“Je rêve les instruments obéissants à la pensée” (I dream of musical instruments obedient to thought) — Edgar Varese in 391 Magazine, June 1917
Composer Edgar Varese also dreamt of resuming his collaboration with the cellist and inventor Lev Theremin, who had unfortunately become isolated behind the iron curtain in 1938. Varese complained to Theremin in a 1941 letter to Theremin (which he was sadly only able to finally read in 1989) that he had become disenchanted with all the “man-power (musical) instruments” and that the new electronic instruments remained inadequate.
Cellist Jonathan Golove describes Varese’s desire to use cello (fingerboard) theremin’s in his piece Equatorial here. Most human-electronic interfaces make use of the piano keyboard, and Theremin’s fingerboard interface was an exception.
The cello fingerboard too points beyond, toward the essence of music itself, which has no model in the physical world.
As Varese himself wrote in The Liberation of Sound, quoting Danish early Romantic poet Oehlenschlager:
“What seek you? Say! And what do you expect?
I know not what; the Unknown I would have!
What’s known to me is endless; I would go
Beyond the known: The last word still is wanting.”
Rock The Cello 