Andrey Smirnov: Sound in Z: Experiments in Sound and Electronic Music in Early 20th-century Russia (2013)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, art, art history, avant-garde, bio-mechanics, electroacoustic music, electronic music, music, music history, musical instruments, russia, sound, sound art, soviet union, technology
“Sound in Z supplies the astounding and long-lost chapter in the early story of electronic music: the Soviet experiment, a chapter that runs from 1917 to the late 1930s. Its heroes are Arseny Avraamov, inventor of Graphic Sound (drawing directly onto magnetic tape) and a 48-note scale; Alexei Gastev, who coined the term “bio-mechanics”; Leon Theremin, inventor of the world’s first electronic instrument, the Theremin; and others whose dreams for electronic sound were cut short by Stalin’s regime. Drawing on materials from numerous Moscow archives, this book reconstructs Avraamov’s Symphony of Sirens, an open-air performance for factory whistles, foghorns and artillery fire first staged in 1922, explores Graphic Sound and recounts Theremin’s extraordinary career-compiling the first full account of Russian electronic music.”
Edited by Matt Price and David Rogerson
Foreword by Jeremy Deller
Publisher Koenig Books, London, in partnership with Sound and Music, London, 2013
ISBN 3865607063, 9783865607065
281 pages
Talk by the author (audio, 90 min, 2012)
Interview with author: Nathan Budzinski (video, The Wire, 2013).
Exh. review: Daniele Balit (The Wire, 2009).
Reviews: Agata Pyzik (Calvert Journal, 2013), Colin McSwiggen (n+1, 2013), Alessandro Ludovico (Neural, 2013), Jacob Gotlib (Computer Music Journal, 2014), Thomas Patteson (Current Musicology, 2017).
PDF, PDF (14 MB, updated on 2020-11-1)
Comments (13)Andrei Smirnov, Liubov Pchelkina: Generation Z: Russian Pioneers of Sound Art and Musical Technology in 1910-1930 (2011) [English/Hungarian]
Filed under booklet | Tags: · 1910s, 1920s, art, art history, avant-garde, music, music history, russia, sound, sound art, technology, utopia
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)
Jeff Berner (ed.): Astronauts of Inner-Space: An International Collection of Avant-Garde Activity (1966)
Filed under book | Tags: · art, avant-garde, computing, concrete poetry, image, language, literature, media, poetry, situationists, technology, text, theatre
17 Manifestoes, Articles, Letters, 28 Poems & 1 Filmscript.
With manifestoes by Raoul Hausmann, John Arden, Jorgen Nash, Decio Pignatari, Maurice Girodias, Bruno Munari, Allen Ginsberg, Franz Mon, Marshall McLuhan, Max Bense, Diter Rot, Otto Piene, W. S. Burroughs, Dom Sylvester Houedard, Konrad Bayer, Margaret Masterman, R. Watts
Publisher Stolen Paper Review Editions, San Francisco, and The Times Publishing Co, London, 1966
66 pages
scanned by Lori Emerson