VARESE'S POEME ELECTRONIQUE REGAINED: EVIDENCE FROM
THE VEP PROJECT
Richard Dobson, John
ffitch, Kees Tazelaar
Department of Computer
Science, University of Bath
ABSTRACT
The Poeme Electronique in the Philips Pavilion at the World
Fair of Brussels 1958 was a unique experience, the very
first multimedia project to involve a sense of the total experience of vision and sound. Realized by three relevant
personalities of contemporary culture, Le Corbusier (conception after Kalff, coordination and visual show), Varese
(organized spatial sound delivered over 350 loudspeakers), Xenakis (architecture of the pavilion), the Poeme
Electronique has never been repeated after the Philips Pavilion has been pulled down after the Expo. The Virtual
Electronic Poem (VEP) project is reconstructing the lost
artwork with virtual reality techniques. In this paper we
consider the technical aspects of the reconstruction of the
audio part of the Poeme by describing the investigations
made on the piece and by connecting the Poeme to the
whole Varesian production.
1. INTRODUCTION
The VEP project' is aimed at reconstructing in Virtual
Reality the multimedia show of the Poeme Electronique
as performed inside the Philips Pavilion in 1958. In order
to do this we need to construct the complete audio material
before it can be treated to the spatialisation implicit in the
environment. In our investigation we have been strick by
how all the available recordings are unclear at times, and
by returning to the original material we believe that is is
now possible to get the real experience of the Poeme, with
both visual and audio senses.
In this paper we describe the state of the original material, and by considering musicological evidence, we are
led to a particular style of reconstruction. The VEP project
has led to a true multidisciplinary approach, with input
from composers, musicologists, performers and computer
scientists.,
The Poeme Electronique represents an unicuum in Varese's
production, being the only pure electroacoustic work the
French-American composer ever realised. French acousmatic composer Frangois Bayle is one of the few musi1 http: //www. edu.vrmmp.it/vep/ and funded by EUCulture2000
Andrea Valle, Vincenzo
Lombardo
Virtual Reality and
Multimedia Park, and
University of Turin
cologists to consider the Poeme electronique as one of
"trois geste-titres" of Varese together with lonisation and
Deserts[1]. While recognising the primary importance of
the Poeme within Varese's output as a whole, he argues
that it is a "geste isole" in Varese's career. This issue of
isolation among the not-so-large Varesian corpus of works
has lead to an analogous isolation in terms of analytical
studies dedicated to it [7, 12, 9, 4].
This circumstance is due to the lack of two features.
First, the absence of acoustic instruments does not allow
an immediate comparison with the sonic world evoked in
other pieces, at least in terms of a familiar instrumental
landscape implied by sound[2 1]. Second, the consequent
absence of a written score for the piece seems to mean we
cannot use the analytical categories developed for the traditionally scored works. So, the studies dedicated to the
composer's works as a whole assume, implicitly or explicitly, that the Poeme Electronique is not very relevant
in the context of the rest of the Varesian music: for Manzoni "the only electronic composition" by Varese "cannot
be considered at the same level of his instrumental works,
and does not represent a starting point for a period of new
experimentations" (preface to [17])
In other cases the scholars claim that a unified approach
capable of giving it a precise place among the composer's
scant output is impossible. As a relevant example, Bernard[2]
(the most influent, complete, documented, and actually
sole text dedicated to the works of Varese) covers the whole
production of the composer, but it excludes a priori the
Poeme Electronique and the other short electronic piece,
la Procession des Verges, on the grounds that "without exact notation to work from, not meaningful analysis is possible" (page 243 note 34). This radical decision forbids
Bernard even to apply the set of operations on pitch space
he himself has developed starting from the emphasis in
Varese's texts on space and on spatial transformations of
music materials (a poetics which can be traced back in
Cubism, Futurism, and more generally in the non musical
Avant-gardes of the first years of the 20th Century). We
must therefore turn to Cogan's categories[6] for the analysis of the Poeme Electronique.
In his later work [7] Cogan addresses the Poeme Electronique via the usual method of investigation through sono
