An Unlikely Pairing

One of the joys of reading Taruskin is that often one stumbles across really intriguing perspectives and bits of information. One such is this photo, from p. 400 of Musical Lives and Times Examined:

Edgar Varèse and Heitor Villa-Lobos together in Paris in 1929

That this photo seems so odd to us is a reminder of the ideological trends that have shaped our understanding of musical modernism. Varèse is an acknowledged master within the modernist canon while Villa-Lobos emphatically is not. But in Paris in the 1920s they were both lauded and indeed were featured on the same concert program: May 30, 1929 saw the premiere of Amazonas by Villa-Lobos and Amériques by Varèse conducted by Marius-François Gaillard at the Salle Gaveau. Let's have a listen:

Put side-by-side one can see that they are not incompatible. They both have neo-primitivist roots that Varèse was able to surmount through his connection with new instruments, technology and electronic resources. Villa-Lobos was cursed with both enormous productivity and modest popularity. Taruskin mentions his Bach-inspired pieces and the preludes for guitar. He doesn't mention Villa-Lobos' connection with folklore, but, pace Bartók, that might count as well. Another element might be what we might call "manifesto promotion" or marketing through manifesto. Wikipedia gives us a taste of how Varèse described his aesthetic:

Varèse's music emphasizes timbre and rhythm; he coined the term "organized sound" in reference to his own musical aesthetic. Varèse's conception of music reflected his vision of "sound as living matter" and of "musical space as open rather than bounded". He conceived the elements of his music in terms of "sound-masses", likening their organization to the natural phenomenon of crystallization. Varèse thought that "to stubbornly conditioned ears, anything new in music has always been called noise", and he posed the question, "what is music but organized noises?"

Nowadays we might see this as a collection of convenient metaphors to create a modernist image. Given the more conventional way Villa-Lobos described his music, inevitably they ended up in very different boxes.