Collective Difference: The Pan-American Association of Composers

instruments with conspicuous similarities of timbre. 48 He describes three groups of
affinity in the eight-measure introduction: “secco,” “resonant,” and “modified attack.”
These subsets account for differences that are rooted in the multicultural sources of the
instruments. Schick calls secco instruments “dry sonorities used primarily for the
articulation of rhythm”; in the first eight measures these are bass and snare drums.
Resonant instruments include tam-tams, gong, low bass drum, and crash cymbals, or
instruments used for non-rhythmic ringing sounds. Finally, the modified attack group
consists of instruments that “depart in some way from a straightforward stroke.” These
include maracas, güiro, sirens, and friction drum. The crux of the work, according to
Schick, is that these group identities become increasingly fluid as the instruments blend
and develop new “behaviors,” such as taking up each other’s rhythmic patterns. Schick
reads this phenomenon as the instruments speaking each other’s languages.
In 1977 Chou Wen-Chung presented his analysis of Ionisation in a lecture at the
City University of New York. His essential thesis was that in the absence of exact pitch
in the work, timbre exerts primary control over structure. He concluded that the germinal
rhythmic ideas presented in the work come from the qualities of the instruments
themselves and the typical techniques used to play them. Chou offered measures 9-12 as
an example of “typical snare-drum stick techniques.” 49 One question that arises from
such an analysis is: From what performance context did Varèse draw these “typical
snare-drum stick techniques”? We are given a hint when Chou labels measures 9-12 the
“parade-drum passage,” though the audience is given no other indication to hear this
passage literally as a military or parade band (see Example 1.7). The rhythmic cells that
we might recognize as characteristic patterns are out of context, and they are soon
subjected to fragmentation and development. Later in the piece, these cells become
combined in such a way that obscures any one rhythm or timbre.
48 Schick, 40.
49 Chou Wen-chung, “Ionisation: The Function of Timbre in Its Formal and Temporal Organization.” in
The New Worlds of Edgard Varèse: A Symposium ed. Sherman van Solkema. I.S.A.M. Monographs, 11
(New York: Institute for Studies in American Music, 1979).
36