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LP
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OI 003LP
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"Arcana" - Requires an orchestra of 120 musicians: 70 strings, 8 percussionists playing 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. "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, Edgar 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. The title "Déserts" should not lead the listener to expect descriptive music. "Déserts" has said that there is no program, no literal reference. For him but not, he insists, necessarily for anyone else, the word, desert, 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.
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OI 002LP
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Reissue of Music Of Edgar Varèse, originally released on Columbia Masterworks in 1960. 180-gram LP. Limited edition of 500. From the original liner notes: "Edgard Varèse belongs to the generation of Béla Bartók, Igor Stravinsky, and Anton Webern. Each of these composers produced a music of extreme individuality, like nothing of his contemporaries, and a radical break with that of the previous century. They may be said to have carried music to the limits of atomization, where one or another of its different elements seem to predominate. 'Ionisation' (Paris, 1931) requires an ensemble of thirteen musicians who play a total of thirty-seven percussion instruments. . . . Most of 'Ionisation' is composed with sonorities of percussion instruments alone. They are pitched instruments, of course, but belong to a category of pitch that we hear only as 'high' or 'low,' 'deep' or 'shallow'; timbre, rather than pitch, is the most conspicuous property of Varèse's orchestra, and rhythm and timbre are the principal elements of 'Ionisation'. . . . The sense of progress and development the listener feels from the first bar to the last, 'Ionisation' is noble music, capable of exalting the listener. When the masterpieces of the twentieth century are enumerated, it should be on the list, not in first place, perhaps, but there, nevertheless. 'Density 21.5,' a composition for unaccompanied flute solo, was written in January 1936, 'at the request of Georges Barrère for the inauguration of his platinum flute.' . . . The 'Poème Èlectronique,' an example of Organized Sound, the technique that has come to occupy Varèse's attention since 'Density 21.5' (he rejects the term musique concrète as inapplicable to his kind of composition), was created in close collaboration with the architect Le Corbusier for the Philips Radio Corporation's pavilion at the Brussels Exposition. Le Corbusier designed the pavilion in the shape of a three-peaked circus tent externally and (to use his own analogy) in the shape of a cow's stomach internally. This provided a series of hyperbolic and parabolic curves from which Varèse could project his 480-seconds-long composition. Along these curves, placed with infinite care, were no fewer than 400 loudspeakers through which the 'Poème' swept in continuous arcs of sound. . . . The audience, some fifteen or sixteen thousand people daily for six months, evinced reactions almost as kaleidoscopic as the sounds and images they encountered -- terror, anger, stunned awe, amusement, wild enthusiasm."
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DOZ 417LP
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"The French-born Edgar Varese (1883-1965), believed music to be both an art and a science. His pioneering use of electronic instruments like the theremin, along with his theory of 'organized sound' has earned him the impressive title of 'Father of Electronic Music'. Varese spent the early twenties as a starving composer in NYC, writing works like the percussionless Octandre and Integrales, his first piece to use the term 'spatial music'. Upon returning to Paris in 1928, he composed the celebrated Ionisation, the first piece ever written for an entirely percussion ensemble (thirteen percussionists and forty instruments). His 1936 piece, Density 21.5, written for solo flute for the premiere of George Barrere's new platinum flute, is one of the great masterpieces for unaccompanied flute. It is also one of the only compositions written by Varese during this decade. His next major work, Deserts, was in fact not written until 1950. It was the first piece ever written for magnetic tape and orchestra and was meant to be the soundtrack to a film which would juxtapose images of actual deserts with images from past wars (the great 'deserts' of civilization)." Featured works: Integrales, Octandre (performed by New York Wind Ensemble, Juilliard Percussion Orchestra); Ionisation (Juilliard Percussion Orchestra); Density 21.5 (Rene Le Roy); Interpolation I, II, III (Varese).
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