A Virtual-Reality Reconstruction of @@iPoeme Electronique@ Based on Philological Research

"The last word is imagination" [Le dernier mot est imagination] (Edgard Varese, in Charbonnier 1970, p. 79): with this statement, Varese replies to Geoirge Charbonnier, closing a 1955 interview about the aesthetic postulates of his long but difficult career. While speaking about the relationship between music and image, Varese declares--somewhat surprisingly--that he would like to see a film based on his last completed orchestral work, @@iDeserts@ (1954). Such a film was created only after Varese's death (Viola 1994; see also Mattis 1992). However, three years after that interview, Varese did see a marriage of sound and image in his @@iPoeme Electronique@ (1958). This seminal work was Varese's only purely electroacoustic work (apart from the very short @@iLa Procession de Verges@ of 1955; Bernard 1987, p. 238), and also, to the best of our knowledge, the first electroacoustic work in the history of music to be structurally integrated in an audiovisual context (cf. Chadabe 1997).