Amériques

"Amériques is, for me, a work which is quite remarkable. It’s a piece where you find the influence of Rite of Spring, it’s close to this aesthetic and feeling—more aggressive, more gigantic—but at the same time you have very lyrical passages, which become rarer and rarer in the later works of Varèse. I like this work because it’s the first work he wrote when he was in America, and it was the first work he kept. The life of Varèse is full of mystery; after he died in 1965, I met regularly with his widow. We spoke together about him, and of course she could speak more openly about him because he was not alive anymore; and all of the scores he composed before coming to the States were supposedly destroyed in Berlin."