"I don't want to write any more for the old Man-power instruments and am handicapped by the lack of adequate electrical instruments for which I now conceive my music"
About this Quote
Varese isn’t just complaining about his tools; he’s declaring artistic secession. “Old Man-power instruments” is a pointed phrase: it shrinks the orchestra - the prestige machine of 19th-century music - into a quaint, muscle-driven technology. The subtext is impatience with an entire cultural order that treated strings and winds as the apex of expression, when to him they were already antiques. He frames tradition as literal human labor, as if the symphony is a factory run by lungs, arms, and etiquette.
The sting is in “handicapped.” For a composer celebrated as a futurist, the real antagonist isn’t critics or audiences but infrastructure. Varese’s imagination has outpaced the hardware. He “conceives” music that requires electrical instruments not yet “adequate,” making the line read like a progress report from someone trapped in the wrong century. It’s a modernist dilemma rendered in plain language: the ideas are ready, the supply chain isn’t.
Context sharpens the urgency. Varese spent decades chasing new sound-making machines - sirens, percussion batteries, early electronic setups - and lobbying for studios and instruments that could deliver timbre with the precision a painter expects from pigment. This quote sits inside that longer campaign, one that culminates in works like Poeme electronique, where sound becomes architecture: shaped, projected, spatialized. What works here is the inversion of romance. Instead of “the limitations make me creative,” Varese insists limits are political and technical, and he refuses to aestheticize them. He’s not asking permission to innovate; he’s demanding the future catch up.
The sting is in “handicapped.” For a composer celebrated as a futurist, the real antagonist isn’t critics or audiences but infrastructure. Varese’s imagination has outpaced the hardware. He “conceives” music that requires electrical instruments not yet “adequate,” making the line read like a progress report from someone trapped in the wrong century. It’s a modernist dilemma rendered in plain language: the ideas are ready, the supply chain isn’t.
Context sharpens the urgency. Varese spent decades chasing new sound-making machines - sirens, percussion batteries, early electronic setups - and lobbying for studios and instruments that could deliver timbre with the precision a painter expects from pigment. This quote sits inside that longer campaign, one that culminates in works like Poeme electronique, where sound becomes architecture: shaped, projected, spatialized. What works here is the inversion of romance. Instead of “the limitations make me creative,” Varese insists limits are political and technical, and he refuses to aestheticize them. He’s not asking permission to innovate; he’s demanding the future catch up.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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