Daily Inspiration Quote by Edgard Varese

Varese is writing like a man who hears the future and can already feel the orchestra straining to catch up. The line reads practical - a composer asking for “several of your instruments” for a new work with a “large chorus” - but the real charge is in the engineering fantasy tucked inside it: “augmenting their range… especially in the high range.” He is not shopping for color; he is shopping for new physics.

That obsession makes sense in Varese’s world, where music isn’t primarily melody but organized sound: blocks of timbre, massed forces, sudden electrical weather. A chorus, in that frame, isn’t just text and harmony; it’s another slab of human noise to sculpt. Pairing it with customized instruments signals a desire to erase the old hierarchy where voices sit politely atop an obedient orchestra. Instead, everyone becomes material. The high register matters because it’s where conventional instruments turn fragile, whistling, precarious - a sonic edge that feels less like “expression” and more like exposure.

The reference to “my Equatorial” is a quiet flex and a breadcrumb of context: Varese had already experimented with expanded forces and novel timbres, and he’s treating that earlier piece as a prototype. This isn’t romantic inspiration; it’s iterative research. Subtext: standard instrumentation is an inadequate toolkit for what he wants to build. He’s also, implicitly, recruiting collaborators in instrument-making - admitting that composition, for him, includes redesigning the means of production. The modernist dream here is blunt: if the orchestra can’t make the sounds in his head, the orchestra must evolve.