DESCRIPTION:
Octandre, for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, trombone, and double bass (1923)

I. Asses lent
II. Très vif et nerveux
III. Grave -- Animé et jubilatoire

ASKO Ensemble
Riccardo Chailly

Varèse often insisted that music is both a science and an art. With his ingeniously inventive orchestration in mind, through which he put many sounds into the world that had never existed before, perhaps he should have summed it up as "alchemy"; he certainly did love the symbolism of arcane religions. Octandre is a brilliant, purely technical study of the inexplicable abracadabra of sound that Carlos Chávez rightly called gold. With this accomplishment, Varèse moved significantly closer to his ideal of a purely material music of "spatial projection." But although Octandre could be by no other composer, it is unlike Varèse's other works in a couple of significant ways. The piece is in three movements, labeled according to tempo -- Assez lent, Très vif et nerveux, Grave-Animé et jubilatoire. Each opens with a different instrument to announce its particular character -- oboe, piccolo, and bassoon -- and is essentially a revisitation of the same structural concepts from a unique angle. More significant, however, is the absence of percussion, which usually forms the very core of his sound. Anyone familiar with his other pieces so feels the absence that their ears prick up every couple of beats expecting percussion noise, as if the violent drums are only waiting in ambush. By the time of Octandre, 1923, he'd already composed several pieces -- Amériques, Offrandes, Hyperprism -- that extensively used percussion. Sonic researcher that he was, he perhaps wanted to test his ability to work without his favorite tools and so, deliberately limited himself. He knew such an exercise could only increase his knowledge and bring him that much closer to realizing the mysterious, unheard-of music of his waking visions. And so it did. Varèse did not, however, abandon his usual aesthetic in Octandre: the winds, brass, and double bass are conspicuously made to fill in, against their instrumental natures, for the absent percussion. They're often used only to articulate nervous rhythmic motifs that unexpectedly accumulate from solo passages into massive, weapon-like pounding in shattering, prismatic colors. Wherever somewhat extraneous melodic lines surface, usually in lonely solo passages, they get pureed before long in the blades of emphatic rhythm, especially in the clamor of the shimmering brass that comes in like the attacking sword of an imaginary sun god. [allmusic.com]

Art by Felix Pasilis