Odd men in

Musical Times, Spring 2005 by Mellers, Wilfrid

The next major composer to impinge on Broyles book is Edgard Varèse (1883-1965), a Parisian whose exceptionally maverick disposition, fuelled by a near-pathological hatred of his father, forced him to leave home and live in Italy, Germany, and other parts of Europe before migrating to remote as well as New York. Here, in 1917, he staged a monster performance of Berlioz's blazing Requiem as ballast to the still raging World War in which so many Frenchmen and more than a few Americans had been slain. Varèse was by far the most radical of the socalled avant garde composers who coincided with the cataclysm of a war that spiritually, and to a degree physically, obliterated the Old World; in the process he discovered new-old techniques within natural processes such as the formation and mutation of crystals.

Varèse as an outsider was no longer alone, for a paradoxical community of mavericks was accruing. Parisian Varèse teamed up with native American Carl Ruggles (1876-1971), whose grandfather had plied a whaling vessel around Cape Cod; Carl himself became the first American 'free' atonalist, whose orchestral Sun treaderoi 1932 was, according to Elliott Carter, profoundly American in being dangerously out of line with proven aesthetic standards'. Pieces such as this, and the few but potent orchestral works of Varèse, were not intended for a ready-made audience, but rather surprisingly found a public, considerably enthusiastic if not vastly numerous.

The third member of this group was Henry Cowell, a quintessential eccentric who had virtually no schooling but an exceptionally high IQ. His music was more slapdash and less demanding than that of Ives, Varèse and Ruggles, for it relied on fairly obvious gimmicks like tone-clusters. Even so his backwoods bravado and extrovert energy were not easy to ignore. A fourth member of this group: Carl seeger (1886-1979) , was not creatively a match for the others and eventually abandoned composition to concentrate on folk music studies and his highly developed and useful talents as an administrator. Regrettably, he seemed slightly resentful that his shortlived wife, Ruth Crawford (1901-53), was a much more talented and innovative composer than he.

When mavericks live in close proximity they sometimes split into rival groups, usually boosted by racial differentiations. Varèse and Ruggles were aggressively antisemitic, though the rising generation of composers - centred on Aaron Copland, a New York urbanite appropriately born in 1900, and incorporating two Tin Pan Alley composers of exceptional talent in Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern - was predominantly Jewish. Even so, differences of race and attitude proved to be productive of energy and even harmony, since it was during these years that the American League of Composers and the International Guild of Composers became established and eventually successful institutions that guided and guarded the destinies of American composers. The League also published a journal, Modern Music, to which many composers contributed; I'd hazard that it was the liveliest and best-written music magazine ever issued.