Only a few weeks ago I was uneasily wondering in these columns whatever became of "modern" art. Well, friends, I now must report that it is officially dead.  Its obituary appeared last Sunday (Dec, 4) under Harold Schonberg's byline in the Arts and Leisure section of the New York Times. And it is, of course, axiomatic that if you read it in the Times it must be true (as well as fit to print). Though he notes such phenomena as the return to figurative painting, Schonberg expectably devotes most of his space to music. He tells us that serial music has reached a dead end, that, given more than enough of a chance, "none of the music created during that period has entered the active repertory," that even the Gotter (Schonberg, Berg, Webern, Carter, Babbitt, and Sessions) have passed their Dammerung, and that there is a growing flight back to such discarded things as melody and feeling and expression of "personality."

 So what else is new?  Perhaps it is true that what we’ve always known as music has been exhausted of further possibilities. Perhaps musical “novelty" in the future will consist--as it has for some time consisted--for the vast musical public of the exhumation of the old rather than of significant new creations. But Schonberg notes that composers are fed up with writing for no audience (save the established old profs who, they hope, will give them tenure and a ragtag of gullible intaleckshul youths who intaleckshuality certified).

And I, for one, am sick unto death of wasting my time on pastiches of electronic feedback or snippets of Beethoven played upside-down and backwards at various speeds or topless lady cellists submerging them- selves in tanks of water.

 So what else is new?  Perhaps it is true that what we’ve always known as music has been exhausted of further possibilities. Perhaps musical “novelty" in the future will consist--as it has for some time consisted--for the vast musical public of the exhumation of the old rather than of significant new creations. But Schonberg notes that composers are fed up with writing for no audience (save the established old profs who, they hope, will give them tenure and a ragtag of gullible intaleckshul youths who intaleckshuality certified).  And I, for one, am sick unto death of wasting my time on pastiches of electronic feedback or snippets of Beethoven played upside-down and backwards at various speeds or topless lady cellists submerging themselves in tanks of water.

 And where does all this leave Edgard Varese. I wish I knew. There is no doubt that Varese--a conservatively--trained Frenchman and authority on early music was one of the founding fathers of the late-lamented new music. His pioneering efforts in percussion music, his concern with such things as timbre and intensity, and his dismissal of traditional melody and harmony as irrelevancies unquestionably underlie that whole latter-day concept of music as "patterned sound'" or "organized noise." But Varese was, from all the evidence I've seen, no poseur or snob or conman or play-it-safe academician. If he was an intellectual, he was also a genuine musician to his fingertips (the two are not always compatible. I suspect that he was a true visionary. He complained of the imitations of the music-producing means available to him, and when electronic composition became possible, he was one of the first to use it.

I became acquainted with Varese in my youth through Nicolas Slonimsky's venturous old recording of the Ionisation for percussion orchestra. I came to scoff and I developed for it a sort of love and admiration. (I might have known the man himself, had I not been so timid., for I used to practice in the Greenwich Village settlement school where he rehearsed his choral group.) One of my earliest LPs was a Varese record on the EMS label (though I must confess that I sometimes used it to retaliate against a neighbor's too-loud radio.)

 Varese was a slow and careful composer, and at one point in his career he lapsed into silence for fifteen years for want of an audience, so his output (except for some early works, which he disowned) is quite small. The two pieces here are his biggest compositions, calling for enormous orchestral forces with lots of percussion. The earlier (“Americas'') is an exploration of new-found lands; “Arcana" (jestingly, I suspect) refers to the alchemist Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim, called “Paracelsus."  Both have thematic development and recognizable shape, and both make a glorious noise--but if you are incurably allergic to dissonance, beware!