In October 1994, Bill Viola’s video of Edgards Varèse’s Déserts was premiered in Vienna by Ensemble Modern, who commissioned it. It had great success, and it has been therefore performed several times since then, both in live performances, and not. Varèse conceived Déserts as a multimedia project, but he has never had the opportunity to make the film; Viola’s video became therefore a sort of substitute – somehow a posthumous completion – of Varèse’s original project in our collective imagination.

Only a few original documents of Varèse’s project are available; nonetheless, we are able to get a glimpse of his intentions. Among these, particularly important was the principle according to which «images, sequences etc. will be used to obtain plans and volumes which will be organized and so composed as to obtain a final montage to be fitted to the already existing musical construction» (from a letter to Merle Armitage of July 1952). From a verbal testimony on Déserts’ compositional technique we evince that the fundamental principle that Varèse intended to follow was precisely the opposition between “planes” and “volumes” of sound, between “intensity” of the acoustic result and “tension” of the intervals. If Varèse intended to create relationships with visual images based on the tensions and oppositions between musical images, the result would certainly have been different from that obtained by Bill Viola.

In Viola’s video, the structure and the editing of the sections that correspond to the instrumental sections of Déserts, with a few rare exceptions, do not reflect «the already existing musical construction», but do establish a sort of counterpoint with it. It is however true that in a letter sent to his daughter Claude in June 1949, Varèse speaks of a film project about Déserts in collaboration with Burgess Meredith – actor, director, and producer – in which the visual images would «follow or contradict the score». Moreover, the opposition between the sequences corresponding to the instrumental episodes and the sequences corresponding to the interpolations of concrete music, of «organized sound», also follows a different logic from that of Varèse.

In Varèse’s composition, relationships of analogy between instrumental sounds and organized sounds (sometimes the same: the percussions, for example) create a joint relationship between the two sonic universes; however, in Viola’s video-film the contrast between mostly rapid sequences of desert images and slower sequences of the character’s actions filmed in the internal space of the room, creates a dialectic relationship between external deserts and internal deserts: dimensions that tend to merge in the procession towards the final sequence. Moreover, Viola’s Déserts should also be seen as an important step in the career of the video artist.

On the one hand, working on a musical masterpiece is an exception in Viola’s modus operandi; on the other one, using images and “topoi” that recur obsessively in his previous and subsequent works leads the video back to its poetic constellation. Viola’s video is neither a philological reconstruction, nor an independent work vaguely inspired by a previous work; rather, Salvatore Sciarrino would have called it an “elaboration”. A close dialogue between a pre-existing work and the imagination of a creator, between the poetic worlds of two visionary artists.

Giacomo Albert is Research Fellow at CRICC–University of Bologna, and Adjunct Professor at the Conservatory of Cuneo. He has published several articles in books and international journals, and recently a volume about the relationship between music and video art. His main fields of study are twentieth- and twenty-first centuries music, creative process in music, electronic music, sound art, film music, audiovision, and computational modelling of musical structures. He is a member of the scientific committee of CIRMA (University of Turin), and of the editorial committees of the journals «Mimesis Journal», «Gli Spazi della Musica», «Nuove Musiche», «Sound Stage Screen». He is also composer and performer of electronic music, audiovisual performances and sound installations: his works have been performed in Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Germany, UK, USA, Canada and Australia.

Gianfranco Vinay was a Professor of History of Music at the Conservatory of Turin from 1974 to 1992. After moving to Paris, in 1994 he joined the Teachers’ Board for the PhD in “Music and Musicology of the Twentieth Century” at IRCAM-CNRS. He was a Maître de conférences at the Department of Music at the University of Paris 8 from 2003 until his retirement in 2013. He published several essays – historical, analytical and hermeneutical – on twentieth-century music on different topics (American, French, Italian, Russian music; relationship between music and dance; musical image; musical interpretation; musical comedy) and several composers (including Ives, Gershwin, Stravinsky, Varèse, Sciarrino). His monographs include: Stravinsky Neoclassico. L’invenzione della memoria nel ‘900 musicale (Marsilio, 1987), Charles Ives et l’utopie sonore américaine (Michel de Maule, 2001), Immagini gesti parole suoni silenzi. Drammaturgia delle opere vocali e teatrali di Salvatore Sciarrino (Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia/Ricordi, 2010). Parallel to his career as a musicologist, he has developed an artistic activity focused on the relationship between musical and visual images (see the catalogue of a recent exhibition in Brussels: À travers le miroir – Through the Mirror, Delatour France, 2019).