Listen to part of a lecture in a music history class.

P: Imagine having a musical performance with no performers. What\'s more, imagine having music with no music. This might seem paradoxical or even impossible, but in the 1950s and 60s, these were radical, new ideas that some composers of classical music were interested in. They were also interested in finding a more direct connection between the composer and the listener without performers in an intermediary role.

And there was a new sense of freedom at this time about how one might define music, about what constitutes music, what it can sound like. As a result of these new ideas, many composers of the 50s and 60s became interested in creating electronic music, music created with the help of electronic devices.

For example, one of these composers Edgard Varese. Varese used electronic equipment, like the tape recorder, to push the boundaries of music. And what\'s crazy about Varese is that early in his career, before the tape recorder was even invented, he was already talking about this new kind of electronic music that he could envision, but wasn\'t yet capable of producing.

One of his big ideas was that he wanted to get away from working with melodies. Now, how does a listener relate to music when there\\\'s no, I mean, the melody is the main, you know, tune of the song. But Varese talked about wanting to replace melodies with what he called "sound masses".

At that time, it was sort of unclear to other musicians, possibly even to Varese himself, what he meant when he first said this, first conceived of sound masses. He just kind of said that these were groups of sounds, sounds that would collide with one another and that that would be the music, whatever that meant. But imagine this, if you can.

Varese started enthusiastically promoting his revolutionary ideas about sound masses years before the invention of the tape recorder made it possible for him to actually create them. When the tape recorder did come along, though Varese could easily record sounds, and he could also edit them, repeat them, manipulate them, whatever, to build these sound masses.

The piece he created that really demonstrated what sound masses were, was called Poème électronique, or electronic poem. Poème électronique was originally created to be played along with a video in a technology demonstration at the 1958 World\'s Fair. And it\'s just the sort of piece that Varese had been championing.

It has no melody. It\'s more like a jumble of sounds, some of them familiar to music listeners, like ring bells or the human voice or pipe organ, but other sounds were strange to hear in a work of music, hissing noises or the squawks of feedback coming through a speaker, or like the sound of an engine running. And Varese combined these familiar and unfamiliar musical elements into, well, walls of sound, what he\'d been calling sound masses.

Another revolutionary thing about Varese\'s use of the tape recorder, aside from the ground breaking, kind of composition he could produce with it, is that it joins the composer and the performer into a single entity. This was an intellectual, a philosophical idea that Varese held about composing music like some other composers of the 50s and 60s, Varese saw the performer as an interpreter, someone whose interpretation of the music would change the composer\'s original vision for the piece.

So inherent in this philosophy is this disparaging view of performers. His prediction was that the musical performer would eventually disappear, just like storytellers did after the invention of printing. Um, storytellers, I mean, who recite stories orally. The printing press made reciting stories unnecessary, and Varese thought electronic recording would have the same effect on musical performance.

So part of what\'s interesting about poem electronic is that there\'s no sheet music for the piece. It wasn\'t composed on paper and then played later. Varese conceived of it, and instead of writing it down, he just recorded and edited it himself. So what he created, that\'s exactly what the audience heard.

The piece is, that specific recording Varese made for the 1958 World\'s Fair you can\'t go see a performance of poem electronic. A live performance by someone else would be a different piece. Varese\'s Poème électronique is like a unique artifact, at least, this was his sense about what the piece was.