Nei deserti di Varèse e di Viola

In October 1994, the video commissioned by the Ensemble Modern from Bill Viola was premiered during the performance of Edgards Varèse's Déserts in Vienne. Since then, the success and the originality of the pairing has led to its frequent repetition. Varèse conceived Déserts as a multimedia project, but he never had the opportunity to make the film; Viola's video became therefore a sort of substitute – somehow a posthumous completion – of Varèse's original project in our collective imagination. Only a few documents of Varèse's original project are left; nonetheless, we are able to get a glimpse of his intentions. Among these, of particular importance is the plan that «images, sequences etc. will be used to obtain plans and volumes which will be organized and composed as to obtain a final montage to be fitted to the already existing musical construction» (from a letter to Merle Armitage of July 1952). From a verbal testimony on the compositional technique of Déserts, we understand that the fundamental principle that Varèse intended to follow was the opposition between “planes” and “volumes” of sound, between “intensity” of the acoustic result and “tension” of the intervals. In Viola's video, the structure of the instrumental sections of Déserts does not mickeymouse «the already existing musical construction» but establishes a sort of counterpoint with it. In a letter sent to his daughter Claude in June 1949, Varèse speaks of a film project about Déserts in collaboration with Burgess Meredith – actor, director, and producer – where the visual images would «follow or contradict the score». Moreover, the opposition between the sequences corresponding to the instrumental episodes and the sequences corresponding to the interpolations of concrete music, of «organized sound», also follows a different logic from that of Varèse. Whereas in Varèse's composition, relationships of analogy between instrumental sounds and organized sounds create a joint relationship between the two sonic universes, in Viola's video-film the contrast between mostly rapid sequences of desert images and slower sequences of the character's actions filmed in the staged room, creates a dialectic relationship between external deserts and internal deserts: dimensions that tend to merge in the movement towards the final sequence. Viola's video is neither a philological reconstruction, nor an independent work vaguely inspired by a previous work; rather a close dialogue between a pre-existing work and the imagination of a creator, between the poetic worlds of two visionary artists.