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  • A Virtual-Reality Reconstruction of Poème Électronique Based on Philological Research
  • Vincenzo Lombardo, Andrea Valle, John Fitch, Kees Tazelaar, Stefan Weinzierl, and Wojciech Borczyk

“The last word is imagination” [Le dernier mot est imagination] (Edgard Varèse, in Charbonnier 1970, p. 79): with this statement, Varèse replies to George Charbonnier, closing a 1955 interview about the aesthetic postulates of his long but difficult career. While speaking about the relationship between music and image, Varèse declares—somewhat surprisingly—that he would like to see a film based on his last completed orchestral work, Déserts (1954). Such a film was created only after Varèse’s death (Viola 1994; see also Mattis 1992). However, three years after that interview, Varèse did see a marriage of sound and image in his Poème

Électronique (1958). This seminal work was Varèse’s only purely electroacoustic work (apart from the very short La Procession de Vergès of 1955; Bernard 1987, p. 238), and also, to the best of our knowledge, the first electroacoustic work in the history of music to be structurally integrated in an audiovisual context (cf. Chadabe 1997).

The history of Poème Électronique, as documented by Petit (1958) and Treib (1996), goes back to the idea of Louis Kalff, artistic director of Philips, to exhibit the Philips technological achievements through an impressive installation to be hosted in the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World Fair in 1958 (see Figure 1). The architect Le Corbusier conceived an electronic poem and involved Edgard Varèse to take care of the music. The multimedia [End Page 24] artwork consisted of a number of different elements:

  1. 1. a pre-stressed concrete pavilion, built as a container for the multimedia artwork and designed by Iannis Xenakis, who was working at the time in Le Corbusier’s studio;

  2. 2. a three-channel piece of tape music, called Poème Électronique, composed by Edgard Varèse, including electronic and recorded sound objects;

  3. 3. an interlude piece of tape music, Interlude Sonore, composed by Iannis Xenakis, which was played in the background during the change of audience;

  4. 4. a system for sound projection over clusters of loudspeakers and along “sound routes” (paths along which sound appeared to travel by being played through a succession of adjacent loudspeakers);

  5. 5. a film mainly consisting of black and white stills, selected by Le Corbusier, projected onto two approximately opposite walls; and

  6. 6. a variety of visual effects, designed by Le Corbusier in collaboration with Philips art director Louis Kalff and set up by Philips technicians.

But the Philips Pavilion was pulled down at the end of the Fair. “The building was neither intended nor destined to endure,” according to Treib (1996, p. 226), and the destruction of the pavilion rendered Poème Électronique an incomplete masterpiece without its essential context. The preservation and maintenance of technology-based art, such as media art, electroacoustic music, or multimedia installations, is a current challenge, owing to their explicit questioning of the notion of permanence (Vidolin, Leman, and Canazza 2001; Wharton 2005). Problems arise at the institutional level owing to the involvement of multiple disciplinary domains (in this case, architectural, visual, musical, technological); at the conceptual level owing to fragmentation over several human and technological agents, multiple moments of creation, realization, and performance, and several theoretical concepts; and finally the technical level owing to the rapid evolution of technology that impedes access to works conceived only a few decades ago. As an example, consider the recent effort to reconstruct John Chowning’s computer-generated composition Stria (1977) in a joint musicological and technological effort (Zattra 2007). For an installation such as the Poème, it is not inappropriate to speak of “archaeology of multimedia” (Lombardo et al. 2006).

With its technologic and artistic complexity, Poème Électronique can be regarded as an exemplary case for the problem of preservation. Because the pavilion was dismantled after the end of the world fair, posterity was always confronted with fragmented documentation and the individual components of the installation. In the case of themusic, the original component has been re-elaborated for distribution on stereo LP and then CD. In fact, there have been...

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