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)

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James M. Harding, John Rouse (eds.): Not the Other Avant-Garde: The Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance (2006)

“Almost without exception, studies of the avant-garde take for granted the premise that the influential experimental practices associated with the avant-garde began primarily as a European phenomenon that in turn spread around the world. These ten original essays, especially commissioned for Not the Other Avant-Garde, forge a radically new conception of the avant-garde by demonstrating the many ways in which the first—and second—wave avant-gardes were always already a transnational phenomenon, an amalgam of often contradictory performance traditions and practices developed in various cultural locations around the world, including Africa, the Middle East, Mexico, Argentina, India, and Japan. Essays from leading scholars and critics—including Marvin Carlson, Sudipto Chatterjee, John Conteh-Morgan, Peter Eckersall, Harry J. Elam Jr., Joachim Fiebach, David G. Goodman, Jean Graham-Jones, Hannah Higgins, and Adam Versényi—suggest collectively that the very concept of the avant-garde is possible only if conceptualized beyond the limitations of Eurocentric paradigms.

Not the Other Avant-Garde is groundbreaking in both avant-garde studies and performance studies and will be a valuable contribution to the fields of theater studies, modernist studies, art history, literature, and music history.”

Publisher University of Michigan Press, 2006
Theater: Theory/Text/Performance series
ISBN 0472069314, 9780472099313
312 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2017-7-11)

Reginald Smith Brindle: The New Music: The Avant-garde since 1945, 2nd ed (1975/1987)

This guide to the more adventurous evolutions of music since 1945–pointillism, post-Webernism, integral serialism, free dodecaphony, aleatory and indeterminate music, graphics, musique concrète, electronic music, and theatre music–was first published in 1975 and has been reprinted several times. For this second edition, Smith Brindle has added a new chapter reviewing developments over the decade since first publication. He discusses the decline of experimentalism and the reaction against increasing cerebralism and complexity as variously illustrated by the more recent works of Stockhausen, the minimalist works of Reich and Glass, and the partial return to romanticism. He also reviews the technological revolution which has taken place in computer music and concludes that the future of music will for the time being be most closely associated with technological change and development, rather than with radical changes in compositional techniques.

First edition published 1975
Publisher Oxford University Press, 1987
ISBN 0193154714, 9780193154711
222 pages

publisher
google books

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