Paul Hembree and Dustin Donahue
Perspectives of New Music
Vol. 51, No. 1 (Winter 2013), pp. 256-261
Excerpt from the Article:
"If Varèse was interested in spatial projection in his earlier works, but did not have the capacity, would it be possible to spatialize them with today's technology? How would a computer musician build an interpretive model from Varèse's writings, works, and background for the spatialization of his acoustic works? What earlier works would be susceptible to such interpretation without unacceptably distorting them? Ionisation is a good test subject. It was written from 1929 through 1931, and therefore falls after Intégrales in 1925. We might assume he was continuing to think of spatial projection while composing Ionisation. Furthermore, the first documented appearance of “spatial projection” in the writing of Varèse appears earlier than both Intégrales and Ionisation. The electronic Interpolations in Déserts – Varèse's frst use of true spatial audio – rely heavily on percussion sounds for the structure of their material. Additionally, there were earlier formative events that suggest Varèse was thinking about the spatial aspects of music potentially even in his frst activities in the United States, such as conducting the antiphonal Berlioz Requiem Mass in 1917, well before the composition of Ionisation.
Varèse wished to use physical space in his compositions to delineate form and structure in his works. Perhaps he was seeking to attain in the auditory domain the spatial clarity of the visual, as evidenced by the presence of many visual analogies to music in his writings. With binaurally encoded audio, we create easily transmissible 2-channel audio recordings, intended for headphones, that have a high degree of spatial clarity. We do not need massive loud-speaker arrays on the scale of those in the Philips pavilion, used to premiere Varèse's Poème électronique in 1958.