Music: No Apology

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Organized Sound. Varèse achieves his effects by recording sounds on tape; then, with the aid of complex electronic equipment, he breaks the sounds apart, amplifies and filters them. He picked up his offbeat skills almost by indirection: his father, a Paris engineer, was so set upon an engineering rather than a musical career for his son that he kept the family piano locked. Varèse studied mathematics, taught himself music on the side, eventually got into the Paris Conservatory as a composition student. In 1915 he moved to New York, soon formed a little-appreciated orchestra devoted to contemporary works. He refused to submit himself, he said, "to sounds that have already been heard," indignantly rejected an offer of $14,000 a year to conduct at the Capitol Theater in New York. "What do you think I am," asked Varèse —"a whore?" After turning out such ear-wrenching but nonelectronic works as Arcana and Ameriques, he fell silent for 18 years while he speculated on the musical possibilities of electronic noise. In 1953 he began putting on tape the sounds that he was hearing in his head.

A painstaking worker ("The first instrument is the wastebasket"), Varèse creates his "organized sound" in a studio in Greenwich Village surrounded by the tools of his trade: gongs, sirens, whistles, drums. He is convinced that electronic music is clearly the music of the future, but he does not expect it to make more conventional composition obsolete ("Just because there are other ways of getting there, you do not kill the horse"). Still living modestly ("I am not an expensive animal"), he is as rigidly indifferent to the reactions of the public as he ever was. "My privilege," says Edgard Varèse, "is not to explain and not to apologize."