Greenwich House, 1957 — Raphaël Belfiore

Greenwich House, 1957
re-enactment of historical recording sessions with Octandre ensemble, conductor and composer

2022 - 2023

Greenwich House, 1957 is a project revolving around a series of recordings documenting sessions from 1957 in which Edgard Varèse met with leading New York jazz figures such as Charles Mingus, Art Farmer and others, with the aim of gathering sound material for his famous “Poème Electronique”. According to the “legend”, these sessions, which took place at the Greenwich House in the Village and were organized by Earle Brown and Teo Macero (composer and producer for Miles Davis, among others), were also open to the public and visited by New York avant-garde figures such as John Cage, Merce Cunningham and James Tenney. An interesting remnant of these sessions is also a few pages of graphical scores that Varèse brought and conducted at least once during these meetings.

In the end these sessions came to little fruition. None of the recordings made it into the Poème électronique, and the meetings were eventually largely forgotten, as none of the protagonists derived any meaningful outcome from them. They are, however, of remarkable historical importance, as they lie at the crossroads of many of the key aspects of music in the second half of the twentieth century. On Varèse's side and the purpose of these sessions, we find the history of the musical avant-garde and its relationship with positivist, science-oriented thinking (e.g. his concept of “Art-Science”, his use of scientific names for his pieces or sirens as well as his work in the Philips' Laboratory for the Poème Electronique), that is a certain ideology of art's function in society On the other hand, the musicians of the “Jazz Workshop” founded by Mingus were close to the Third Stream movement, and to some extent sought to assert the status of jazz as music on a par with so-called “classical” music, although with varying ethos and techniques. Moreover, the graphic score in the form of horizontal curves, as a means of translation for Varèse, will be found in various compositions by people close to this circle (Brown, Macero, Tenney). What ultimately emerges from this peculiar configuration of people is a general tension between several major visions of the relationship between knowledge and music, on both theoretical and practical levels, notably between written composition and orality. This tension can sometimes be heard in the recordings.

Greenwich House, 1957 takes place in the context of a workshop with Basel's Ensemble Phoenix centered around the Octandre instrumentation on the occasion of the piece's 100th anniversary. The project aims to present an alternative and more problematic aspect of Varèse's legacy. It contains, until now, two phases:

First, it involved a speculative re-enactment of the conditions of these sessions. That is: a recorded meeting in which musicians improvise using graphic materials while being directed by a composer.
To this end, a specific recording from the archive is treated as a "general score". It revolves around the live experimentation and listening of a specific tuba technique: a repeated pedal sound with “flutter tongue”. The repetitions of this sound are separated by moments of discussion between the participants. The proportions of this recording are used to structure the 45-minutes long recording session and designate moments of music-making or of talking. The contents of it involve various graphic and discursive elements designed firstly to inform the performers of the profusion of ramifications of these recordings, and secondly, to generate musical material for the next phase.

The second part of the project consists of a “presentation version” in which the ensemble performs a score on sight, using a selection of the material gathered in the first stage. At the same time, some of the original recordings are played back on a tape player. The informal nature of the rehearsal is preserved by the composer's presence around the musicians during the performance to give oral indications and influence the outcome of the presentation live. (Unfortunately, these discreet, mostly gestural indications are not included in the final documentation).

performance: 04.10.2023 / H95, Basel

Ensemble Phoenix Basel

conductor: Jürg Henneberger
flute: Christoph Bösch
clarinet: Toshiko Sakakibara
oboe: Antje Thierbach
bassoon: Lucas Rößner
horn: Aurélien Tschopp
trumpet: Nenad Markovic
trombone: Michael Büttler
double bass: Aleksander Gabrys

score (rehearsals)

score (presentation)

upcoming : March 2026 / new piece for percussion with Zacarias Maia / Basel, Geneva, Krakow