-
5/24/2018 Babbitt, Milton - On Varese
1/10
Edgard Varse: A Few Observations of His Music
Milton Babbitt
Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 4, No. 2. (Spring - Summer,
1966), pp. 14-22.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-6016%28196621%2F22%294%3A2%3C14%3AEVAFOO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-T
Perspectives of New Music is currently published by Perspectives
of New Music.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of
JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available
athttp://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and
Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have
obtainedprior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a
journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content
inthe JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this
work. Publisher contact information may be obtained
athttp://www.jstor.org/journals/pnm.html.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the
same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of
such transmission.
JSTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to
and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. Formore
information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
http://www.jstor.orgMon Apr 30 20:40:33 2007
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-6016%28196621%2F22%294%3A2%3C14%3AEVAFOO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Thttp://www.jstor.org/about/terms.htmlhttp://www.jstor.org/journals/pnm.htmlhttp://www.jstor.org/journals/pnm.htmlhttp://www.jstor.org/about/terms.htmlhttp://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-6016%28196621%2F22%294%3A2%3C14%3AEVAFOO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-T
-
5/24/2018 Babbitt, Milton - On Varese
2/10
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.
-
5/24/2018 Babbitt, Milton - On Varese
3/10
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
-
5/24/2018 Babbitt, Milton - On Varese
4/10
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-
6
-
5/24/2018 Babbitt, Milton - On Varese
5/10
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
7
-
5/24/2018 Babbitt, Milton - On Varese
6/10
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
-
5/24/2018 Babbitt, Milton - On Varese
7/10
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
9
-
5/24/2018 Babbitt, Milton - On Varese
8/10
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
2
-
5/24/2018 Babbitt, Milton - On Varese
9/10
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.
-
5/24/2018 Babbitt, Milton - On Varese
10/10
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.