Yesterday’s new piece of music was Edgard Varèse’s Poème èlectronique, a piece of musique concrète created by Varèse on four-track magnetic tape and played through the more than four hundred loudspeakers installed inside the Philips Pavilion designed by Le Corbusier and Yannis Xenakis for the 1958 Brussels World Fair. The original master tape was digitally remastered, mixed down to two tracks, and transferred to CD in 1998. (To look at the “score” of Poème èlectronique, go here and scroll down.)
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
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