Déserts
Déserts is a piece of music by Edgard Varèse which combines electronic sounds with orchestral instrumentation. Varèse spent three years collecting the sounds to use in the piece which was finished by 1955.
It's one of the tracks on the Complete Works Of Edgard Varèse, Volume 1.
Zappa about Déserts
"Varèse told me that he was working on a new piece called "Déserts" which thrilled me since Lancaster, California, was in the desert. When you're fifteen and living in the Mojave Desert, and you find out that the World's Greatest Composer (who also looks like a mad scientist) is working in a secret Greenwich Village laboratory on a 'song about your hometown' (so to speak), you can get pretty excited. I still think "Déserts" is about Lancaster, even if the liner notes on the Columbia LP insist that it is something more philosophical." - Frank Zappa in The Real Frank Zappa Book
""Déserts", which is probably the starkest of the pieces in terms of the way they deal with the raw material, there're special overblown chords that produce difference tones, which you wouldn't be able to get any other way – you know what I'm talking about? If you take two intervals and play them very loudly on a woodwind instrument – for instance, this one spot where two piccolos are playing either a Major second or minor second apart, very high octave – when you blow it real hard you hear a third note that's not there. To know in advance what's going to come out and to plan your composition to achieve effects like that was something that people just hadn't thought of doing before." - Frank Zappa on Edgar Varèse, 1981.
