Sketching a New Verticality: Varèse’s Atonal Sound and its Contexts—Schoenberg, Webern and Ruggles

Abstract

Varèse’s music is still considered an isolated phenomenon, beyond comparison to any contemporary or former compositional approaches. With a few exceptions, no search for harmonic coherence other than chromatic complementarities and symmetrical pitch formations has been undertaken in the literature so far. Nor has the long-awaited accessibility to his documental archive since 2006 brought any analytical reassessments. This contribution makes use of a mutual integration of contour and interval analysis and sketch study (including annotated scores) in order to reconstruct Varèse’s harmonic thinking. The recognition of a specific ‘system’, based on registered expanded chromatic relations and expressed in peculiar figural morphologies that are not detectable through pitch-class reduction, calls for a further reconsideration of his positioning in the historical context. On the one hand, I will show how Varèse identifies significant structures intuitively used by Schoenberg in his atonal compositions and elevates them to actual constructive ‘principles’, thus overcoming a mere ‘emancipation of dissonance’. On the other hand, such harmonic features reveal the fundamentals of an ‘atonal sound’ also present in the music of other composers, as the examples from Webern (Op. 8 and 27) and Ruggles (Toys and Sun-Treader) show. This raises the question as to whether a common atonal language might exist beyond specific compositional techniques (free atonality, twelve-tone composition, dissonant counterpoint), whose ‘unwritten rules’ composers do not need to formulate in the sketches for each work.

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