Andrei Smirnov, Liubov Pchelkina: Generation Z: Russian Pioneers of Sound Art and Musical Technology in 1910-1930 (2011) [English/Hungarian]

Variophone, theremin terpsitone, rhythmicon, emiriton, ekvodin, graphical sound – just to mention a few of the amazing innovations of the beginning of the 20th century in Soviet Russia, a country and time turbulent with revolutions, wars and totalitarian dictatorship.

While the history of Russian post-revolutionary avant-garde art and music is fairly well documented, the inventions and discoveries, names and fates of researchers of sound, creators of musical machines and noise orchestras, founders of new musical technologies have been largely forgotten except, perhaps, Leon Theremin, inventor of the first electronic musical instrument, the theremin.

This community of creators, however, was inherently incompatible with the totalitarian state. By the late 1930s it became effectively written out of histories, wiped out from text books.

Many of their ideas and inventions, considered as utopian at that time, were decades later rein¬vented abroad. We still use them today not knowing their origin.

This booklet was produced for the Budapest edition of a traveling exhibition curated by Andrei Smirnov of the Theremin Center and Liubov Pchelkina of the State Tretyakov Gallery.

Publisher OSA Archivum, Budapest, 2011
ISBN 9789638853820
20 pages

exhibition (from the curators)
exhibition (gallery website)

PDF

Dick Higgins: Computers for the Arts (1970)

Includes Fortran program and printout of Hank and Mary, A Love Story, A Chorale by Higgins, realized by Higgins and James Tenney; and program and printout of Proposition No. 2 for Emmett Williams by Alison Knowles, realized by James Tenney.

Publisher Abyss Publications, Somerville/MA, June 1970
ISBN 091185603X, 9780911856033
17 pages

PDF
PDF (2-up version, added on 2014-2-5, via Lori Emerson)

Metropolis Magazine (1927)

“Film programme booklet produced for the London premiere of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis at the Marble Arch Pavilion on March 21, 1927. Not only a list of cast and crew, it includes eleven short pieces on the making of the movie, commentary from the director and cast, and numerous production photographs and film stills, many attractively arranged as modernist collages. One of the most interesting sections shows in parallel columns how a passage of film scenes was adapted from the novel of the same name by Lang’s wife, Thea von Harbou.” (source)

Published in March 1927
33 pages
via Kabal, via Laura Massey (of Peter Harrington Book Shop)

PDF (no OCR)