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Poeme Elecronique

Edgard Varese composed Poeme Electronique for the Phillips Pavilion at the World Fair in Brussels in 1958. At this exhibition, the music was played on 425 speakers, placed all around the pavilion. The 480 seconds of music were played alongside projected images ( photographs, paintings and montage ) as well as text by Corbusier. It was perhaps the first piece of “surround sound” and certainly of multimedia as we understand the term today. Varese, generally regarded as the father of Electronic Music, was way ahead of his time. He had no interest in producing “sounds that have already been heard”. Rather he spoke of needing “an entirely new medium of expression: a sound producing machine - not a sound reproducing one”. To this end he experimented with ‘tape speeds, editing, splicing, sine wave and white noise’. His specific aim being to compose “organised sound”. Varese’s declared intention as stated in “the Liberation of Sound” was “Liberation from the arbitrary, paralysing tempered system; the possibility of obtaining any number of cycles, or, if still desired, subdivisions of the octave, and consequently the formation of any desired scale; unsuspected range in low and high registers; new harmonic splendours obtainable from the use of subharmonic combinations now impossible; the possibility of obtaining any differential of timbre, sound-combinations and new dynamics far beyond the present human powered orchestra; a sense of sound projection in space by the emission of sound in any part or in many parts of the hall as may be required by the score; cross rhythms unrelated to each other, treated simultaneously, or to use the old word, ‘contrapuntally’, since the machine would be able to beat any number of desired notes, any subdivision of them, omission or fraction of them- all these in a given unit of measure of time which is humanly impossible to attain” This is exactly what he went on to compose in Poeme Electronique. It was ‘ a montage of ‘found’ sounds and synthetic creation’, which he referred to as “organised sound”.

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