Edgard Varèse

Born in France on December 22, 1883, Varèse spent most of his career in the United States, where he treated sound as living matter and musical space as something unbounded. He coined "organized sound" to describe his aesthetic, organizing elements he called "sound-masses" the way crystals form in nature. He saw electronic media as the future of sound production - his experiments with new instruments and electronics earned him the tag "Father of Electronic Music" - and he pushed other modernists forward too, founding the International Composers' Guild in 1921 and the Pan-American Association of Composers five years later. Writer Henry Miller called him "The stratospheric Colossus of Sound." He died November 6, 1965, leaving behind only three hours of finished work, but every major composer since has had to reckon with the question he posed: what is music but organized noises?