Poême électronique, Edgard Varêse and Le Corbusier 1958

In my last post I discussed evoluon, a science museum built by Philips in Eindhoven and whilst looking through the liner notes of a Varêse CD, I saw his Poême électronique was also written for another Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World Fair.



The pavilion was designed by the studio of Le Corbusier and the lead architect of the pavilion was Iannis Xenakis. Visitors would enter through curved corridor, stand in a central chamber for the eight-minute presentation, and exit out the other side.

The presentation had images conceived by Le Corbusier and music by Varêse. The music was constructed by splicing together (on tape) pre-existing sounds and played through 425 speakers placed throughout the pavilion. The speakers were triggered to sound at specific intervals so the piece never sounded exactly the same at any location.

Varêse worked at the Philips laboratories in Eindhoven to produce the montage of sounds and it must have been quite spectacular to hear the 360 degree sound space.

The multimedia presentation, complete with images and music, can be played below:




Here's an mpeg version to download here (85mb).

Unfortunately the pavilion was soon demolished but the more familiar Atomium remains.