In 1915, with Europe caught in the throes of war, the 32-year-old Edgar Varèse boarded a package steamer for New York. But before setting off across the Atlantic, nearly all his works were destroyed in a fire.

Varèse’s most prolific period as a published composer emerged following his arrival in New York, where he would co-found composers’ societies and mingle with artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia.

While Amériques designates Varèse’s new home and, artistically, embodies a departure from codified Old World formulas, the composer considered the title symbolic in a more abstract sense of “new worlds on Earth, in the sky, or in the minds of men.” Varèse’s one-movement symphonic work creates a vast landscape of shifting, unpredictable contours—from light-filled dreamscapes to violent urban underworlds.

Form bends naturally to the composer’s search, with masses of sound and their varying intensities replacing melody or harmony as building blocks. Surging, mechanical timbres offer a glimpse into the aesthetic of a composer who is often called the father of electronic music due to his later innovations with tape recordings and collaborations with Harvey Fletcher and Leon Theremine.

Yet Varèse does not shut the door entirely on the past. The bare alto flute motive which opens the piece—only to return in haunting, fragmented guises— recalls Débussy’s Prélude à l'aprés-midi d'un faune, while chugging rhythms evoke Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps.

The interplay of wind and percussion instruments is a central dynamic that would permeate subsequent works such as Hyperprism and Intégrales. Amériques is in fact one of only four published works to include strings, which Varèse sought to dethrone as “kings of the orchestra.” Ionisation, premiered in 1933, would be scored entirely for non-pitched instruments, reflecting his belief that percussion “must talk, have its own pulse, its own circulation system.”

Amériques, the composer’s largest-scale work to date, originally deployed a percussion section of 11 players—a radical number for the time—and included hand-operated sirens. Following the work’s premiere by the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski in 1926, Varèse penned a slightly shorter version reducing the numbers of players from 142 to 125. The first performance by the Orchestre des Concerts Poulet in 1929 replaced the sirens with the newly invented ondes martenot. After Varèse’s death in 1965, protégé Chou Wen-chung prepared a new edition, published by Ricordi in 1973, which sought to eliminate misprints and include unpublished revisions undertaken by the composer.

Rebecca Schmid is a music writer based in Berlin. She contributes regularly to publications such as The New York Times, Gramophone, and MusicalAmerica.com. More on: http://rebeccaschmid.info/