Music Of Edgar Varése - Volume 2

 

Music Of Edgar Varése

A Sound Spectacular

Music Of Edgar Varése - Volume 2

Robert Craft Conducting The Columbia Symphony Orchestra

Arcana / Déserts / Offrandes - Dona Precht Soprano

Cover Photo: Columbia Records Studio - Henry Parker

Recorded under the auspices of the American Music Fund Recording Guarantee Project

Columbia Records STEREO MS 6362

1962

From the back cover: Arcana has been recorded under the auspices of The American Inter- national Music Fund Recording Guarantee Project. The Fund is the United States affiliate of The International Music Fund, founded by Serge Koussevitzky in 1948 to aid living composers through the performance, recording and broadcasting of their music.

To further these objectives, The American International Music Fund initiated in 1957-58 the Recording Guarantee Project with the approval of the American Federation of Musicians and a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. The Project calls for the tape recording of contemporary works, not available on commercial recording, while these works are performed by the participating United States and Canadian symphony orchestras at their regular concerts. The tapes, duplicates of which are deposited in seven strategically located libraries, are auditioned biannually by an international jury of three eminent musicians who recommend one or more of the tape recorded works for commercial recording. Thus in 1959 Arcana was recommended by the Recording Guarantee jury and subsequently recorded by Columbia Records under the auspices of The American International Music Fund, Inc.

ARCANA. Requires an orchestra of 120 musicians: 70 strings, 8 percussionists play- ing some 40 percussion instruments, 8 horns, 5 each of the standard woodwinds, 5 trumpets, 3 trombones, 2 tubas, 2 sarrusophones, heckelphone, contrabass clarinet, contrabass trombone. First performed April 8, 1927 by The Philadelphia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski conducting. On the title page of the score appears the following quotation from the Hermetic Astronomy of Paracelsus:

"One star exists higher than all the rest. This is the apocalyptic star; the second star is that of the ascendant. The third is that of the elements, and of these there are four, so that six stars are established. Besides these there is still another star, imagination, which begets a new star and a new heaven.

– Paracelsus the Great, monarch of Arcana."

In the Middle Ages, the name "great arcanum" was especially applied to the science of alchemy, whose chief aim was to change baser metals into gold and to discover the elixir of perpetual youth.

In his program notes for the first performance, Lawrence Gilman wrote: "Mr. Varèse's work is not a symphonic poem, and the lines quoted in the score are not to be taken as a guide to its imaginative content, except in the most general way, as an indication of certain moods, certain thoughts which were in the composer's mind at the time of its conception. The work, says Mr. Varèse, is 'absolute music,' not program music. Its structure adheres to a definite and governing form-though not to a conventional pattern. This form might be regarded as an immense and liberal expansion of the passacaglia form-the development of a basic idea through melodic, rhythmic and instrumental transmutation. This basic idea is the phrase of eleven notes that opens the work... There are also suggestions of the concerto grosso form, indicated by the use of the brass choir as a sort of concertino, in the eighteenth century sense."

DÉSERTS. 2 flutes (sometimes piccolos), 2 clarinets (sometimes small clarinet and bass clarinet), 2 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, bass tuba, contrabass tuba, piano, percussion, 2 magnetic tapes of electronically organized sounds transmitted on two channels by means of a stereophonic system. First performed in Paris in 1954 by the Orchestre National, Hermann Scherchen conducting.

Déserts was conceived for two different media: instrumental sounds and sounds electronically produced. After planning the work as a whole, Varèse wrote the instrumental score, always keeping in mind its relation to the organized sound sequence on tape to be interpolated at three different points in the score. There are four instrumental sections of different lengths and three interpolations of organized sound. The music given to the instrumental ensemble may be said to be evolved in opposing planes and volumes, producing the sensation of movement in space. But, though the intervals between the pitches determine these ever-changing and contrasted volumes and planes, they are not based on any fixed set of intervals, such as a scale, a series or any existing principle of musical measurement. They are decided by the exigencies of this particular work. The title "Déserts" should not lead the listener to expect de-scriptive music. Varèse has said that there is no program, no literal reference. For him but not, he insists, necessarily for anyone else, the word "désert" suggests not only "all physical deserts (of sand, sea, snow, of outer space, of empty city streets) but also the deserts in the mind of man; not only those stripped aspects of nature that suggest bareness, aloofness, timelessness, but also that remote inner space no telescope can reach, where man is alone, a world of mystery and essential loneliness."

OFFRANDES. Soprano voice, piccolo, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, trombone, harp, solo strings, percussion. First performed in New York in 1922 by the International Composers Guild conducted by Carlos Salzedo with Nina Koshetz, soprano. The two songs, or "offerings," are dedicated, respectively, to the composer's wife, Louise, and to Carlos Salzedo.

CHANSON DE LA-HAUT 

(Vincente Huidobro)
La Seine dort sous l'ombre de
   ses ponts
Je vois tourner la terre
et je sonne mon clairon 

vers toutes les mers.

Sur le chemin de ton parfum
toutes les abeilles et les paroles s'en vont. 

Reine de l'Aube des Pôles,
Rose des Vents que fane l'Automne. 

Dans ma tête un oiseau chante toute l'année.

LA CROIX DU SUD
(José Juan Tablada) 

Les femmes aux gestes de madrépore 

ont des poils et des lèvres rouge d'orchidée. 

Les singes du Pôle sont albinos
ambre et neige et sautent
vêtus d'aurore boréale

Dans Le Ciel il y a une affiche

 d'Oléo margarine
Voici L'arbre de la quinine 

et la Vierge des Douleurs
le Zodiaque tourne dans la nuit 

de fièvre jaune
la pluie enferme tout le Tropique 

dans une cage de cristal
C'est l'heure d'enjamber le crépuscule 

Comme un zèbre vers l'Ile de jadis 

où se réveillent les femmes assassinées

SONG FROM ON HIGH

The Seine is asleep in the shadow of 

   its bridges.
I watch Earth spinning, 

And I sound my trumpet 

Toward all the seas.

On the pathway of her perfume 

All the bees and the words depart, 

Queen of the Polar Dawns,
Rose of the Winds that Autumn withers. 

In my head a bird sings all year long.

THE SOUTHERN CROSS

Women with gestures of madrepores 

Have hair and lips as red as orchids. 

The monkeys at the pole are albinos, 

amber and snow, and frisk 

dressed in the aurora borealis.

In The Sky there is a sign, 

Oleomargarine.
Here is the quinine tree
And the Virgin of the Sorrows.
The Zodiac revolves in the night 

of yellow fever.
The rain holds the tropics
in a crystal cage.
It is the hour to stride over the dusk
Like a Zebra toward the Island of Yesterday 

Where the murdered women wake.