Edgard Varèse

The most radical of a radical generation that also included Stravinsky, Bartók, Berg and Webern, Varèse produced only a dozen or so works, all of them dynamite. After studying in Paris he went to Berlin, where he was encouraged by Busoni and Richard Strauss. At the end of 1915 he emigrated to New York, leaving behind nearly all his music, which was destroyed. That did not concern him. He got going in the 1920s as a new composer in a new world, writing orchestral works and a sequence of blazing scores for ensemble: Hyperprism and Intégrales for wind and percussion, Octandre for a wind group with double bass, and Ionisation for an orchestra entirely of percussion. Meanwhile he dreamed of electronic means to realise his vision of sound blocks colliding and interpenetrating, of rhythmic subtleties and superhigh pitches.

Dispirited by the lack of such means, he wrote little in the 1930s and almost nothing the next decade, but made a spectacular return to creativity in his seventies with Déserts, the first score for orchestra with interludes of synthesized and recorded sounds on tape. His music has featured on Sinfonietta programmes from the ensemble’s earliest days.