Edgard Varèse

Edgard Varèse (1883–1965) was a French-born composer who emigrated to the United States in 1915 and became one of the foundational figures of 20th-century experimental music. Rejecting tonal hierarchies, he conceived of music as organised sound and explored timbre, rhythm, and texture as primary materials. Works including Ionisation (1931) — scored entirely for percussion — Density 21.5 (1936) for solo flute, and Poème électronique (1958), created for the Brussels World's Fair and diffused through 425 speakers, established him as a pioneer of electronic and spatial music. He was a formative influence on virtually every subsequent direction in experimental music.