Unfinished/aborted Music
At one point, the music exists in the composer's mind. In 1928, Edgar Varèse started working on an opera called L'Astronome based on North American Indian legends, a project he never completed and destroyed the drafts. In 1932, he asked Antonin Artaud to write the libretto of a large scale oratorio, Il n'ya plus de firmament (There is no longer any firmament). In his book Phantasmatic Radio Allen S. Weiss translates the beginning of Artaud's text:
| “ | Darkness. Explosions in this darkness. Harmonies suddenly broken off. Harsh sounds. Depressurized soundings. The music will give the impression of a distant cataclysm and will fill the room, falling as from vertiginous heights. Chords will originate in the sky and then deteriorate, going from one extreme to the other. Sounds will fall as if from very high, then suddenly stop and spread out in bursts, forming vaults and parasols. Tiers of sounds... ] | ” |
The piece was never completed and Varèse turned to other projects, including a radiophonic work involving various synchronised choirs located in different places of the world. He never found the technology for it. In 1948, Artaud insisted on having noise sounds included in his Pour en finir avec le judgement de Dieu (To have done with the judgment of God). This was done in the Radiodiffusion Television Française studios where Pierre Schaeffer was working at the time.
Read more about this topic: Music Without Sound
Famous quotes containing the words unfinished, aborted and/or music:
“A person taking stock in middle age is like an artist or composer looking at an unfinished work; but whereas the composer and the painter can erase some of their past efforts, we cannot. We are stuck with what we have lived through. The trick is to finish it with a sense of design and a flourish rather than to patch up the holes or merely to add new patches to it.”
—Harry S. Broudy (b. 1905)
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—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“The harp that once through Tara’s halls The soul of music shed, Now hangs as mute on Tara’s walls As if that soul were fled.”
—Thomas Moore (1779–1852)