Science & Tech Quote by Edgard Varese

Varese isn’t praising science as a lab-coated savior; he’s picking a fight with a musical establishment he saw as embalmed. The opener, “Music, which should pulsate with life,” is a deliberately biological image: rhythm as heartbeat, sound as organism. It frames tradition not as heritage but as stagnation, implying that concert music had become a museum piece - preserved, admired, and fundamentally inert.

“Needs new means of expression” is the key phrase, because it shifts the debate away from style and into tools. Varese isn’t merely advocating a new melody or harmonic language; he’s arguing that the medium itself is outdated. The subtext is impatience with the romantic myth of the lone genius and the limited palette of the orchestra. If music is to sound like modern life - urban, mechanized, fast, abrasive - then it requires technologies and techniques capable of producing new timbres, densities, and spatial effects.

“Science alone can infuse it with youthful vigor” lands like provocation, not dogma. He knows “alone” will scandalize traditionalists, and he uses it to force a choice: either keep recycling inherited sounds or accept that innovation now depends on acoustics, electronics, recording, and instrument design. In the early-to-mid 20th century, when radios, engines, and industrial noise were rewriting everyday listening, Varese’s stance reads less like futurist hype and more like a demand for honesty: if the world has changed, music must change at the level of its materials, or it forfeits its claim to vitality.