Edgard Varèse

If you have any interest in electronic music, classical, experimental, or just music, or humanity, in general, today is the day to listen again to the works of the great Edgard Varèse. Theremin fans will know his work, but there is more intensity and to him than that. A number of excellent collections of his works exist, and exhibition books of aphorisms, performance notes, and biography all worth the time — I dunno with what end, I mean, beyond expansion of your world, the possibilities of sound, the knowledge that such experiments exist, that there were dedicated and relentless explorers of the outer reaches of creativity, as if interplanetary, sonicity, plurality — listening again as I type this and it is so clear how so many of the conventions of composition in rock, pop, jazz, incidental music, drums, sirens, space opera, piccolo elfenreich, even advertising jingles, are in absolute debt to his innovations. Edgard V folks, the real deal, with diacritical notes that will bug some people, but without which, not much else would have advanced (incidentally, Frank Zappa’s favourite composer, if that works as a recommendation for you, all is not lost). Happy 142nd birth anniversary, a sonic colossus.

https://hutnyk.wordpress.com/2025/12/22/edgard-verese/

This is volume one of the complete works:

Of course not without criticism, from 2006: “Edgard Varese describes an alleged difference between Western and Eastern music – citing one of his Indian students who thought Western music jerky and edgy he writes ‘To them, apparently, our Western music seems to sound much as it sounds to us when a record is played backwards’ and Varèse then conducts his own quaintly charming experiment: ‘playing a Hindu record of a melodic vocalization backward, I found that I had the same smooth flow as when played normally, scarcely altered at all’ (Varèse 1936 P 20 of “Audio Culture”)”

https://hutnyk.wordpress.com/2006/03/11/silence-on-music-and-politics-thoughts-to-add-to-the-word-hoard/