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MUSIC

Banging Out a Revolution In Just 91 Measures

By STEVE SMITH
Published: July 16, 2010
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Enlarge This Image

Electra Slonimsky Yourke

Dedicated to the composer Nicolas

Slonimsky conducting the piece in
Havana in 1933, it is an organized
discourse for 13 percussionists.

Related
Video of Steve Schick rehearsing
Varse's "Intgrales" with ICE for
the 2010 Lincoln Center Festival.

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INTO THE MUSIC

MUSICAL revolutions often come in generous portions. Think of

Monteverdis operas; Beethovens Eroica and Ninth Symphonies, C
sharp minor Quartet and Hammerklavier Sonata; and Wagners
Ring cycle and Parsifal. Compared to those monuments, the
French-American composer Edgard Varses Ionisation barely
amounts to a flyspeck. The works 91 measures are generally
dispatched in less than six minutes, hardly the girth of an epic.

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Yet the piece to be performed by

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members of the New York
Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall on
Tuesday evening as part of a two-day
Lincoln Center Festival series devoted
to Varses complete surviving output is genuinely
groundbreaking. Varse (1883-1965) fashioned a rigorously
organized discourse for 13 percussionists playing on 40
instruments, and nothing else. Other composers wrote
solely for percussion before Varse composed Ionisation
from 1929 to 31, but none with his sophistication and
subtlety.
Nicolas Slonimsky, the historian and composer to whom
Varse dedicated Ionisation, showed that the piece
adhered to conventional sonata form, with two principal
themes, contrasting subjects and sections of development
and recapitulation. But Varses use of timbre, texture and
density, rather than melody and harmony, as
organizational tools pointed the way toward more radical
future propositions like musique concrte and electronic
music.
If youve never heard of Ionisation, let alone heard it,
youre hardly alone. Even among new-music aficionados
the piece can be an obscure footnote. Devotees come in two
main species: percussionists, for whom Ionisation is a
sacrament; and fans of the iconoclastic rock guitarist and

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Enlarge This Image

Courtesy Electra Slonimsky Yourke

Nicolas Slonimsky
Enlarge This Image

No credit.

Ionisation by Edgard Varse, above

about 1930, was groundbreaking when
it was introduced in 1933.
Enlarge This Image

Rahav Segev for The New York Times

A Manhattan School of Music

ensemble gave a rare performance of
it in 2006, below.

composer Frank Zappa, who was transformed by a youthful

encounter with a Varse LP (which included Ionisation)
into a zealous torchbearer for his maverick predecessor.
On first brush with the piece, you might still wonder what
all the fuss is about. Opening with a hushed murmur of
bass drums, gongs and hand-cranked sirens, the music
picks up momentum in its ninth measure when a military
snare drum raps a jagged tattoo, bongos burbling
alongside. A smaller snare drum chatters in contrast;
maracas, claves, tambourine and guiro (a scraped gourd)
form an insect chorus in the background.
The cuca, a Brazilian friction drum with a rosined stick
fastened to its head, repeatedly yawns like a distant lion,
while sirens and clanking anvils evoke an urban jungle.
Rude eruptions repeatedly jut through simmering surfaces.
In the last 17 bars a celesta and tubular bells produce the
works only definite pitches; also added is a piano, its keys
mashed in clusters with a forearm. The piece ends as
mysteriously as it began, with a sonorous pianissimo
fermata.
Strange as the piece may be, it did not constitute a major
stylistic departure for Varse. The sound world of
Ionisation was explicitly foreshadowed in orchestral
works like Amriques (1918-21) and Arcana (1925-27),
which mixed strong influences from Debussy and early
Stravinsky with the unmistakable shake, rattle and roil of
Varses adopted home, New York. (Both works will be
included in the Philharmonic concert on Tuesday.)

Accounts vary as to precisely what prompted Ionisation,

produced during a brief Paris sojourn in which Varse abandoned several other key works.
Befitting his early studies in engineering as well as his piercing mad-genius gaze and
unruly nimbus of hair, Varse cited a scientific phenomenon in a 1931 letter to the harpist
and composer Carlos Salzedo.
At the high temperature inside a star the battering of the particles by one another, and
more especially the collision of the ether waves (X-rays) with atoms, cause electrons to be
broken off and set free, Varse wrote, quoting from of Stars and Atoms (1927) by the
English astrophysicist Arthur Stanley Eddington. This breaking-away of electrons from
atoms is called ionization.
Varses letter revealed that he had conceived Ionisation as a dance piece for the famous
flamenco dancer Vicente Escudero, a notion Varse eventually abandoned. He cant grasp
my idea too Spanish, he lamented to Salzedo. A collaboration with the choreographer
Martha Graham, also mentioned in the letter, was similarly dismissed.
Instead, Slonimsky conducted the premiere in a concert at Carnegie Hall on March 6,
1933, while Varse was still in Paris. In May 1934 Slonimsky also conducted the piece for a
disc issued by Columbia Records, the first recording of a Varse work. (Slonimskys
recording can be streamed or downloaded from Ubuweb, at
www.ubu.com/sound/varese.html, an invaluable archive of avant-garde art.)
We engaged the percussion players from the New York Philharmonic, but it soon became
clear that they could never master the rhythms, Slonimsky wrote of the recording session
in his memoir, Perfect Pitch. In desperation, we appealed to fellow composers to take

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over the task; to them the Varsian asymmetry was childs play.

reduced risks to retirees all here.

Included in Slonimskys makeshift band were Salzedo, Paul Creston, Wallingford Riegger
and William Schuman. Henry Cowell, in a clever bit of typecasting, mashed the cluster
chords on piano. Roy Harris supervised the sound from the control room.

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Varse himself was in charge of the sirens for the recording, Slonimsky wrote. Louise
Varse, the composers wife, recalled the scene differently in her Looking-Glass Diary,
reassigning the sirens to Salzedo.
To call the session scrappy is charitable, though essential landmarks turn up in the right
places. Still, the record has an unmistakable sense of occasion, not least because of its
starry cast. Above all, it introduced Varses music to a new generation of listeners and
composers.
My first experience with Varse was an old recording of Ionisation, Pierre Boulez says
in The One All Alone, a 2009 Varse documentary by the director Frank Scheffer, which
had its American premiere at the Other Minds Festival in San Francisco in April. And of
course, I mean, it was like an object coming from Mars.
Mr. Boulezs recollection and those of others in Mr. Scheffers film, including Chou
Wen-Chung, a student and protg of Varse, as well as Elliott Carter and, heard in an old
radio recording, Morton Feldman and John Cage indicates how Ionisation startled
even the most sophisticated musical thinkers.
The demands made by Varses music, meanwhile, dramatically raised the bar for
virtuosity among percussionists, as evidenced by outstanding modern recordings of the
piece by the New York Philharmonic with Mr. Boulez (Sony Classical SMK 45844; CD) and
the Asko Ensemble (Decca 289 460 208-2; two CDs). And the explosive proliferation of
percussion music that came after Ionisation owes nearly everything to Varses
mysterious masterpiece.
It has an extraordinary sense of continuous change and variety, and a very original point
of view about using the instruments, Mr. Carter says in the film. All this was something
that was really very exciting then. And it is still, to me.
A version of this article appeared in print on July 18, 2010, on page AR19 of the New York edition.

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