Arcana

Not the least arcane aspect of Arcana is its title. In fact, like most of Varèse’s titles - Hyperprism, Intégrales, Ionisation - it is intended not so much to enlighten as to mystify. “I admit that I get much amusement out of choosing my titles,” he once said. For him it was “a parental sort of pastime, like christening a newborn child, very different from the more intense business of begetting.” It was not an entirely self-indulgent operation, however. As well as being “a convenient means of cataloguing the work,” the Varèse title is a sure indication of what the work is not - not a symphony, not a tone poem, neither a mood piece nor a formal exercise of any kind. The object of the title is to divert our thinking away from preconceptions to areas where, because we are not likely to understand them, we should have an open mind.

With Arcana Varèse made absolutely certain of our incomprehension by adding to the title an arcane declaration by the sixteenth-century alchemist and mystic Paracelsus: “One star exists, higher than all the rest. This is the star of the Apocalypse. The second star is that of the ascendant. The third is that of the elements, of which there are four; so there are six stars established stars. Besides these there is still another star, imagination, which gives birth to a new star and a new heaven.” Having read it, we can forget it and concentrate on music which, as the composer said, “can express only itself.” Arcana is purely acoustic in conception, unsystematic in technique, asymmetrical in construction and, theoretically, abstract in material,

In spite of his rigorously radical attitude, however, Varèse could not liberate himself completely from his background. Although he destroyed everything he wrote in the period before he left France for New York in 1915, he could not escape his formative years in Paris, where he had studied composition with Roussel at the Schola Cantorum and with Widor at the Conservatoire and where he was indelibly impressed by his encounters with the new sound worlds of Stravinsky, Debussy and Ravel. The echoes of The Rite of Spring at the beginning of Amériques, the first thing he wrote after his departure for the United States, is a clear indication of where he was coming from as well as of where he was going. While Arcana, his next orchestral work, completed six years later in 1927, is closer to the radical objective - not least because of the starring role allotted to an unprecedentedly extensive percussion section - the echoes persist.

Varèse would probably not welcome any comparison between the opening bars of Arcana and the beginning of the “Infernal Dance of King Kastchei” in Stravinsky’s Firebird. It is true that they are not exactly alike but the similarity - in terms of melody, rhythm and orchestral colour - is unmistakable. Besides, in the abstract circumstances, the comparison is irresistible: those first two bars, rumbling ponderously on lower wind and strings, represent one of the few familiar shapes in the whole composition and the only one that recurs in a readily recognisable way. After the opening section, where it is heard five times in shorter or longer variants, it recurs perhaps as many as a dozen times before the end - always in a new form but always in something close to its original dark colouring. There is no regularity in the recurrences, however. Although the construction has been compared to that of the passacaglia, there is no sense here of a cyclic sequence, of continuous progression or of logical development. It is an essentially and deliberately episodic construction fractured by an empty bar about a third of the way through and fragmented in the closing stages by two more silences which make even the ending uncertain.

Other recognisable shapes or sounds include a shrill reflection on flutes and piccolos of the “Entrance of the Emperor and his Court” in Háry János (Kodály studied with Widor at the Conservatoire at much the same time as Varèse; Háry János was first performed shortly before Arcana was completed) and, with increasing frequency from after the first silent bar, brief melodic and rhythmic reminders of The Rite of Spring. More to the point is the exhilarating precision of Varèse’s own distinctive sound world: the stark definition of the orchestration, the uncompromising clarity of the textures, the hygienically atonal harmonies and, above all perhaps, the rhythmic arithmetic that liberated the percussion section and for the first time brought it into equal prominence with the strings. It is not a comfortable experience but it is a thrillingly fearless conception forty years ahead of its time.