Edgard Varèse, born on 22 December 1883 in Paris, France, and passing away on 06 November 1965 in Greenwich Village, New York, is often hailed as the "Father of Electronic Music." He is sometimes referred to as Edgar Varese.

Varèse spent his early years in the village of Le Villars in Burgundy before moving back to Paris in 1890. His family later relocated to Turin, where he began his early compositions. On 05 November 1907, he married actress Suzanne Bing, with whom he had a daughter, Claude, born in 1910. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1913. In 1917, Varèse met Louise Norton, whom he married on 17 January 1922.

His formal music education included studies under Vincent d'Indy at the Schola Cantorum from 1903 to 1905 and with Charles-Marie Widor at the Paris Conservatoire from 1905 to 1907. Varèse subsequently moved to Berlin, where he encountered notable composers such as Richard Strauss and Ferruccio Busoni. After returning to Paris in 1913, he emigrated to New York in 1915, during which time most of his compositions were lost, leaving only a published song and the orchestral score Bourgogne (1908), which he later destroyed.

Varèse's significant creative output began with the orchestral piece Amériques in 1921, a work that, while echoing the styles of Claude Debussy and the early ballets of Igor Stravinsky, sought to explore new soundscapes. In the same year, Varèse and Carlos Salzedo founded the International Composers' Guild, which premiered several of Varèse's works for small ensembles. These compositions prominently featured wind and percussion instruments and distilled the innovations of Amériques into more concise forms, exemplified by Hyperprism (1923), Octandre (1923), and Intégrales (1925). His large orchestral work Arcana (1927) marked the conclusion of this highly productive period.

From 1928 to 1933, Varèse spent an extended time in Paris, during which he composed Ionisation (1931), a pioneering percussion orchestra piece that largely eschewed pitched sounds until its coda. He became increasingly interested in emerging electronic instruments and incorporated them into Ecuatorial (1934), which utilized two theremins or ondes martenot, alongside bass, brass, keyboards, and percussion. His flute solo Density 21.5 (1936) was his last completed work for nearly two decades.

During this hiatus, he taught intermittently and envisioned Espace, a project involving simultaneous radio broadcasts from around the world. An Etude pour Espace for chorus, pianos, and percussion was performed in 1947. With the advancement of tape recording technology, Varèse returned to composition, creating Déserts (1954) for wind, percussion, and tape, as well as Poème Électronique (1957-8), designed for diffusion in the Philips pavilion at the 1958 Brussels Exposition. In his later years, Varèse focused on themes of night and death, including the unfinished Nocturnal for voices and chamber orchestra (1961), which was later completed by Chou Wen-chung.