The French-American composer who reframed music as "organised sound", timbre and rhythm rather than melody, and who imagined electronic and noise music decades before the means existed · the bridge from the Futurist noise-idea to its electronic realisation.
Edgard Varèse is the prophet of organised sound, and the Bureau files him as the bridge figure: the composer who carried the Futurist proposition that noise is musical material across the first half of the twentieth century and into electronic realisation. He coined the term "organised sound" for an aesthetic in which music is the organisation of timbre and rhythm rather than melody and harmony, the reframing the entire noise tradition takes as its premise.
Born in Paris in 1883 and settled mostly in New York, Varèse worked against the grain of his era. Ionisation (1929–31) is among the first Western concert works scored for percussion ensemble alone, sirens included, treating rhythm and noise-timbre as the whole substance of a piece rather than as colour. It is a direct ancestor of the percussion-and-noise instinct that runs through Einstürzende Neubauten and the rhythmic-noise tradition.
What makes Varèse the bridge is that he spent decades imagining instruments and sounds that did not yet exist. He met Leon Theremin in New York and worked with early electronic sound, waiting, in effect, for the technology the genre would later take for granted. His Poème électronique (1958), composed for the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels Expo and played over some four hundred loudspeakers, is one of the landmark spatial electronic works, and the pavilion itself was designed by Xenakis for Le Corbusier, two of this archive's figures in one building.
His line of descent runs both ways: back to the Futurist F·03 noise-idea he inherited and forward to the electronic and noise musics he anticipated. He directly influenced Frank Zappa and the post-war avant-garde, and his insistence that noise and timbre were the real material of music is, in retrospect, the genre's own first principle stated decades early.
The Bureau files Varèse at Forms · Figure as the prophet of organised sound: the composer who reframed music around timbre and rhythm, bridged the Futurist noise-idea and its electronic fulfilment, and imagined the genre's materials before the machines to make them existed.