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 Varèse (rhymes with fez) was finally receiving the acclaim he deserves as the U.S.'s Grand Old Man of electronic music.

Bread & the Wafer. Varèse 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, Varèse for a long time remained, by his own definition, "a musical bum." Large-scale recognition did not come until 1958, when his Poème 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).

Poème 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 Anaï's Nin. None of Nocturnal was taped, but its sounds—chittering strings, night-wailing flutes—were far out enough to fire up any Varèse 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."