Friday, November 10, 2017

Edgar Varese: Deserts (documentary 1966)

An hour long documentary on Edgar Varese.

Described as (translated by Google):

Movie of Gérard Patris and Luc Ferrari. "Great Rehearsals" Ionization, Deserts

This show is primarily a tribute to the musician Edgar Varèse who died in the United States on November 6, 1965 at the age of eighty-two years, a few days before the scheduled date for the filming of the repetition of one of these works. Through the testimonies of personalities who have known him, the extraordinary vitality of this composer has evolved for more than forty years, in an almost total isolation, a revolutionary sound research. Ferdinand Ouelette, his Canadian biographer, traces the life in Paris and New York of the musician. Iannis Xenakis, Olivier Messiaen, Hermann Scherchen, André Jolivet, Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Boulez and Marcel Duchamp evoke the personality and work of this sound architect. All these insider witnesses also recall how much this brutal music 
In the second part of the show, Bruno Maderna conducts a rehearsal of "Desert". The conductor wrestles with the score, striving, with great skill, to bring the orchestra's instrumentalists to a proper understanding of the required sound materials and their temporal organization. Finally, he directs the execution of a fragment developed from this rigorous, aggressive, powerful, and revolutionary work of the sixties. 

http://www.ubu.com/film/varese_documentaire.html

(Can't embed so you'll just have to click the link!)

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