Approaching Electronics

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Varse and the Technological Sublime;

or, How Ionisation Went Nuclear
Anne C. Shreffler

The famous composer Varse,

Is chanting musics new phase,
It gloriously abounds;
In Electronic Sounds,
Which is really something these days.
Carl Ruggles, undated letter to Varse (1950s)

The music of Edgard Varse has been associated with science and technology since the beginning of its reception. He himself linked his music to the scientific sphere, and indeed in writings and statements from the early 1920s on, he carefully shaped and cultivated his image as
a musician-scientist. The emotional impulse that moves a composer to write his scores contains the same element of poetry that incites the scientist to his discoveries, he wrote in 1936; 1
on other occasions he described music as an Art-Science, whose physical, acoustical properties
should be as great a concern to the composer as its artistic content.2 As a self-described pioneer
in the realm of sound, Varse sought to create new sounds from both old and new instruments
and to liberate sounds from the fetters of an outmoded musical language.3 Central to Varses
vision was the movement of sounds in space. Shaped into planes and blocks, sounds could
shift, be transformed, and collide; in short, the frozen architecture that is music could be truly
set free. The scientific titles of many of his works, such as Ionisation, Hyperprism, and Density
21.5, evoke the relationship between science and art just as they invite listeners to associate the
music with scientific or mathematical thought.
Such associations are not merely peripheral because of the enormous cultural weight that
science carried throughout the twentieth century. Scientific progress is commonly linked to a
wide range of positive and negative values, including, on the one hand, labor-saving devices,
greater efficiency in production, and the exploration of new realms, and, on the other, anxieties
about the mechanization of daily life, and, after 1945, awareness of the unprecedented and literally unimaginable destructive power of the atomic bomb. The enormous cultural value ascribed to technology in the twentieth century, as well as the mixture of awe, admiration, hope,
fear, and even horror that people experience with regard to technologys power can be described
as the technological sublime. 4 It had become clear by the middle of the twentieth century that
using science for rational advancement on the one hand and for uncontrolled destruction on
the other were not opposite and contradictory positions, but rather points on a continuum.
Technology, although often spoken of as a thing in itself, was seen as an instrument of mankind, whose ultimate irrationality and bloodthirstiness could after 1945 no longer be ignored.
The much-discussed dangers of technology are actually the dangers we present to ourselves.
The technological sublime, then, refers not only to an attitude that celebrates the possibilities, the power, and the dangers of technology, but also one that takes into account the
heights and depths of the human soul. In the late 1940s and 1950s technology became a powerful symbol in the American popular imagination for deeper-seated anxieties about social
change, the possibility of world destruction, and mankinds capacity for evil. These anxieties
are played out in the cultural realm as well.
Music, as a site of deeply held cultural values, is an excellent canvas upon which to view
the tensions and desires associated with science and technology. Since Varses music, in its
explorations of musical space and of new sounds, as well as his image as a tireless experimenter in sound, are congruent with those ideas commonly linked to science and scientists, a
scientific mode of reception has been a productive and indeed a highly resonant one.

1 Edgard Varse, The Liberation of

Sound (Chou Wen-chungs compilation

of excerpts from five Varse lectures in
Contemporary Composers on Contemporary
Music, ed. Elliott Schwartz and Barney
Childs [New York: Holt, Rinehart, and
Winston, 1967]), pp. 19698, esp. 196.
This passage is from a lecture given at
Mary Austin House, Santa Fe, 23 August
1936, entitled Music and the Times; in
Schwartz and Childs it is given the new
title New Instruments and New Music.
2 Varse, The Liberation of Sound
(see note 1), pp. 198201. This passage is
from a lecture given at the University of
Southern California, 5 June 1939, entitled
Music as an Art-Science; it retains its
original title in Schwartz and Childs.
3 See, for example, Winthrop P. Tryons

interview with Varse, New Instruments

in Orchestra are Needed, Christian
Science Monitor, 8 July 1922, p. 18.
4 See Eric Drotts discussion of the

technological sublime in Conlon

Nancarrow and the Technological Sublime, American Music 22/4 (Winter
2004), pp. 53363, esp. 54247. Drott
notes the significance of David E. Nyes
book American Technological Sublime
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).
5 Varse, Music and the Times,

(see note 1), p. 198.

6 There are no documented performances
of Varses music between the premieres
of Density 21.5 on 16 February 1936
and Etude pour Espace on 20 April 1947.
Ecuatorial, performed once in 1934, was
not played again for twenty-five years.
Therefore Ionisation, which Slonimsky
conducted several times in 1933, had
been the last Varse premiere with any
resonance until Dserts in 1954.

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7 Wolfgang Steinecke, quoted in Rein-

hold Brinkmann, Varse in Darmstadt:

Dokumentarischer Bericht und kurzer
Kommentar, in Von Kranichstein zur
Gegenwart: 50 Jahre Darmstdter Ferienkurse 19461996, ed. Rudolf Stephan,
Lothar Knessl, Otto Tomek, Klaus Trapp,
and Christopher Fox (Stuttgart: Daco,
1996), pp. 8793, esp. 92.
8 Olin Downes, Music, review of
concerts given by the State Symphony
Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra, The New York Times, 17 December
1924, p. 19 (catastrophe in a boiler
factory), and Abraham Skulsky, Varese
Set to Launch Electronic Music Age,
New York Herald Tribune, 24 January
1954, section 4, p. 5.
9 Pierre Schaeffer, Karlheinz Stock-

hausen, and Pierre Boulez in Europe, and

Otto Luening, Vladimir Ussachevsky,
John Cage, and Bebe and Louis Barron in
the US had all done significant work
in tape or electronic music by the time of
the Dserts premiere in 1954. Brinkmanns hypothesis that Varse first
encountered the tape machine in Darmstadt in 1950 is quite probably true;
Brinkmann, Varse in Darmstadt (see
note 7), p. 92. Varses inexperience with
tape composition has always been known
in electronic music circles; see interview
with the composer and engineer Max
Mathews in the Video Archive of ElectroAcoustic Musicians (Waltham, MA, Eric
Chasalow and B. Cassidy, 19962000).
10 Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto

Luening had collaborated on two works

for orchestra and tape, Rhapsodic
Variations (195354) and Poem in Cycles
and Bells (1954): the first of these must
have preceded Varses work on the tape
part of Dserts, and the second preceded
or overlapped with it. Varse was acquainted with Luening and Ussachevsky
at this time and was well informed about
their projects; Eric Chasalow, personal
communication.
11 N[athan] B[roder], Varse, Edgar,
in the Grove Dictionary of Music and
Musicians, fourth edition, ed. H. C. Colles
(New York: Macmillan, 1944), Supplementary Volume, p. 664, and N[athan]
B[roder], Varse, Edgar, in the
Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians,
fifth edition, ed. Eric Blom (New York:
St. Martins Press, 1954), vol. 8,
pp. 66970.

When Varse began composing for tape and electronics during the 1950s, this seemed
like the culmination of his lifes dream. For the first time it would be possible, it seemed, for
composers to create any kind of sound, unhampered by the limitations of instruments or performers. In Varses case, expectations were even higher than usual because he had spoken of
the possibility of electronic music long before it became practicable, writing for example in
1936: [T]he new musical apparatus I envisage, able to emit sounds of any number of frequencies, will extend the lowest and highest registers [...]. Not only will the harmonic possibilities
of the overtones be revealed in all their splendor, but the use of certain interferences created
by the partials will represent an appreciable contribution. [...]. An entirely new magic of sound! 5
When Dserts, a composition for fifteen instruments and percussion with three taped interpolations of organized sound, was premiered in 1954, this was the first time a major new
Varse work had been heard in public in almost twenty years (Etude pour Espace, an unpublished fragment of the larger project Espace, had been performed in New York in 1947).6 This
was followed by the tape piece Pome lectronique in 1958, transmitted over approximately 400
loudspeakers in the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels Worlds Fair, in which Varses vision of
sounds projected into space was also realized.
Because Varses new works brought him again before the public eye, and also because of
a general revival of high modernist styles after World War II, Varses music experienced a
renaissance during the 1950s. The timing is important, as it led to typically 1950s-era concerns
about technological progress, especially about atomic energy and warfare, being applied not
only to the current works, but also projected back onto the earlier music. The percussion piece
Ionisation (1931) especially was widely seen as a bold anticipation of the sound world of electronic music. 7
In the following I shall examine the scientific reception of Varses music in the 1950s
and early 1960s, particularly the prevalence of atomic and nuclear metaphors used to describe
his music. The composer was increasingly viewed as visionary scientist, as a prophet of the
atomic age. The new image was an intensified and transformed version of the older one of the
musician-scientist, except that now of course, after the atomic bomb, the technological analogy had an immediate relevance. Seen as a prophet of the new scientific thinking that was
so influential after World War II, Varse gained enormous prestige during these decades;
after his death in 1965 his reputation grew even more. After decades of reviews such as the one
that compared Hyperprism to a catastrophe in a boiler factory it must have been deeply satisfying for Varse to be praised thirty years later as the composer set to launch the electronic
music age. 8
It has become clear in recent years that Varse was not as technologically informed or as
adept at tape and electronic composition as were many of his younger colleagues in the late
1940s and early 1950s.9 Contrary to received opinion, Dserts was not even the first work to
combine tape and instrumental music: Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening had already
done this.10 But in terms of how Varses music was heard and understood at that time, it did
not matter that his alleged prowess with technology was largely a fiction, because the myth had
already taken hold. It resonated powerfully in the reception of Varses music because, like all
myths, it contained a larger truth.
The discourse on Varse and his music changed rapidly during the decade after 1945, as a comparison of the article on Varse in the supplement to the fourth edition of Groves Dictionary of
Music and Musicians in 1944 with that in the fifth edition of 1954 reveals.11 The earlier article
the first one on the composer to appear in Groves begins by relating his studies at the
Schola Cantorum and with dIndy and Roussel. His compositional style is described as thoroughly unconventional and extremely dissonant but still concerned with the carefully
planned disposition of the individual tones of each chord among the various instruments. The
next edition inserts the clause, He studied mathematics and science at first. The article ends
with the newly-added sentence: In later years Varse came to believe that normal musical instruments are obsolete and that music should be written exclusively for electrotonic [sic] in-

Approaching Electronics

292

struments. 12 The conventionally schooled French composer has morphed into a wild-eyed
mad scientist.
Other ideas from the earlier phase of Varse reception, for example Paul Rosenfelds view
of Varses music as an ideal expression of Americas urban landscape,13 were replaced by a
new scientific image of the composer, which was articulated with remarkable clarity in the
postwar Varse literature in terms that continue to dominate the discourse about the composer today. This later reception, although it has various strands, can be subsumed under the
general notion of the technological sublime. Varse is seen alternately as a romantic genius,
laboring for years in obscurity until the world finally caught up with him, as a composer-scientist, as a visionary of electronic music, and as a prophet of the atomic age. Although each of
these strands even the atomic one had been anticipated in preceding decades, during
which Varse was hardly unknown,14 they took shape and solidified only during the postwar
Varse revival.
This revival was marked by a succession of events, including the premiere of Etude pour
Espace in New York in 1947, Varses lectures at Columbia University in 1948, the lauded performance of Hyperprism at the Paul Rosenfeld memorial concert in New York in 1949,
Varses visit to Darmstadt in the summer of 1950, and the issuing of the EMS recording of
Ionisation, Intgrales, Density 21.5, and Octandre the same year. Most of all, though, Varse had
begun to compose again. The fact that his newest works, Dserts and Pome lectronique, made
use of the technology that he had been dreaming about publicly for so many decades guaranteed him the spotlight.
The reception of these works also converged with the general fascination with science and
technology so prevalent in Western society in the wake of the atomic bomb. This is really the
music of the age of the hydrogen bomb, wrote one critic of the tumultuous premiere and
simultaneous stereo broadcast of Dserts in Paris in 1954.15 The image of the atomic bomb, with
its dual associations of violence and scientific progress, was often used in connection with
Varses music after 1945. The novelist Henry Miller, who had been a friend of Varse and his
wife since the early 1940s and had written about Varse in his book The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945), wrote to him in 1951: I had the definite impression that 25 or 35 years before the
horrible discovery of the powers of the atom, you were already in the new age. No one crossed
the frontier with the courage and the integrity which your music reveals. 16 (See Cat. 174,
p. 392.) Walter Anderson wrote to the young conductor Werner Janssen of Varese, whom I
for decades [...] esteem [as] The Only XXth Century Voice in music. In the sciences a New Guy
has just cut the price of Uranium to $1.86 per mm; Ikes Peace-Atom costs $16 per. Thats the
Speed and the Dimension the world has long been moving in [...]. 17
Although there is some disagreement on exactly what caused the Dserts scandal whether
it was the unfamiliarity of the organized sound on the tape interpolations, or simply the
length of the instrumental piece and its relative lack of drama it seems clear that the piece
caused some confusion, even among well-disposed critics.18 One possible reason is that the
piece particularly the interpolations did not seem to live up to Varses and others utopian
pronouncements about the limitless possibilities of electronic music. Instead of [a]n entirely
new magic of sound, 19 listeners heard rumbles and buzzing, beeps and blurps, metallic
growls and a kind of mechanical keening. There were combinations of noises like dentist drills,
riveting, trains going over a rusty bridge, a monstrous bowling alley or rush-hour traffic gone
wild. 20 The expectations were all the higher since Varses fallow period had been presented
not as a period of low productivity, but as a time of concentrated scientific research, the fruits
of which were about to be revealed. Today the name of Varese is being heard again, wrote
Abraham Skulsky in the New York Herald Tribune in January 1954, The composer who retreated from the public musical scene in the mid-thirties to explore electronic means of capturing sounds, is writing new scores which make use of his discoveries in new techniques. 21
Although in a real sense Varse had indeed imagined what electronic music might be capable
of, he had only begun to use his first tape recorder on 22 March 1953.22 There was therefore an
enormous gap between his idealized vision of a musical utopia and his actual experience with

12 Grove, fifth edition (see note 11),

p. 670.
13 Paul Rosenfeld, An Hour with Ameri-

can Music ([1929]; reprinted Westport,

CT: Hyperion Press, 1979), pp. 16079.
14 See Carol J. Oja, Making Music Modern:

New York in the 1920s (Oxford and New

York: Oxford University Press, 2000),
pp. 2544.
15 Nicole Hirsch, Dsert [sic], uvre
lectrosymphonique, a t accueilli par
des sifflets, des chants de coq et des
aboiements au Thtre des ChampsElyses, France-Soir, 4 December 1954,
p. 8F.
16 Letter from Henry Miller to Varse,
19 April 1951; Edgard Varse Collection,
PSS.
17 Walter Anderson had been Secretary
of the Pan-American Association of
Composers and was a longtime friend
of Varse. Letter (carbon copy) from
Walter Anderson to Werner Janssen,
30 December [1956?]; Edgard Varse
Collection, PSS.
18 Olivia Mattis describes the scandal in
her article Varses Multimedia Conception of Dserts, The Musical Quarterly
76/4 (Winter 1992), pp. 55783, esp. 557.
Dieter Nanz reports, on the basis of a
recording of the premiere, that people
were more restless during the instrumental parts than during the interpolations;
Dieter A. Nanz, Edgard Varse: Die Orchesterwerke (Berlin: Lukas, 2003), p. 558.
Heinz-Klaus Metzger, who attended the
premiere of Dserts, writes: Dserts [...]
was a bitter disappointment to me in
1954, and the technical dream of Brussels
[Pome electronique] is a massive yet
really somewhat specious nightmare;
Heinz-Klaus Metzger, Hommage
Edgard Varse, Darmstdter Beitrge zur
Neuen Musik, ed. Wolfgang Steinecke
(Mainz: Schott, 1959), pp. 5466, esp. 57.
19 Varse, Music and the Times,

(see note 1), p. 198.

20 Howard Taubman, Music: No Sound
Like a New Sound, The New York Times,
1 December 1955, p. 45.
21 Skulsky, Varse Set to Launch
(see note 8).
22 Nanz, Orchesterwerke (see note 18),
p. 474.

Shreffler: Varse and the Technological Sublime

293

23 Varse claimed in a letter to the Musi-

cal Quarterly in 1955 that he had never

been connected in any way with the
Futurist movement and [...] was at complete variance with their views and totally
uninterested in their intona-rumori;
Edgard Varse, A Communication,
The Musical Quarterly 41/1 (October 1955),
p. 574. This appears to be contradicted
by Luigi Nonos report that Varse had
spoken of the Futurists and their instruments in his lectures at the Darmstdter
Ferienkurse in 1950; see Brinkmann,
Varse in Darmstadt (see note 7), p. 92.
This view of sonic violence, echoed by
many commentators, was summed up by
Henry Cowell: The sheer tension of
sound in Hyperprism is so impelling that
it knocks the spots out of paler music [...].
No one has ever achieved greater punch
than Varse; Henry Cowell, Current
Chronicle, The Musical Quarterly 35/2
(April 1949), pp. 29296, esp. 293.
24 Frederic Grunfeld, The Well-Tempered Ionizer, High Fidelity 4/7
(September 1954), pp. 3941 and
104108, esp. 40.
25 Dserts received its American premiere

on 17 May 1955 in Bennington, Vermont,

and was first performed in New York on
20 November 1955 at Town Hall; see
Howard Taubman, Music: No Sound
Like a New Sound (see note 20). A tape
of Pome lectronique was first played in
the US at the Village Gate Caf in
New York on 9 November 1958; see
Edward Downes, Pome by Varse has
US Premiere, The New York Times,
10 November 1958, p. 36. There was also
more than a little confusion about the
original number of loudspeakers in
the Philips Pavilion in Brussels, as a later
review shows: Originally 2,500 loudspeakers carried the electronic and
human sounds, but for the occasion only
two were used; Howard Klein, Music:
Varse Concert, The New York Times,
3 September 1964, p. 25.
26 Letter from Slonimsky to Varse,

26 February 1946; Edgard Varse Collection, PSS.

27 Nicolas Slonimsky, The Road to Music

(New York: Dodd, Mead, 1947), p. 80.

The book grew out of articles published
several years ago in the Christian Science
Monitor, on the Childrens Page; Foreword, p. vii.
28 In a printed program of a concert

by the Pan-American Association of

Composers in Paris, Slonimsky gave a
one-line description of each piece under
its title: Intgrales was described as
Sonorous geometry of an implacable

tape and electronic music. The liberation of sound as Varse conceived it was ultimately a romantic vision, not a scientific idea.
Tape and electronic music is hard to talk about under any circumstances. There is no visual (or imagined visual) connection between a sound and its source, no notation to capture
the music outside of time, and a very limited vocabulary to describe non-pitched sounds (which
was at that time even more strikingly limited than it is now). Lacking a vocabulary with which
to describe the new sounds, Varses critics had to leave musical-technical discourse behind
and rely on spontaneous impressions. In listening to Dserts, particularly to the sounds that resemble machine guns and airplane propellers in the first and third interpolations, listeners
readily grasped at images associated with violence and war to describe them, as the French reviewer did. But Varse made the job of his critics even more difficult by vehemently distancing himself from two aesthetic movements that seemed related to his music, Futurism and
musique concrte. His public rejections of any link to musical Futurism are well known but are
still baffling, given that this movement clearly influenced him during the 1910s, and that it obviously intersected with his own interests in noise and in what might be termed sonic violence.23
With equal vehemence and far less reason, he rejected any connection with Pierre Schaeffers
musique concrte, even though he had completed the first version of the taped interpolations to
Dserts in Schaeffers Paris studio and used actual noises from the streets and factories in the
tapes. In an article in High Fidelity from 1954 Frederic Grunfeld echoes what must have been
Varses view: Composing on tape directly hasnt affected [Varses] lifelong habit of calculating every pitch, nuance, and timbre long before he actually begins setting down what he has
in mind. In that important respect he differs from most of the Tapesichord avant-gardists of
musique concrte. Pierre Schaeffer, the schools founder, has hailed Varse as concrte prophet
and patriarch, but Schaeffer and his cohorts are mainly surrealists-in-sound, improvising tapemontages from railroad noises, or crickets, or human heartbeats. Varse has no interest in improvisation. 24
While Dserts was a succs de scandale, and Pome elctronique achieved equal notoriety in
1958, practical constraints limited performances of both works.25 Performances and recordings
of Varses earlier works, on the other hand, multiplied during these years and continued to
increase throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The previous understanding of these works was
transformed, as they were now heard through the electronic music lens. Ionisation in particular, which quickly became Varses best-known work, was seen as anticipating the atomic age
in music.
Nicolas Slonimsky wrote to Varse in early 1946: Its really a strange and fortunate renewal to work together and to create music that is truly modern. I shall think of Ionisation
while the atomic bomb is tearing apart the inertia of the world. 26 Two years later Slonimsky
described Varses music in a textbook on twentieth-century music for children in similar
terms: Even atoms have been pictured in musical compositions. The modern composer,
Edgar Varese, has written a piece called Ionization, scored for drums, rattles, anvils, and two
fire-engine sirens. In case you are not sure what Ionization means, it is the state of electrical
conductivity of the air induced by the presence of radioactive substances. Anyway, it is something about knocking off the atoms. And certainly Vareses music sounds ominous, now that
we know what atoms are up to. He wrote Ionization fifteen years before the atomic bomb, and
that is a musical prophecy! 27
Slonimsky, one of Varses earliest advocates, had already described the composer as un
Einstein franco-amricain in 1931.28 He continued to revel in atomic metaphors for Varses
music, culminating in the tongue-in-cheek virtuosity of the fourth edition of Music Since 1900
(1971): Ionisation, epoch-making work by Edgar Varse, [...] portraying in a recognizably classical sonata form the process of atomic change as electrons are liberated and molecules are ionized, the main subject suggesting a cosmic-ray bombardment introduced by an extra-terrestrial
rhythmic figure [...] the development section being marked by the appearance of heavy nuclear
particles in the metal group [...] and after an artfully abridged recapitulation arriving at a magistral coda, with tubular chimes ringing as new atomic polymers are created and the residual

Approaching Electronics

294

thermal energy of vigorous tone-clusters [...]. (In the first edition of Music Since 1900, Slonimsky
had laconically described the same piece as written in sonata form.) 29 An article about Varse
in High Fidelity in 1954 was entitled The Well-Tempered Ionizer and featured a head shot of
the composer juxtaposed with a drawing of an atom (see Plate A, p. 295).30 Roy Harris, who
had produced the first recording of Ionisation in 1934, made the astounding remark in 1950
that scientists at the top-secret nuclear weapons lab of the Manhattan Project had listened to
the recording during the war: Now about Ionization. This is weird music, as remote from
our daily life as the atomic world it represents. [...] No! No! You have the cart before the horse.
Ionization was not an attempt to capitalize on the publicity of the atomic bomb. It was written in 1931, and recorded for Columbia Records (1935) [sic] under direction of Slonimsky and
supervised by this writer. It is now a collectors item. In fact, the recording of Ionisation was
used for amusement years later at Oak Ridge during work on the atomic bomb. 31
Such language as in the quotations above should not be dismissed as simply the free associations of lazy critics. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had had an
immediate and lasting impact, above all in the way they suddenly and horrifyingly broadened
all previous conceptions of destruction, but also in thousands of smaller ways, which manifested themselves in all corners of the culture and in daily life, including advertising.32 As the
epitome of the technological sublime, the atomic bombs evoked images ranging from violence
on the one hand to an awe-inspiring beauty on the other. Given Varses reputation as a scientific composer and the implicit violence of his music, it is not surprising that commentators
used atomic metaphors to describe it. These figures of speech also tap into the fascination with
the notion that potentially unlimited power could be released from the very smallest unit of
matter. (One encounters non-nuclear violent metaphors as well. Henry Miller wrote in 1951
that he and his wife had been knocked out after hearing the EMS recording: We were really awake, I tell you and more electrified. [...] I am impatient now to hear more. It was like a
joyous electrocution. The martyrs of old often went to the stake singing. No one goes thus to
the electric chair. Dommage! 33
Varses own initial reaction to the atomic bomb, though typical of the time, clearly revealed
his fascination with the unleashing of violent forces. His wife Louise recounted: The summer
of 1945, when the first successful world-shattering test of the atomic bomb exploded its monstrous mushroom over the New Mexican desert, we were visiting Dr. Louise Despert in the
country. [...] When [Varse] had read the papers, with their apocalyptic announcement, he
phoned me. He was in a state of extreme excitement, elated by the wonder of it. In a letter a
day later he wrote: Bombe atomique formidable mouvant stimulant. After I too had read
the papers, I was horrified and wrote Varse: Bomb: Awesome, frightening, inhuman. To
which he replied, Yes, the bomb is terrible not the invention but the employment [...] but
think what could be achieved for the good of the whole world in distributing and directing that
energy! 34
The prevalence of atomic metaphors to describe Ionisation was also due in large part to its
title, which describes the procedure by which electrons are separated from an atom in order to
give it a positive or negative electrical charge. Varse had learned about the procedure in a book
by the English astronomer Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (18821944) called Stars and Atoms,
which had also been translated into French.35 Eddington described ionization as basic to the internal workings of stars: 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... [this] is called ionization. (Varse copied out this passage from the French translation of Eddingtons book, see Cat. 108, plate p. 296.) Eddington
depicts the insides of stars as a cauldron of splitting atoms: electrons are being wrenched
away as fast as they settle and the atoms are kept stripped almost bare [...]. The high temperature [...] has to a large extent eliminated differences between different kinds of material. He
concludes, using a colonial metaphor entirely typical of his time and class, Stellar atoms are
nude savages innocent of the class distinctions of our fully arrayed terrestrial atoms. 36 Varse
therefore associated his title however the title may be related to the composition with the

logic, by a Franco-American Einstein;

program of the Pan-American Association, conducted by Nicolas Slonimsky, at
the Maison Gaveau (Salle des Concerts)
on 11 June 1931;
29 Nicolas Slonimsky, Music Since 1900
(New York: Norton, 1937), p. 340; fourth
edition (New York: Charles Scribners
Sons, 1971), pp. 56263.
30 Grunfeld, Well-Tempered Ionizer
(see note 24), p. 39.
31 Roy Harris, Peabody To Be Scene

of Operas: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday

Nights, The Nashville Tennesseean,
5 August 1950, p. 35. Slonimsky includes
this anecdote in the Varse article in
Bakers Biographical Dictionary of
Musicians for the first time in the seventh
edition (1984), but gives the date as
1940, which is impossible since the Oak
Ridge facility was founded in 1943.
See http://www.ornl.gov/ (consulted on
21 February 2005).
32 See Paul Boyer, By the Bombs Early
Light: American Thought and Culture
at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York:
Pantheon, 1985).
33 Letter from Henry Miller to Varse,
19 April 1951 (see note 16).
34 Louise Varse, unpublished typescript

for vol. 2 of Varse: A Looking-Glass

Diary, chapter entitled Another Chorus,
p. 66; Edgard Varse Collection, PSS.
Less than a year later Varse commented
on the atomic bomb in an interview with
the music critic Harold Schonberg:
When the atomic bomb fell, nationalism
was wiped out. Today is one complete
world, not individual countries barred
from the rest. National art is a ridiculous
concept today; it has broken up;
Harold C. Schonberg, Art from the
Shoulders Up, The Musical Digest 27/4
(MarchApril 1946), pp. 10 and 35,
esp. 35.
35 Arthur Stanley Eddington, Stars and

Atoms (New Haven: Yale University

Press, and London: Humphrey Milford
and Oxford University Press, 1927);
trans. into French by J. Rossignol as
Etoiles et atomes (Paris: Hermann, 1930).
36 Eddington, Stars and Atoms
(see note 35), pp. 2122.
37 Eddingtons numerous books, above

all The Nature of the Physical World

(Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1928), were widely reprinted and
translated. His classic study, The Internal
Constitution of the Stars (London:
Cambridge University Press, 1926),
was reprinted as late as 1988.

Shreffler: Varse and the Technological Sublime

295

Plate A
Frederic Grunfeld, The Well-Tempered
Ionizer, in: High Fidelity 4/7 (September
1954), p. 39

38 Star, in Encyclopedia Britannica,

2005. Encyclopedia Britannica Online

http://www.search.eb.com/eb7article?
tocId=52847 (consulted on 18 March
2005).

extremely violent forces inside a star, which he understood as resulting from something very
like atomic fission. It is also possible that some of Varses listeners, in the 1930s as well as
later, were familiar with Eddingtons description of ionization within stars, or that Eddingtons
description had influenced the popular-science understanding of that time.37 Although Eddingtons account has been superseded by the current view that atomic fusion, not fission, provides
the stars energy, he was right about the constant ionization that takes place inside a star.38 In
any case, to the scientifically untrained, and especially to those listeners after 1945, ionization
does evoke nuclear processes.

Approaching Electronics

296

Cat. 108 | Commentary p. 226

Edgard Varse, handwritten
copy of a passage from
Arthur Stanley Eddington,
Etoiles et atomes (Ionisation
des Atomes), enclosure in
a letter of 27 December 1931
to Carlos Salzedo

Cat. 108

Shreffler: Varse and the Technological Sublime

297

Varses Ionisation was a suitable subject for an atomic reception in a more substantial
way as well: because of its scoring for percussion ensemble, its mostly unpitched and noisy
sounds defy description in conventional musical terms, just as does Varses tape music. In
both Varses percussion music and his works for organized sound, certain types of noise unavoidably evoke violent images. As Heinz-Klaus Metzger notes, The average, free-associating
listener, who is unaware of the professionals injunction against musical imagery and who relates the blaring siren in the percussion section of Ionisation with alarm and bombardment,
has actually experienced more of the substance of the piece than the expert [].39
Yet there is another strain to Varses music in addition to the forcefully emphatic one.
Dserts in particular unfolds slowly and for long stretches quietly, presenting a rich sonic landscape of Klangfarbenmelodie. The deserts evoked in its title, which would have been visually depicted in the film planned to accompany the music, were the deserts of earth (sand, snow);
the deserts of the sea; the deserts of outer space [...] but particularly the deserts in the mind of
man. 40 There is no better image than that of the atomic bomb incidentally closely associated
with the deserts in the American West in which it was tested in the 1940s and 1950s to evoke
all registers of what I have called the technological sublime, including its illumination of the
dark side of human nature. Varses embrace of science and technology was from the beginning part of a utopian vision, not the rational, post-industrial thinking of a Milton Babbitt.
Even if Varse was not in reality a scientist or even much of a technician, his music (even or
especially his non-electronic music), straining mightily against conventional boundaries, did
articulate a vision of a sound world as yet unattained.

39 Metzger, Hommage (see note 18),

p. 55.
40 Dserts, expos for a film project,

in Fernand Ouellette, Edgard Varse,

trans. Derek Coltman (New York: Orion,
1968), p. 181.