I've been fascinated with Edgar Varese's Poeme Electronique since I was an undergrad, when I spotted a photo in the back of my music history book of the striking modernist pavilion built by Le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis to house Varese's piece at the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels. Varese, one of the 20th century's most iconoclastic composers, wrote Poeme towards the end of his long career, when technological innovations finally caught up to his boundary-pushing creative vision.

Unfortunately, Poeme has only existed in listeners' imaginations for the past 50 years, as it was composed specifically for 350 individual loudspeakers installed in Le Corbusier's pavilion, which was dismantled at the close of the fair. (Varese later authorized a stereo version of Poeme Electronique for album release.) As Varese described it, the taped and electronic sounds followed a physical path through the loudspeaker arrays, creating unprecedented effects such as reverberation and cross-fading. "I heard my music literally projected into space," Varese said of the end product.

In order to give modern listeners a sense of what the original experience must have been like, Italian professor Vincenzo Lombardo conceived The Virtual Poeme Electronique (2000), using historical documents and the original master tapes to recreate Poeme within a virtual-reality setting. Last night, the Electronic Music Foundation invited Lombardo to present his version of Poeme at Judson Church in the West Village, charging only $1 for the unique opportunity to hear this groundbreaking piece, as it was more-or-less meant to be heard.

In his introductory remarks, Lombardo described the painstaking research that went into this new version of Poeme: everything from calculating the dimensions of the original pavilion, to determining the precise location of each of the 350 loudspeakers, in order to recreate Varese's spatialization effects. At Judson Church, multi-channel speakers were placed strategically around the perimeter, the sound run through a series of laptops. At the front of the church, a large video screen projected a series of still images that Le Corbusier selected for the original presentation. 

The whole experience was fairly surreal: a mix of sirens, squawks and woodblocks, combined with taped animal sounds and other recordings. And, even though it was crude and rudimentary by 2010 standards, it's hard to understate the magnitude of Poeme's significance, which can justly claim forerunner status to everything from Dolby Surround Sound, to Phil Kline's Unsilent Night, to Monkeytown (only 1 week left!) For that, I'm glad I got to see - and hear it - the way Varese intended. (See below for a two-dimensional version.)