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MOMus
Museum of Modern Art
Costakis Collection
21 st Kolokotroni Str.
Moni Lazariston
56430, Stavroupoli
Greece
GENERATION Z |
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| RUSSIAN PIONEERS OF SOUND ART AND MUSICAL TECHNOLOGY IN 1910-1930 |
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Generation Z exhibition is a part of an ongoing project by Andrei Smirnov and Liubov Pchelkina that is attempting to reconstruct the censored history and culture of the Russian artistic Utopia of the 1910-1920s – a kind of 'network culture' of revolutionaries in art who realized seemingly unrealizable projects in sound, invented new musical machines, and who explored concepts and methods that offered a promising basis for future scientific and cultural development. The exhibition offers an introduction to some of the key figures of the period and their areas of research. 
While the history of Russian post-revolutionary avant-garde art and music is fairly well documented, the inventions and discoveries, names and destinies of the community of researchers of sound, creators of musical machines and noise orchestras and founders of new musical technologies have been largely forgotten except, perhaps, Leon Theremin, well known as an inventor of the first commercially produced electronic musical instrument, the Theremin (1920). As composer and author Albert Glinsky asserts, ‘this frequently clumsy instrument was the first foray into the brave new world of electronic music.' Its arrival heralded a new, technologically based trend in the arts. As a physicist, musician and engineer he worked on the development of innumerable projects, often trying to combine music with colour, with gesture, scent and touch. Having worked at the crossroads of creative technology and espionage, it is hardly possible today to imagine any synthesizers, burglar alarms or automatic doors without his pioneering research. 
August 31, 1938 he was illegally taken on board Starry Bolshevik ship on which he has transported over 1000 kilograms of electronic equipment to Russia. His intension was to develop an electronic music studio in Soviet Russia. It is not surprising that all equipment was confiscated by Soviet customs. Shortly after arrival in March 1939 Leon Theremin was arrested and condemned for 8 years of GULAG camps. Fortunately after one year in Kolima (the worst place in Siberia) he was moved to Moscow “Sharaga” – special prison for scientists. After release in 1947 he remained to work for KGB until his retirement in 1962 when he moved to Acoustical Laboratory at Moscow State Conservatory (former NIMI), where he tried to revive most of his American inventions and research. On April 1967 an article about him was published by the New York Times, which caused a fast and only possible in the USSR reaction: Leon Theremin was removed from his position and kicked out of the Moscow State Conservatory. The rest of his life Leon Theremin has spent working at Moscow State University in a position of technician at the Physics Department. 
While the career of Theremin the physicist began at the Institute for Physics and Technology in Petrograd, his musical career has begun in Moscow, at the State Institute for Musical Science (GIMN) which was founded in Moscow in 1921 in an attempt to centralize all activities related to musical science including disciplines such as acoustics, musicology, psychology, physiology, construction of new musical instruments and ethnomusicology. Nikolai Garbuzov was elected director. 
In 1931 GIMN was closed and in 1933 Garbuzov established a new Research Institute for Musical Science (NIMI) at Moscow State Conservatory where in 1940s it was renamed as the Acoustical Laboratory. In the realm of music and its technology GIMN/NIMI was the highest-level organization in Moscow. Projects from all over Soviet Russia seeking a patent or financial support needed a positive review from the appropriate GIMN/NIMI experts. As many of these experts were involved in similar research or had different aesthetic views, their responses were often negative, based on biased opinions and self-interest rather than scholarship, discourse and the greater good.
In 1916 a student at the Neurological Institute in Petrograd Denis Kaufman (1896-1954) (aka Dziga Vertov) attempted what would now be called sound poetry and audio art. As he put it: ‘I decided to include the entire audible world into the concept of “Hearing.” It was during this time that I attempted to draw up the sounds of a lumber-mill. [...] I tried to describe the audio impression of the lumber-mill in the way a blind person would perceive it. In the beginning I wrote down words, but then I attempted to capture all of these noises with letters. [...] It also concerned my experiments with gramophone recordings, where from the separate fragments of recordings on 
gramophone disks a new composition was created. But I was not satisfied experimenting with available prerecorded sounds'. Being frustrated, he has switched to film to o rganize not the audible, but the visible world. 
Arseny Avraamov (Krasnokutsky) (1885-1944) was a composer, performance instigator, music journalist and creator of the first ever artificial soundtrack. In a series of articles from 1914-1916 he developed the theory of microtonal ‘Ultrachromatic' music and invented special instruments to perform it. Shortly after the October Revolution Avraamov proposed to the Commissar of Education, Anatoly Lunacharsky, a project to burn all pianos – symbols of the despised twelve-tone, octave-based ‘well tempered' scale, which he believed had adversely affected human hearing for several hundred years. 
In the spring of 1917 in Petrograd the Leonardo da Vinci Society was founded by Arseny Avraamov and the young inventor Evgeny Sholpo (1891-1951) accompanied by the mathematician and musicologist Sergei Dianin. Their objective was to unite efforts to produce a revolution in music theory and techniques based on the cross-connection of the arts and sciences. They declared that academic views on music theory were dull and scholastic, and that techniques relating to it were old fashioned, proclaiming that both were becoming increasingly outdated. In the summer of 1917 in Petrograd Evgany Sholpo wrote a science-fiction essay entitled ‘The Enemy of Music' in which he described a sound machine named the Mechanical Orchestra, capable of synthesizing any sound and producing music according to a special graphical score without any need for a performer. The instrument was based on the same principles as the ANS Synthesizer, built 35 years later by Evgeny Murzin. According to Sholpo's description the instrument incorporated a set of sine wave oscillators, based on numerous Helmholtz tuning forks, adjusted on fixed frequencies, forming a discrete scale, covering the whole audible range with intervals between successive pitches unperceivable to the human ear. Control over the system and the process of sound synthesis was to be carried out by means of a special graphical score with the diagram, representing a spectrum of a sound by means of cut-out transparent strips, having appropriate shape and slopes, allowing a complete set of sine wave tones to be operated synchronously and independently, controlling the sound on a spectral level, directly manipulating the overtones, erasing the difference between the pitch-based harmony structures and the spectral tissue of a sound. 
The Central Institute of Labour (CIT) was established in 1920 by the writer, politician and polymath Alexei Gastev (1882-1939), who was one of the most popular and outstanding proletarian poets of the early post-revolutionary Russia. He was convinced that CIT was his main artistic creation. Fascinated by Taylorism and Fordism, he has led a popular movement for the ‘scientific organization of labor' (NOT) to represent a Marxian variant of cybernetics. It was Gastev who coined the term Bio-mechanics, which was widely used then in the psychology of labour as well as in the field of theatre, most evidently in the work of producer, director and actor Vsevolod Meyerhold. It was scientific research with an interdisciplinary and broad-ranging agenda. And at the foundation of this approach lay a powerful manmachine metaphor associating, in particular, with the concept of Organoprojection (1919) by Pavel Florensky - Russian 
Orthodox theologian, philosopher, mathematician and inventor, executed by NKVD in late 1930s. 
(1896–1966) - the Institute's leading physiologist, who conducted a series of experiments that measured the trajectories and speeds of human limbs, while his subjects performed various labour tasks. 
The ideas, projects and artworks created during 1910-20-s are often considered utopian. However, there is no general definition or style that can lay claim to characterize the art of the late 1910s and 1920s. Nor does this time interval fit neatly into any system of representation about the unity of culture or its progressive development. A term that sought to capture the essence of the period was proposed by the artist and philosopher Solomon Nikritin (1898-1965). Projectionism (from the Latin 'projectus') was intended to reflect the urge to rush ahead, or more accurately, to rush into the future. He applied this term not only to new approaches in painting and methods of art criticism, but also to the methodology of constructing a new society, to which it was considered necessary to aspire. In 1919 Nikritin developed his fundamental theory of Projectionism. According to his philosophy, the rational essence of nature is the highest goal of technology and culture. In his manifesto he asserted: ‘The Artist is not a producer of consumer goods (a cupboard, a picture), but of (PROJECTIONS) METHOD – the organization of matter.'
The method, therefore, invented by the artist, becomes the purpose of the creative process. The intention was for new ideas to transfer creative energy into further development. In the context of ‘projecting the method' even faults and paradoxes gained a new constructive sense and value. In the early 1920s much project-based research took place that could be considered within the framework of Projectionism, including Alexei Gastev's Art of Movement exhibitions, the concert-lectures by Leon Theremin, and Arseny Avraamov's concert series Music of the Future, in which the author demonstrated his practical ideas regarding the future of musical harmony and techniques, rather than presenting finished musical pieces. 
each part within the movement of the body, for the development of this movement, and for its nuances and transitions, including vocal resonance. All this was tinged by the emotional score which became the basis of the entire action". Many instances of the use of current multimedia technologies were already being explored in the performances of the Projection Theatre in the 1920s. To create the most complicated scores of sounds, gestures, movements and emotional states needed for his research, actors were involved in a daily routine of exercises and psychological training. Specially made diagrams specified the distribution of various emotions in time such as anger, melancholy and sadness by representing them as percentages on a graph. Large screens behind the stage were intended to produce a dynamical film projection as a part of the performance and virtual characters from the film projection appeared to interact with the actors on the stage. 
In 1921-23 performances of the Projection Theatre, the Foregger Studio as well as sound experiments at the Proletkult Studio, directed by Sergei Eisenstein, have provoke a fashion on Noise Music and Noise Orchestras. As Rene Fulop-Miller has noted in 1926: ‘The same idea also ruled the true proletarian music: it, too, emphasized the rhythms which corresponded to the universal and impersonal elements of humanity. The new music had to embrace all the noises of the mechanical age, the rhythm of the machine, the din of the great city and the factory, the whirring of driving-belts, the clattering of motors, and the shrill notes of motor-horns. 
Many inventors patented new sound machines specially intended for performance of the Noise Music. Some devices based on electro-optical, electro-mechanical and newest electronic technologies were ahead of their time by decades. Among them the Electro-Musical Device invented by J.A. Pakhuchi (Patent #19675, filed December 26, 1929) with application of a buzzer and a pedal rheostat for change of intensity of a sound. ‘Mechanical keyboard instrument for the reproduction of speech, singing and various sounds' invented in 1925 by D.G. Tambovtsev (Patent N6309. Filed May 9, 1925) was a kind of proto-sampler, very similar to the famous Mellotron, popular in 1970-s. It comprises a system of infinite loops of steel wire with prerecorded sounds, movable against the poles of electromagnets (magnetic heads), corresponding to each key of the keyboard. N.M. Molodsov invented a ‘Device for sound on film reproduction, intended to create illusion of the spatial movement of sounding objects by means of sound film' (Copyright certificate on the invention N49350. Filed June 8, 1934). A.G. Mashkovich invented some extraordinary devices to produce sound effects. Electro - Optical Musical Instrument, invented by Sergeev in 1926, was very similar to the famous Rhythmicon, built by Leon Theremin in 1931 and based on principle of the optical siren. It was a kind of electro-optical sound synthesizer, incorporating a sequencer to program scores with complicated rhythms and harmonies. 
Perhaps the most well known project of the epoch of Noise Music was the Symphony of Sirens by Arseny Avraamov, inspired by the poetry of Alexei Gastev. It was first staged in the port town of Baku in 1922 in celebration of the 5th anniversary of the Revolution. This epic spectacle featured a cast of choirs, the foghorns of the entire Caspian flotilla, two batteries of artillery guns, a number of infantry regiments including a machine-gun division, hydroplanes, and all the town's factory sirens. The conductor, posted on a purpose-built tower, signaled various sound units with coloured flags and pistol shots. A central sound-machine called the 'Magistral' contained 50 steam whistles controlled by a crowd of musicians following 'text-scores'. 
The late 1920s was also the period in which sound was being developed to accompany films and animations in Russia. Among the first Soviet sound movies ever created was ‘Piatiletka. Plan velikih rabot' (Plan of Great Works) by Abram Room.The group, working on this film in 1929 at Shorin's Central Laboratory of Wire Communication in Leningrad, included the painter, book illustrator and animator Mikhail Tsekhanovsky, the chief of the composer's brigade Arseny Avraamov and the inventor Evgeny Sholpo. When in October of that year the first roll of film was developed, it was Tsekhanovsky who voiced the idea: ‘What if we take some Egyptian or ancient Greek ornaments as a sound track? Perhaps we will hear some unknown archaic music?' He was referring to the shapes and outlines of vases and how these could be used as if wave forms to generate sound. It was at this precise moment that Graphical Sound techniques were invented. The next day they were already furiously at work on experiments in what they referred to variously as ‘ornamental', ‘drawn', ‘paper', ‘graphical', ‘artificial' or ‘synthetic' sound. By 1936 there were four main trends of Graphical Sound in Soviet Russia: hand-drawn Ornamental Sound (Avraamov, early Boris Yankovsky (1905-1973)); hand-made Paper Sound (Nikolai Voinov (1900-1958)); Variophone or automated Paper Sound (Evgeny Sholpo, Georgy Rimsky-Korsakov); and the spectral syntones technique (Boris Yankovsky). 
It was Avraamov who completed the first artificial sound tracks in 1930. The same year Evgeny Sholpo invents the Variophone. It was a continuation of research that Sholpo had been conducting since the 1910s when he was working on ‘Performer-less music'. The first version of Variophone was built in 1931 by Sholpo together with composer Georgy Rimsky-Korsakov (the son of the famous composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov). It was capable of producing artificial soundtracks by means of automated Paper Sound techniques. 
any soundtracks for movies and cartoons were created using the Variophone. Among the most accomplished pieces recorded with the Variophone in 1933-34 were ‘The Carburettor Suite' by G. Rimsky-Korsakov, ‘Waltz' by N.Timofeev, ‘Flight of the Valkyries' by Richard Wagner, and 6th Rhapsody by Franz Liszt. In 1941 during the blockade of Leningrad, together with composer Igor Boldirev, Sholpo synthesized one of his most experimental pieces – the soundtrack to the cartoon ‘Sterviatniki' (The Vultures). Although aesthetically these works are similar to Walter Carlos' ‘Switched-on Bach' (1968) and sound like 'eight-bit music', the main difference is in their timing. In 1918 Sholpo developed special tools - the Melograph and Autopianograph - to register the temporal characteristics of live musical performance. Much electronic music has a rigid tempo, like a metronome; Sholpo was able to simulate more subtle variations in tempo such as Rubato, Rallentando and Accelerando, based on his carful analyses of the live piano performances by the best pianists. 
In 1939 Yankovsky met Evgeny Murzin (1914-1970) – a young inventor, fascinated by the idea of universal tool for sound synthesis and after a year of conversations the final concept of the future instrument was formulated. In 1957 Murzin completed and patented a photo-electronic musical instrument called the ANS Synthesizer. [Evgeny Murzin. 'Photoelectrichesky sintezator muziki' (The Photoelectric Synthesizer of Music). 
Copyright certificate N118695, USSR, applied 24.06.1957. Its name was derived from initials of the influential composer Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin. It was remarkably close to the concept of Evgeny Sholpo's Mechanical Orchestra. The instrument was based on the scale 72 steps per octave, proposed by Boris Yankovsky, and incorporated a set of sine wave oscillators, adjusted on fixed frequencies, forming a discrete scale, covering the whole audible range with intervals between successive pitches unperceivable for human ear. Control over the system and the process of sound synthesis was carried out by means of a special graphical score with the diagram, representing a spectrum of a sound by means of drawn transparent strips, having appropriate shape and slopes, allowing to operate all set of sine wave tones synchronously and independently, controlling the sound on a spectral level, directly manipulating the overtones, erasing a difference between the pitch harmony structures and a spectral tissue of a sound. A similar principle of the graphical score was used in the legendary UPIC computer system, developed by Yanis Xenakis in 1977 in the Parisian center CEMAMu. 
Review from the Wire Magazine, February, 2009 (pdf)