Music of Edgard Varese

Besides Charles Ives, Arnold Schoenberg and Igor
Stravinsky, the French-American composer Edgard
Varese(1883-1965) was certainly the most radical
and influential founding father of 20th century
Western music. He established a method for a
conceptual atonal pitch organization within the
tone system of 12-tone Equal Temperament which
served as a powerful alternative to Schoenberg's
dodecaphonic serialism, and with his keen focus
on the 'Liberation of Sound' (projecting its
corporeality and fully embracing noise), he
opened great new doors for composers as different
as Iannis Xenakis, Morton Feldman, or James
Tenney and indeed for all of us! The course will
combine biography, music theory, analysis, score
study, guided listening and aesthetic discussion
in order to yield an overview of Edgard Varese's
life, work and historical influence and an
appreciation of his revolutionary thinking, his
new musical concepts and compositional methods
and of the contemporary relevance of his heritage
even for our music making today and in the future.