Edgar Varése (1883-1965) wrote only a couple of hours' worth of music in his lifetime and yet he exerted a remarkable influence on the direction of Twentieth Century music. He was born in France, and was close to the circle including Apollinaire, Cocteau and Satie. He was present at the 1912 Berlin premiere of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire and was well acquainted with Busoni's New Music theories. In 1914, he conducted the premiere of Debussy's suite from The Matyrdom of St Sebastian with the Czech Philharmonic. In 1915 he moved to the United States but he frequently returned to Europe. He was also a close friend of the Dadaist movement (Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia) and published in the magazine 391. However, his was only a loose association. In America, he premiered works by Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Webern, Ruggles and Cowell.

His composition “Ameriques” was written between 1918 and 1921. “America is the symbol of discoveries: a new world on the Earth, in the Sky and in human consciousness” – he wrote. In 1916, he wrote the following: “We have a pressing need for new instruments and this is something that musicians much work out seriously with the help of specialist experts in engineering and technology.”