman, “Music: No Sound Like a New Sound,” The New York Times, 1 December 1955, p. 45. 21 Skulsky, “Varèse Set to Launch” (see note 8). 22 Nanz, Orchesterwerke (see note 18), p. 474. Shreffler: Varèse and the Technological Sublime 293 23 Varèse claimed in a letter to the Musi- cal Quarterly in 1955 that he had “never been connected in any way with the Futurist movement and [...] was at complete variance with their views and totally uninterested in their ‘intona-rumori’”; Edgard Varèse, “A Communication,” The Musical Quarterly 41/1 (October 1955), p. 574. This appears to be contradicted by Luigi Nono’s report that Varèse had spoken of the Futurists and their instruments in his lectures at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse in 1950; see Brinkmann, “Varèse in Darmstadt” (see note 7), p. 92. This view of sonic violence, echoed by many commentators, was summed up by Henry Cowell: “The sheer tension of sound in Hyperprism is so impelling that it knocks the spots out of paler music [...]. No one has ever achieved greater punch than Varèse”; Henry Cowell, “Current Chronicle,” The Musical Quarterly 35/2 (April 1949), pp. 292–96, esp. 293. 24 Frederic Grunfeld, “The Well-Tempered Ionizer,” High Fidelity 4/7 (September 1954), pp. 39–41 and 104–108, esp. 40. 25 Déserts received its American premiere on 17 May 1955 in Bennington, Vermont, and was first performed in New York on 20 November 1955 at Town Hall; see Howard Taubman, “Music: No Sound Like a New Sound” (see note 20). A tape of Poème électronique was first played in the US at the Village Gate Café in New York on 9 November 1958; see Edward Downes, “‘Poème’ by Varèse has US Premiere,” The New York Times, 10 November 1958, p. 36. There was also more than a little confusion about the original number of loudspeakers in the Philips Pavilion in Brussels, as a later review shows: “Originally 2,500 loudspeakers carried the electronic and human sounds, but for the occasion only two were used”; Howard Klein, “Music: Varèse Concert,” The New York Times, 3 September 1964, p. 25. 26 Letter from Slonimsky to Varèse, 26 February 1946; Edgard Varèse Collection, PSS. 27 Nicolas Slonimsky, The Road to Music (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1947), p. 80. The book “grew out of articles published several years ago in the Christian Science Monitor, on the Children’s Page”; Foreword, p. vii. 28 In a printed program of a concert by the Pan-American Association of Composers in Paris, Slonimsky gave a one-line description of each piece under its title: Intégrales was described as “Sonorous geometry of an implacable tape and electronic music. “The liberation of sound” as Varèse conceived it was ultimately a romantic vision, not a scientific idea. Tape and electronic music is hard to talk about under any circumstances. There is no visual (or imagined visual) connection between a sound and its source, no notation to capture the music outside of time, and a very limited vocabulary to describe non-pitched sounds (which was at that time even more strikingly limited than it is now). Lacking a vocabulary with which to describe the new sounds, Varèse’s critics had to leave musical-technical discourse behind and rely on spontaneous impressions. In listening to Déserts, particularly to the sounds that resemble machine guns and airplane propellers in the first and third interpolations, listeners readily grasped at images associated with violence and war to describe them, as the French reviewer did. But Varèse made the job of his critics even more difficult by vehemently distancing himself from two aesthetic movements that seemed related to his music, Futurism and musique concrète. His public rejections of any link to musical Futurism are well known but are still baffling, given that this movement clearly influenced him during the 1910s, and that it obviously intersected with his own interests in noise and in what might be termed sonic violence.23 With equal vehemence and far less reason, he rejected any connection with Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète, even though he had completed the first version of the taped interpolations to Déserts in Schaeffer’s Paris studio and used actual noises from the streets and factories in the tapes. In an article in High Fidelity from 1954 Frederic Grunfeld echoes what must have been Varèse’s view: “Composing on tape directly hasn’t affected [Varèse’s] lifelong habit of calculating every pitch, nuance, and timbre long before he actually begins setting down what he has in mind. In that important respect he differs from most of the ‘Tapesichord’ avant-gardists of musique concrète. Pierre Schaeffer, the school’s founder, has hailed Varèse as concrète prophet and patriarch, but Schaeffer and his cohorts are mainly surrealists-in-sound, improvising tapemontages from railroad noises, or crickets, or human heartbeats. Varèse has no interest in improvisation.” 24 While Déserts was a succès de scandale, and Poème eléctronique achieved equal notoriety in 1958, practical constraints limited performances of both works.25 Performances and recordings of Varèse’s earlier works, on the other hand, multiplied during these years and continued to increase throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The previous understanding of these works was transformed, as they were now heard through the electronic music “lens.” Ionisation in particular, which quickly became Varèse’s best-known work, was seen as anticipating the atomic age in music. Nicolas Slonimsky wrote to Varèse in early 1946: “It’s really a strange and fortunate renewal to work together and to create music that is truly modern. I shall think of Ionisation while the atomic bomb is tearing apart the inertia of the world.” 26 Two years later Slonimsky described Varèse’s music in a textbook on twentieth-century music for children in similar terms: “Even atoms have been pictured in musical compositions. The modern composer, Edgar Varese, has written a piece called Ionization, scored for drums, rattles, anvils, and two fire-engine sirens. In case you are not sure what Ionization means, it is the state of electrical conductivity of the air induced by the presence of radioactive substances. Anyway, it is something about knocking off the atoms. And certainly Varese’s music sounds ominous, now that we know what atoms are up to. He wrote Ionization fifteen years before the atomic bomb, and that is a musical prophecy!” 27 Slonimsky, one of Varèse’s earliest advocates, had already described the composer as “un Einstein franco-américain” in 1931.28 He continued to revel in atomic metaphors for Varèse’s music, culminating in the tongue-in-cheek virtuosity of the fourth edition of Music Since 1900 (1971): “Ionisation, epoch-making work by Edgar Varèse, [...] portraying in a recognizably classical sonata form the process of atomic change as electrons are liberated and molecules are ionized, the main subject suggesting a cosmic-ray bombardment introduced by an extra-terrestrial rhythmic figure [...] the development section being marked by the appearance of heavy nuclear particles in the metal group [...] and after an artfully abridged recapitulation arriving at a magistral coda, with tubular chimes ringing as new atomic polymers are created and the residual Approaching Electronics 294 thermal energy of vigorous tone-clusters [...].” (In the first edition of Music Since 1900, Slonimsky had laconically described the same piece as “written in sonata form.”) 29 An article about Varèse in High Fidelity in 1954 was entitled “The Well-Tempered Ionizer” and featured a head shot of the composer juxtaposed with a drawing of an atom (see Plate A, p. 295).30 Roy Harris, who had produced the first recording of Ionisation in 1934, made the astounding remark in 1950 that scientists at the top-secret nuclear weapons lab of the Manhattan Project had listened to the recording during the war: “Now about ‘Ionization.’ This is weird music, as remote from our daily life as the atomic world it represents. [...] No! No! You have the cart before the horse. ‘Ionization’ was not an attempt to capitalize on the publicity of the atomic bomb. It was written in 1931, and recorded for Columbia Records (1935) [sic] under direction of Slonimsky and supervised by this writer. It is now a collector’s item. In fact, the recording of ‘Ionisation’ was used for amusement years later at Oak Ridge during work on the atomic bomb.” 31 Such language as in the quotations above should not be dismissed as simply the free associations of lazy critics. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had had an immediate and lasting impact, above all in the way they suddenly and horrifyingly broadened all previous conceptions of destruction, but also in thousands of smaller ways, which manifested themselves in all corners of the culture and in daily life, including advertising.32 As the epitome of the technological sublime, the atomic bombs evoked images ranging from violence on the one hand to an awe-inspiring beauty on the other. Given Varèse’s reputation as a scientific composer and the implicit violence of his music, it is not surprising that commentators used atomic metaphors to describe it. These figures of speech also tap into the fascination with the notion that potentially unlimited power could be released from the very smallest unit of matter. (One encounters non-nuclear violent metaphors as well. Henry Miller wrote in 1951 that he and his wife had been “knocked out” after hearing the EMS recording: “We were really awake, I tell you – and more – electrified. [...] I am impatient now to hear more. It was like a joyous electrocution. The martyrs of old often went to the stake singing. No one goes thus to the electric chair. Dommage!” 33 Varèse’s own initial reaction to the atomic bomb, though typical of the time, clearly revealed his fascination with the unleashing of violent forces. His wife Louise recounted: “The summer of 1945, when the first successful world-shattering test of the atomic bomb exploded its monstrous mushroom over the New Mexican desert, we were visiting Dr. Louise Despert in the country. [...] When [Varèse] had read the papers, with their apocalyptic announcement, he phoned me. He was in a state of extreme excitement, elated by the wonder of it. In a letter a day later he wrote: ‘Bombe atomique – formidable – émouvant – stimulant.’ After I too had read the papers, I was horrified and wrote Varèse: ‘Bomb: Awesome, frightening, inhuman.’ To which he replied, ‘Yes, the bomb is terrible – not the invention but the employment [...] but think what could be achieved for the good of the whole world in distributing and directing that energy!’” 34 The prevalence of atomic metaphors to describe Ionisation was also due in large part to its title, which describes the procedure by which electrons are separated from an atom in order to give it a positive or negative electrical charge. Varèse had learned about the procedure in a book by the English astronomer Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) called Stars and Atoms, which had also been translated into French.35 Eddington described ionization as basic to the internal workings of stars: “At the high temperature inside a star the battering of the particles by one another, and more especially the collision of the ether waves (X-rays) with atoms, cause electrons to be broken off and set free... [this] is called ionization.” (Varèse copied out this passage from the French translation of Eddington’s book, see Cat. 108, plate p. 296.) Eddington depicts the insides of stars as a cauldron of splitting atoms: “electrons are being wrenched away as fast as they settle and the atoms are kept stripped almost bare [...]. The high temperature [...] has to a large extent eliminated differences between different kinds of material.” He concludes, using a colonial metaphor entirely typical of his time and class, “Stellar atoms are nude savages innocent of the class distinctions of our fully arrayed terrestrial atoms.” 36 Varèse therefore associated his title – however the title may be related to the composition – with the logic, by a Franco-American Einstein”; program of the Pan-American Association, conducted by Nicolas Slonimsky, at the Maison Gaveau (Salle des Concerts) on 11 June 1931; 29 Nicolas Slonimsky, Music Since 1900 (New York: Norton, 1937), p. 340; fourth edition (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971), pp. 562–63. 30 Grunfeld, “Well-Tempered Ionizer” (see note 24), p. 39. 31 Roy Harris, “Peabody To Be Scene of Operas: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday Nights,” The Nashville Tennesseean, 5 August 1950, p. 35. Slonimsky includes this anecdote in the Varèse article in Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians for the first time in the seventh edition (1984), but gives the date as 1940, which is impossible since the Oak Ridge facility was founded in 1943. See http://www.ornl.gov/ (consulted on 21 February 2005). 32 See Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985). 33 Letter from Henry Miller to Varèse, 19 April 1951 (see note 16). 34 Louise Varèse, unpublished typescript for vol. 2 of Varèse: A Looking-Glass Diary, chapter entitled “Another Chorus,” p. 66; Edgard Varèse Collection, PSS. Less than a year later Varèse commented on the atomic bomb in an interview with the music critic Harold Schonberg: “When the atomic bomb fell, nationalism was wiped out. Today is one complete world, not individual countries barred from the rest. National art is a ridiculous concept today; it has broken up”; Harold C. Schonberg, “Art from the Shoulders Up,” The Musical Digest 27/4 (March–April 1946), pp. 10 and 35, esp. 35. 35 Arthur Stanley Eddington, Stars and Atoms (New Haven: Yale University Press, and London: Humphrey Milford and Oxford University Press, 1927); trans. into French by J. Rossignol as Etoiles et atomes (Paris: Hermann, 1930). 36 Eddington, Stars and Atoms (see note 35), pp. 21–22. 37 Eddington’s numerous books, above all The Nature of the Physical World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928), were widely reprinted and translated. His classic study, The Internal Constitution of the Stars (London: Cambridge University Press, 1926), was reprinted as late as 1988. Shreffler: Varèse and the Technological Sublime 295 Plate A Frederic Grunfeld, “The Well-Tempered Ionizer,” in: High Fidelity 4/7 (September 1954), p. 39 38 “Star,” in Encyclopedia Britannica, 2005. Encyclopedia Britannica Online http://www.search.eb.com/eb7article? tocId=52847 (consulted on 18 March 2005). extremely violent forces inside a star, which he understood as resulting from something very like atomic fission. It is also possible that some of Varèse’s listeners, in the 1930s as well as later, were familiar with Eddington’s description of ionization within stars, or that Eddington’s description had influenced the popular-science understanding of that time.37 Although Eddington’s account has been superseded by the current view that atomic fusion, not fission, provides the star’s energy, he was right about the constant ionization that takes place inside a star.38 In any case, to the scientifically untrained, and especially to those listeners after 1945, ionization does evoke nuclear processes. Approaching Electronics 296 Cat. 108 | Commentary p. 226 Edgard Varèse, handwritten copy of a passage from Arthur Stanley Eddington, Etoiles et atomes (“Ionisation des Atomes”), enclosure in a letter of 27 December 1931 to Carlos Salzedo Cat. 108 Shreffler: Varèse and the Technological Sublime 297 Varèse’s Ionisation was a suitable subject for an “atomic” reception in a more substantial way as well: because of its scoring for percussion ensemble, its mostly unpitched and “noisy” sounds defy description in conventional musical terms, just as does Varèse’s tape music. In both Varèse’s percussion music and his works for organized sound, certain types of noise unavoidably evoke violent images. As Heinz-Klaus Metzger notes, “The average, free-associating listener, who is unaware of the professional’s injunction against musical imagery and who relates the blaring siren in the percussion section of ‘Ionisation’ with alarm and bombardment, has actually experienced more of the substance of the piece than the expert […]”.39 Yet there is another strain to Varèse’s music in addition to the forcefully emphatic one. Déserts in particular unfolds slowly and for long stretches quietly, presenting a rich sonic landscape of Klangfarbenmelodie. The deserts evoked in its title, which would have been visually depicted in the film planned to accompany the music, were “the deserts of earth (sand, snow); the deserts of the sea; the deserts of outer space [...] but particularly the deserts in the mind of man.” 40 There is no better image than that of the atomic bomb – incidentally closely associated with the deserts in the American West in which it was tested in the 1940s and 1950s – to evoke all registers of what I have called the technological sublime, including its illumination of the dark side of human nature. Varèse’s embrace of science and technology was from the beginning part of a utopian vision, not the rational, post-industrial thinking of a Milton Babbitt. Even if Varèse was not in reality a scientist or even much of a technician, his music (even or especially his non-electronic music), straining mightily against conventional boundaries, did articulate a vision of a sound world as yet unattained. 39 Metzger, “Hommage” (see note 18), p. 55. 40 “Déserts”, exposé for a film project, in Fernand Ouellette, Edgard Varèse, trans. Derek Coltman (New York: Orion, 1968), p. 181.