Poème électronique

Varèse, Edgard (full name: Edgard [or Edgar] Victor Achille Charles Varèse). [1] Poème électronique ("Electronic Poem"). An 8-minute piece[2] prepared "for the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair," (slogan: progress of mankind through progress of technology[3])

From the Wikipedia entry:

The [Dutch multinational] Philips corporation [known for electronics][4] commissioned Le Corbusier to design the pavilion, which was intended as a showcase of their engineering progress. Le Corbusier came up with the title Poème électronique, saying he wanted to create a "poem in a bottle". Varèse composed the piece with the intention of creating a liberation [sic] between sounds and as a result uses noises not usually considered "musical" throughout the piece.[5] [* * *] The pavilion was shaped like a stomach, with a narrow entrance and exit on either side of a large central space. As the audience entered and exited the pavilion, the electronic composition Concret PH [which see at this link][6] by Iannis Xenakis [...] was heard. Poème électronique was synchronized to a film of black and white photographs selected by Le Corbusier which touched on vague themes of human existence. [...]

The interior of the pavilion was lit by a constantly changing pattern of colored lights, and in addition to the film, three separate projectors showed still photos on the walls.[7]

Note mixing of media and transgressions of common boundaries starting with a highly organic stomach and emphatically inorganic building.

In our initial source for this citation, "China’s Sonic Fictions: Music, Technology, and the Phantasma of a Sinicized Future" (SFRA Review 50.2-3 (Spring-Summer 2020),[8] Carmen Herold identifies Poème électronique as "one of the first ever electronically generated music pieces" and notes both its originality and its significance as a marker of a turning point in sensibilities as part of the whole Le Corbusier ensemble here:

an unprecedented, conceptronic Gesamtkunstwerk that fused architecture, film, sound, and light in an immersive spectacle. [...]

As much as [... the music composers] hoped to draw on the frenzied techno-enthusiasm of bygone days, the dystopian magnitudes of Auschwitz and Hiroshima and the looming threat of a nuclear war seemed to give way to a decaying pathos of modernity. As such, the fair’s general critique reads as a mourning for the grandeur of major world exhibitions of pre-war times and thus can be understood as an expression not only of a “collapsing faith in the future” ([Shanghai Future, Oxford UP, 2014]: 20), as Anna Greenspan detects, but also of a burgeoning scepticism in its most salient signifier: technology.

RDE, finishing, 25Oct21; with belated thanks to Todd Mason, e-mail June 2004