Amériques & Le Sacre du printemps
programme notes
written by JASPER CROONEN
Edgard Varèse Amériques (1918-1922)
Igor Stravinsky Le Sacre du Printemps (1913)
[discover also: Stravinsky's Journeys Documentary]
[discover also: Wolfgang]
[listen also: podcast Boosey & Hawkes]
[all programme notes]
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21.03.2025 CONCERTGEBOUW BRUGGE
22.03.2025 FLAGEY BRUSSEL
This is Amériques
How Edgard Varèse set his country of adoption to music
There is a photo of Edgard Varèse and Igor Stravinsky sitting together on a sofa. It was taken in 1964, a year before Varèse’s death. Stravinsky is wearing sunglasses indoors and coolly leans forward, hands on his knees and his walking stick over his shoulder. Varèse looks at his colleague with curiosity, his thin curls contrasting with the Russian’s bald head. Without context, it looks as if Varèse were gazing adoringly at Stravinsky.
But appearances are deceiving, as it was anything but a one-way street. The two contemporaries (Varèse, born in 1883, was one year younger) had great mutual respect. “His music will survive; we know that now, for it has dated in the right way,” Stravinsky said of the innovativeness of his companion. Undoubtedly an echo of Varèse’s famous statement: “Contrary to general belief, an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.”
Conversely, Varèse was won over early on by Stravinsky’s revolutionary work; in fact, he had been present in 1913 at the notorious première of Le Sacre du Printemps [The Rite of Spring]. When Varèse later founded the International Composers’ Guild in the United States, an organization that served to perform and promote the work of contemporary composers, he regularly invited his friend to conduct.
IGOR STRAVINSKY (1882-1971)
- Russian composer
- Launched his career thanks to his innovative scores for Les Ballets Russes in Paris
- In 1939, moved to Hollywood, where he would spend the rest of his life
- Walt Disney used his Sacre du Printemps in 1940 in his third animated film, Fantasia
- Became one of the most important cultural figures of the twentieth century
EDGARD VARÈSE (1883-1965)
- French-American composer
- Wrote only twenty-six works in his lifetime
- Pioneered the use of electronic instruments in classical music
- His Poème électronique for tape recorder used 450 speakers in the Philips Pavilion at Expo 58
- Was one of the main sources of inspiration for Frank Zappa
Grand, grander, grandest
Percussive, more percussive, most percussive
It should not be surprising, therefore, that we have linked the two composers to each other. The connection goes even farther. Amériques is, after all, regarded as Varèse’s homage to Le Sacre. At the première on 29 May 1913, Igor Stravinsky had initially shocked the cultural elite of Paris to the core with his ballet score – after which the audience even came to blows. The music was absolutely epoch-making, chiefly on account of its unpredictable rhythms. They give voice like none other to the threats and primal forces emanating from the springtime sacrificial rite. The composer holds the dancers, musicians and audience constantly on the alert with capricious accents that shake the very ground under your feet. What is more, he uses every tint available to the symphony orchestra: from original solo notes, like those of the bassoon that open the work, to the fierce tutti.
Stravinsky thus reconciles Parisian symphony music with a traditional Russian sonority. The folklore of his homeland is not merely the source of the story, but the composer uses all his abilities as a tone poet to make this inspiration audible as well. After Petrushka and The Firebird – his two earlier fairy-tale ballets – Le Sacre du Printemps is the summit of his quest to merge his then country of refuge, France, with his native Russia.
But his public was in no way prepared for this merger. They were expecting a conventional ballet with traditional tutus, pliés and pirouettes. When the music began – and especially when the radical choreography of Vaslav Nijinsky burst loose – a schism appeared within the audience. The good old-fashioned viewers loudly expressed their dissatisfaction, upon which the more progressive attendees tried to drown them out. Soon the pots boiled over at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and the two sides came to blows. The ballet could only be completed because the gendarme was summoned to restore calm.
How on earth can you write a tribute to a work that from day one of its performance history became so notorious? Well, by remaining surprisingly close to the original, and then exaggerating it all to the extreme. Like Stravinsky, Edgard Varèse begins his work with a soft, buoyant introduction by a single woodwind. But Varèse does not use a bassoon but an alto flute – with which the composer also pays tribute to Debussy and his Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. But the charming character of the introduction is quickly interrupted by sharp, dissonant, rhythmic outbursts that would seem better suited to a spring sacrificial rite.
Anyone who has listened to the two works one after the other cannot help notice the parallels between them. However, in his work written thirteen years later, Varèse goes one step further. The orchestra called for is massive: 27 woodwinds, 29 brass … in the words of his student Chou Weng-chung, “Varèse stretched the post-Romantic orchestra to the breaking point, weaving a towering tapestry from unimaginable sonic threads. Bursting colours, cascading sonorities, explosive dynamics and swirling rhythms.”
Moreover, the composer used no fewer than 13 percussionists, spread across an enormous arsenal of instruments. At that point in music history, this was the largest percussion part ever written. Varèse did not limit himself to the traditional percussion instruments such as timpani, xylophone and glockenspiel, but also used more eccentric choices such as a wind machine, metal jingles (zills) and the ‘lion’s roar’, a drum with a cord attached that is used to imitate the roar of a lion.
Nevertheless, the most talked-about instrument in Amériques is undoubtedly the siren that appears to bellow time and again through the orchestra. Varèse had his reasons for this, and two in particular. On the one hand, his use of the siren contains the kernel of his later artistic practice. It is a foretaste of the Varèse of works such as Poème électronique, his fully electronic composition for the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels. Of the Varèse of the synthesizer/precursor of the ondes Martenot. And of the Varèse who wrote a work specially for a platinum flute.
The importance of the tuu-taa
The siren in Amériques was, in other words, the first step in Varèse’s fascination with and unbridled quest for unprecedented sounds. He saw his first published composition “as a symbol of discoveries – new worlds on this planet, in outer space and in the minds of man.” In order to give concrete expression to that idea, in the years before the première of Amériques the composer kept enlarging his instrumentarium, in particular with new electronic inventions. These were, in the composer’s words, “badly needed. Musicians should take up this question in deep earnest with the help of machinery specialists.”
In 1939, at a lecture given at the University of Southern California, Varèse expanded on these new possibilities. He spoke of “new harmonic splendors obtainable from the use of sub-harmonic combinations now impossible.” With the new instruments, performers and composers can break out of the traditional even temperament, the potential reach could be vastly expanded, shades of sound could be much more subtle and impossible, unplayable rhythms should be within reach. The siren in Amériques is the ‘big bang’ of all that.
Metropolitan music
The alarm signal also serves a second, more important goal. For Varèse sought to bring to life the bustling noise of the city as closely as possible. His trans-Atlantic journey from Paris to Manhattan had opened his ears.
“Where other newcomers may have concentrated on the visual aspect [of the ‘city that never sleeps’], for Varèse, the city offered an exciting auditory cacophony of street sounds, police cars, fire engines, river noises, foghorns and skyscraper construction sites.” [culture journalist Thomas May]
For Varèse, it went even further than that. His adoration of the big city and fascination with technological progress situated him in a particular artistic tradition. He felt an affinity with the Italian futurists, whose exhibition he had seen in Paris, but he refused to associate himself with that current because he accused them of paying too little attention to the sounds and rhythms of machines. Varèse himself would not, of course, make the same mistake. Later in his career, he would use recorded factory sounds in his work Déserts. But the most emphatic element of his metropolitan music remains the siren that he had first incorporated in Amériques, and that would later make its appearance in various others of his works.
This dual purpose of the siren, both as an innovative instrument that made possible previously impossible glissandi and as an imitation of the urban environment in which Varèse flourished, gives this apparent gimmick an incredible importance in this work. And if you add the massive orchestration as well, a form of composition that looks back at the Western European tradition but searches the world to create an American musical tradition, you see immediately why Amériques was such a crucial milestone in music history. Not for nothing did Varèse say: “with Amériques, I began at last to write my own music.”