babbitt, milton - on varese

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Edgard Varse: A Few Observations of His Music

Milton Babbitt

Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 4, No. 2. (Spring - Summer, 1966), pp. 14-22.

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F E W O B S E R V T I O N S O F H I S M U S I C XMILTON B BBITT

TH I s I S , to the best of my knowledge, only the second occasion onwhich I have been granted the somewhat unnerving privilege ofspeaking publicly of a composer's music in tha t composer's presence.On the first such occasion, the composer was Igor Stravinsky, beingdone homage in his 8 0 th birthyear; now, on this second occasion,the composer is Edgard Varsse, in his 80th birthyear;l and it wasof Varsse tha t Stravinsky has predicted: His music will survive;we know that now, for it has dated in the right way. Altho ugh Ihave no direct knowledge of Stravinsky's survival theory of music,I infer from this statement that it derives from Darwin rather thanfrom Gresham, and, having been obliged to have the temerity tospeak of S travinsky's music in his presence, it requires relativelylittle courage to conjectu re as to the meaning of his prose in hisabsence, particu larly since, for those of us who rega rd it as far lessremarkable when Varsse's music was composed than that it wascomposed at all, it is not difficult to interpret Stravinsky's observa-tion to our satisfaction. Surely, the most critical factor of the agingnprocess has been the transformation of much of this body of musicfrom works little heard in the first quar ter-cen tury of the ir existenceto works widely heard in the pas t decade and a half. And just as we,who pressed our mind's ea r almost beyond its capacities in a ttem ptingto re-create, or-more accurately-create, mentally the unprecedentedsonorous world of this music from those scarce scores to which wehad access thirty years ago, understandably measured its originalityprim arily , if not solely, by the extent of th e difficulty of this inferencefrom experienced and recalled sound to the sound of Varsse, so thefirst hea ring and first rehearin g of the music directed attention to thestriking singularities of the single events, and induced the ultimatelyunjust appraisal, in the name of finally redressing injustice, that thismusic was most remarkable in its insular originality, its absence of

This article consists mainly of selected and slightly altered portions of a talkgiven at Peterborough, New Hampshire on August 21, 1965, on the occasion of thepresentation of the Edward MacDowell Society Medal of Achievement to VarZse.VarZse s birthyear is usually reported as 1885, but 883 appears to be correct.


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V A R E S E : O B S E R V A T I O N S O F H I S M U S I Csignificant ancestry or possible progeny. Yet, it appears now to beacceptably deferential and appreciative to say that, now that thosecoruscating sonorities and dazzling rhythmic webs have become morefamiliar, we can penetrate beneath and beyond them , and-if theyhave lost a little of their breathtaking impact with time and repeti-tion-we can now value the music for other, more durab le properties,not exc luding those of historical precedence and chronological orig-inality. But I prefer to assert that the sonorities have lost nothing oftheir luster, the rhythm s nothing of their fascination precisely becausewe have penetrated from the local to the global, from the event asseparable and independent to its temporal and spatial dependencies,relationships, and influences. If we have identified possible ancestralsources, this seems of far less consequence than that we have recog-nized the extent to which Varsse's music engages the same issues,represents the same kind of stage in a mainstream of musical devel-opment as that of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Webern, and Berg, andtha t its eventual originality is thus most fruitfully and justly gaugedin the light of its shared connections, as competitive rathe r thanas insular. If this music has already outlived its most skillful imita-tions, it is because the only satisfactory imitation must be totalduplication, for the attrib ute s of the surface are structurally compre-hensible not so much as primitives f rom which the remainder of acomposition may be said to derive, but as themselves derived fromother dimensions of the composition. T h e new sound^,^ it is nowma nifest, were less new as things in themselves than as new infer-ences from compositional premises.This , in turn , a ffects the very mode of presentation of suc h acompositional premise, idea, donnee, which is, in its turn, a centralcharacteris tic of Varsse's style , for it involves the setting forth of acontextual, referential norm for an entire work. This crucial functionis defined not only by the customary emphasis of priority, b ut bysimplicity and-often immediate-repetition, repetition not of alldimensions of the musical idea, bu t exact repetition of one or moredimensions. By simplicity, I mean brevity, the minimal motivicfo rm in which the idea appears in the w ork, linearity rath er th an poly-phony, and-often-a grea ter internal homogeneity than later formsof the samen material. I shall refer to and recall for you O ~ t a n d r e , ~because it is probably Varsse's best known and most widely per-formed ensemble work, as an instance of these characteristics. The

Neither perform ed nor notated musical exam ples were ava ilable during the talk;to employ them here would prejudice the necessarily informal and general nature ofthe original discussion


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P E R S P E T I V E S O F N E W M U S Iopening four-note statement, clearly articulated by a pause, and byimmediate pitch and attack rhy thm repetition (V arss e always re-garded grace notes as on the beat), functions in the work much lessas a total motive than as a unit of harmonic content, for, as thework unfolds, these initial four notes are interpreted as representa-tives of an unordered collection of four pitch-classes, to within trans-position. This collection, not insignificantly, is one of the simplestall-combinatorial tetrachords, simplest in the sense that it is one ofthe two su ch tetrachords generated b y a single interval. A t the outset,this tetrachord is presented by temporal proximity (immediate suc-cessio n), equally clearly, the do min ant motive of the work , extractedfrom the tetrachord by spatial proximity (registral association, ina reasonably unam bigu ous sense of th e slippery word register )appears throughout in its initial ordering, under customary trans-formations. The three-note succession G-flat-E-D-sharp is verifiedimmediately by twofold repetition, and a disjunct transposition (stillstated within, and registrally extracted from, the tetrachord) andthen stated explicitly by direct succession, conjoining spatial andtemporal proximity, by the entrance of the clarinet as an answerat the fifth above. T h e prom inent foreground them atic role of thissuccession in the rest of the work is perfectly clear: in the trumpetand horn at the end of the first movement, divided between the twohighest instrum ents (flute, w ith the first note, and cIarinet, with thefollowing two, this division into one and two corresponding to thelinear division of the motive in the original tetrachord) on the firstof the reiterated chords of the second movement (eight statementsbeginning with the first measure after rehearsal 5 , and in thetru m pe t through out the sixteen measures of the repeated chord inthe third movement (where the F-sharp that completes the tetra-chord is heard in the lowest note of the chord).The ordered, tritone-transposed return of the initial tetrachord atthe end of the first movement ends with the elision of the fourth note,clarifying the origin of the three-note figure of the piccolo whichopens the second movement as the tritone pitch-class transpositionof the first three notes of this terminating tetrachord, and-there-fore-as a dup lication of the opening three pitch-classes of the compo-sition, reordered as a retrograde. T h e chord-forming entrances w hichfollow the piccolo on the clarinet and trombone present the sametrichord, now in the initial ordering. T h is trichord , the only possiblethree-note extraction fro m the tetrachord other than the form s of thepreviously discussed three-note them atic un it, is a prim ary articulativeand unifying element in the second and third movements, and sug-

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V A R E S E O B S E R V A T I O N S O F H I S M U S I Cgests why these two movements are performed without separation.T h e final chord of the second movement, w hich is the cho rd ofmaximal registral dispersion in the entire work, includes the pitch-classes of th e opening tetracho rd of the first movement as the highestfour notes, and those of the closing tetrachord of the movement asthe lowest four notes, with immediate succession thus transformedinto immediate simultaneity, again, in its own way, the horizontaland the vertical. The tetrachord is stated linearly, early in the thirdmovement, as the them e fo r imitation in the oboe, but now reorderedso that the original three-note theme, inverted, is presented by linear,rather than by spatial, proximity; at this point, too, the pitch dyadF E returns in the registral placement it occupied in the openingtetra chord , and-finally-occurs in thirteen consecutive measures inthe last section of the movement, until the piccolo takes over thesepitch-classes as a trill. T h e final sound of th e composition is thetrichord that opened the second movement, sounded as a simultaneityand transposed to the level presented linearly by the double-bass atthe beginning of th e third movement.If I have spent what may appear to be a disproportionate amountof time identifying some of the modes of occurrence and adaptivetransformations of the pitch content of the assumptive source, I havedone so in order to attem pt to show the stru ctu ral basis of certain ofVar2se7s style characteristics. A n analogy wi th spoken, o r pr inted ,language may serve to clarify the issue. If one were to ask: howlarge a sample of an unfam iliar natural languag e would have to beobserved before phonemic, or g raph em ic, constraints could be inferredand employed to predict language events with an accuracy reasonablyreflecting the redundancy of the language, obviously the answerwould have to be that the sample would have to be large. But, if anartificialn language were constructed, of but few phonemes and alimited number of possibilities of concatenation of them, then a smallsample should suffice. The VarSsian opening statement is such asample; its repetition is a reiteration and an emphasizing of the rele-van t elements in defining a work's constraints. Also, and m ost impor-tan t, it is of such a character as not to suggest tha t it is itself aninstance of a fam iliar language system , whose associated constraintswould then be inferred, mistakenly and, for the coherent hearing ofthe rest of th e work, d isastrously.VarSse, like Webern, directs one's ears to the structural and as-sociative relevance of every dimension of the musical event, not, asdoes Webern, by isolating the event, by framing it with silence,above, below, before, and after, but by isolating the singularity that

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PERSPE TIVES O N W MUSIsuch initially defined determinacy can bestow upon the event, even inthe most elaborate of vertical complexes, and the most varied oflinear configurations.

If immediate repetition, as reinforcement, characterizes the Va-rssian opening, it also and therefore characterizes the means ofcontinuation, of achieving delineation and contras t within a singledimension, and total climax. But even at its most strikingly extreme,as at the entire 21-measure moderato section of Intkgrales, only onemeasure is totally repeated and but once, and-at the conclusion of thesection-a two-m easure unit is immediately repeated twice I over-look the probably erroneous change of the dynam ic indication of th efirst piccolo on the first repetition). From such parsimony wi th regardto total repetition could be inferred the almost total abstinence fromconjoined, all-dimensional repetition as architectonic, the determi-na nt of external form patte rns. In this VarSse reflects, and probablyantedates, the contemporary concern with polyphonicn rather thanphased repetitions. In his case, this is achieved far less often byholding one factor (say, the rhythmic) fixed, while another (say,pi tch ) is altered, than by em ploying different periods of repetition inindividual-usually, instrumental-lines; the result is different en-semble rhythms, dynamics, simultaneities, etc. associated with indi-vidual component repetitions. Even where this specific procedure ismade impossible by the medium, as in Density 21.5, the principleis still maintained. There are, I believe, no two identical measures inDensity. The durational succession associated with the attack pointsof the initial three pitches occurs, in the same metrical orientation,only at two fu rthe r places in the w ork, and at those places is associatedwith the opening interval succession also, but the pitch succession isaltered in each case by transposition. The transposition choices, in onesense, reflect traditio nal crite ria of similitude, in that they are the twowhich secure maximum pitch-class identification (beyond identity)with the initial statement; but in a further sense, the choices areserial, in that the order of occurrence of these transpositions reflectsthe pitch-class ordering of the initial three-note succession. Obviously,neither this nor any other work of V arsse's is serial in any extensivesense, or even much beyond the sense in which traditional works arethemat ica l ly ~er ia l .~nd in the single instance of Density, whereit mig ht be observed that the ordered m otive is not fu rther embeddedin an unordered collection, the serialism represented by the motiveand its transpositions is combinational, not permutational, pitch-classserialism. T ha t VarSse is not a serial composern is, clearly, not to beconstrued as a normative statement, but it is an important reminder


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V A R R S E O B S E R V A T I O N S OF H I S M U S I Cth at one of the fundam enta l aspects of the musical revolution in whichVarbse was so primary a figure is that it was a struggle to create aworld of musics, not a struggle between one music and another, serialand nonserial, tonal and atonal. I t is this tha t conveys the impressionthat w ha t the dom inant com posers of Varbse7s generation shared incommon was lack of, an avoidance of, comm unality.Linear repetitions create a rhythm of durations between such repe-titions, so that there is also the sense in which repetitions of differentperiodicities in simultaneous instrumental statements create poly-rhythms, and in which the individual rhythm ic lines constitute apar titioning of time units corresponding to the partition ing of sm allerunits by pitch repetition in the individual line, or by repetition ofsimultaneities in the ensemble. These analogies suggest means ofrhythm ic linearization and delinearization as a mode of rhythmicdevelopment, while still not involving the intricate and largely un-resolved questions of rhythmic relatedness in terms of related trans-formations, for such means are identity transformations, or-perhapsmore informatively-they are transform ations among dimensionsrather than within a single dimension. Even so, the perception and,correspondingly, the verbal formulation of such interdimensionalrhythmic relationships are complicated by the dependence of pro-tensity perception not only upon duration but upon other dimensionsof the musical event. Now we know how dangerous and, often, inde-fensible it is to speak of th e same rhythm n when the associatedpitches are different or different in number or different in contour orassociated wi th different dynamics or associated with different timbres.Th erefo re, Varbse is one of those composers, and the tribe has in-creased many times and in many ways in the past thirty years, whosemusic has necessarily directed our attention to the inadequacies of ouranalytical concepts with regard to rhythm, by decreasing composi-tional rhythm ic redundancy , by increasing the number of rhythm icconfigurations, and the dimensions in which these configurations aremade to appear.Although it is probably the voluminous, strident sonority, dom-inated by broad registral dispersion and acoustically unconventionalproportional ranges within the dispersion that is the primary associa-tion with the name of Varbse in the mind of the casual listener, in thisrespect, as well, he is more parsimonious than would be guessed byeven a less casual listener. In all of Octandre there are only eightlocations, associated with twelve nonidentical chords, and constitutingonly some thirty-five measures, w here all eight instrum ents are sound-ing . Here, aga in, there is the avoidance of conjoined repetition: in no

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PERSPE TIVES O NEW MUSItwo of these chords is the very ordering of in strum ents fro m top tobottom the sam e, although in each of these chords the lowest note ishea rd on the doub le-bass. There fore , the effect of different LLharmoniesis by no means dependent entirely on the explicit pitches presented byeach instrument, but most importantly, on the strikingly differentspectra associated with these instruments, individually, and in allconstituent com binations, as a resu lt of the different registral place-ment of the fundam ental in each instru ment and the different regis-tral relations among the instruments. It is clear that, for Varsse, theinvariant aspect of an instrument, in some important sense, the timbreof n instrument, is to be identified with its formant, that fixed,amplificatory, resonance region of an instru ment, which operatesupon the spectrum of the input sound, resonating, according to thecharacteristics of the formant region, those partials whose frequenciesfall in this region , and-thereby-attenuating those whose frequenciesdo not. So, only when a specific pitch (n ot just pitch-class ) has beenassigned an instrument can we speak of the spectrum (and, to thisextent, the tim bre ) associated with the pa rticular event. Th e distribu-tion of p itches in a cho rd, although the pitch-classes are contextuallyderived, taken together with associated dynamics, is determined by

the degree of resu ltant density (t he relations among all the com ponentfrequencies passed by the form ant reg ion ) desired, or-given a desireddynamic level-a distribution is chosen th at makes such a dynamiclevel attainable , which is itself a m atter of the relation of inputspectrum to formant characteristics. Crescendi, such as those in thetre s vi section of Octandre produce not what can be most accuratelydescribed as a chan ge in loudness of a fixed sonority, bu t a continuousalteration of the num ber, relations, and densities of th e partials of th etotal spectrum; the percussion instruments themselves constitutetimbra l resonance regions sliced out of the frequency continuum. T h eperformance instructions required for such controlled results place theperformers in the most responsible and dem anding of roles, that ofreproducing with the greatest possible accuracy and precision themost exp licit and su btle of specifications.Such concern with and stru ctu ral utilization of the timbra l conse-quences of dynamic, registral, and dura tional values approach thecondition of nonelectronic synthesis, and if the presence of suchprocedures su gg ests one of th e many m usical dispositions th at ledVar&seto the need for the electronic medium, then his eventual ex-periences with and composition for that medium seem to have fedbackn into his instrumental procedures. The synthetic separability ofthe attack and steady-state portions of the event (o r, in the case of

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V A R E S E O B S E R V A T I O N S O F H I S M U S I Cthe percussive sound, the attack and decay portions) suggested theanalogous construction of instrumental sounds combining constituentinstruments into a resultant instrumental totality. For example, atthe beginning of De serts, the eventual steady-staten of the piccoloand F of the clarinet are compounded with an attack provided firstby piano, chimes, and xylophone, then by chimes, xylophone, andhigh and low cymbals; then this latter attack is associated withsteady-staten continuations in mu ted trum pets, and-finally-an at-tack of chimes and vibraphone is associated w ith a steady-state in,again, piccolo, but an octave higher, and flute. Throughout, thepiano provides a continual decay. In this way, too, percussion instru-ments of indeterminate pitch acquire tem porary , local pitch bycollocation, just as, conversely, instru ments of definite pitch serve, onoccasion, prim arily as vehicles of rhythm ic projection.I eagerly anticipate detailed discussions of Varsse's music, whichconcern themselves w ith the analysis of tota l progression , the motiontoward and from points of conjoined climax, by means of the tran s-formation of rhythmic components, particularly in the sense of thenumber of a ttack s per unit time, the pitch content and range ofextrem a, the d ispersion and intern al distribution of the elem ents of

similitudes, the total spectrum, and other compound concepts, for thepossibility of such discussion , if it is to be more than m ere translationfrom musical to verbal notation, depends upon the formulation ofscales to measure degrees of similitude applicable to such concepts.Or, assuming that temporal progression and proximity define, inVarsse's music, his assumption of relatedness in these respects, towhat extent can such contextually defined norms of relatedness pro-vide, in the course of a work, unambiguous adaptive scales?IN CCORDwith Varsse's strong feelings on the matter, which cor-respond to my own, I have tried to pay homage to Varsse the m an byhonoring the man's music. But, in conclusion, I shall allow myself afew personal words about Varsse, the colleague. Although, forchronological and geographical reasons, I was unable to profit directlyfrom the Internation al Composers' Guild , of which he was a cofounder,we all have profited eventually, if indirectly, from that remarkablepioneer of organizations for the performance of contemporary music.But I have been privileged to observe Varsse as the colleague of, thechampion of, and-most consequentially-the enthusiastic audiencefor his younger colleagues, and as the eternal musical youth, p ursuin gand shaping the future at the Bell Laboratories and at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center.


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PERSPE TIVES O F NEW MUSIAs composers as informed listeners we can all express our deepgratitude for Varsse the com poser; those of us who were fo rtunateenough to have known him da re now to express our further gratitud e

our great affection for him as colleague as friend as a man.

babbitt, milton - on varese

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