5.0 out of 5 stars
tensions of a suspension bridge explored, January 14, 2006
This review is from: The Music of Edgard Varese (Composers of the Twentieth Century) (Hardcover)
Jonathan Bernard finds/locates a useful space to speak about the various dimensions, the functions that makes the music of Varese work. He questions all aspects and revolves many times around the idea of pitch/register. The long now famous flute solo "Density 21.5" captured the sense of strident register in a focus,the beginnings of modernity the machine metal timbres(for the flute is limited in tones,but single tones can be disbursed powefully in repetition/iterations)and this is where the work functions in disbursals of register,for registers displace and come to occupy space, Space came to have meaning for Varese, although his music has a claustrophobic feel, "gefuehl" about it,like the misterioso places in di Chirico; and wherever you are High, Middle, Low is what gives meaning and how the work develops despite its affinity for the static world.The highest registers for example are saved for the climax, here it occurs in the center of the work, so that the music has then "life", "Breath" left to proceed. Varese had smatterings of engineering knowledge and he put it to work, the excitements of the industrial age,of proportions and densities, textures, the complexity of the metropolis, much like Leger,Le Corbusier, Mondrian and prior the necessities of Cubism.
Bernard explores why Varese's music contains so much impacted amounts of tension, much like the focused anxiety of strength of suspension bridges. The melodic geometric shapes as well are explored here as the reiterations of materials, from the more gentle single solo melodic lines to the more lower regions of the brass, muted ugly horns as brutal, tyrannical chordal displays as in "Hyperprism" or the expanded "Deserts "or "Arcana" or in "Ameriques". Bernard places the movements of pitch/register on graph paper so that we may see the movements in space, and how tones/pitches come to displace.occupy a space, and give a shape to this inhabitation.
Bernard also knows how to situate Varese's achievements within the context of musical aesthetic modernity,social and historical; but he does not limit his arguments there for he extends this mixes it quite well with the visual and plastic arts. "Time" as an element of composition was a new dimension to be explored in the arts, when the flatness came to painting so to in music an excited "surface" came into Being, that we still explore in many respects. All the classics of Varese are also placed under the analytic spy-glass, as "the ugly beauty of the chamber "Octandre", and the more arrogant "Hyperprism. There is really no follow up to this work on Varese available in commerical print, and it is a soory day for that.
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