Arsenij Avraamovs best-known creation appeared involved the Caspian port of Baku [Bakı, capital of Azerbaijan], for the Fifth Anniversary of the Soviet Republic on 7 November 1922. A spectacular, called the Symphony of the Factory Sirens, used the services of a huge cast of choirs (joined by spectators), the foghorns of the entire Soviet Caspian flotilla, two batteries of artillery guns, a number of full infantry regiments (including a machine-gun division) hydroplanes, and all the factory sirens of Baku. Conductors posted on specially built towers signaled various sound units with colored flags and pistol shots. A central steam-whistle machine pounded out The Internationale and La Marseillaise as noisy autotransports (half-tracks) raced across Baku for a gigantic sound finale in the festival square. Russian composer and theorist. He studied theory at the music school attached to the Moscow Philharmonic Society with I.N. Protopopov and A.M. Koreshchenko (1908--11). From 1910 he was active as a music critic under the pseudonym Ars and, having refused to fight in World War I, fled abroad in 1914 and worked, among other occupations, as a stoker and as a circus artist. Returning to Russia in 1917 he was appointed arts commissar of the RSFSR branch of Narkompros (1917--18). He participated in the creation of the first Russian films with sound (1929--34), he led a sound laboratory in the Cinematic Institute of Scientific Research (1932--3) and he lectured at the Moscow Conservatory on the history and theory of sound systems (1934). While living in Nalchik (1935--41) he collected folk music of the peoples of the north Caucasus and wrote some compositions based on these materials. He later conducted the Russian Folk Chorus (1941--3). During the early Soviet era many artists attempted to integrate technology and creativity; Avraamovs work typifies this trend. He invented a graphic-sonic art which was produced by drawing directly onto magnetic tape. He also sought to overcome equal temperament and tonality by his creation of an ultrachromatic 48-tone system. This method was proposed in a thesis entitled Universalnaya sistema tonov (The Universal System of Tones) and was realized in his demonstrations which took place in 1927 in Berlin, Frankfurt and Stuttgart. He is considered a precursor of the musique concrète movement with his Simfoniya gudkov (Symphony of Factory Sirens) which was performed in Azerbaijan in 1923 and later in Moscow. This information was taken from: youtu.be/Kq_7w9RHvpQ?t=13m12s
Posted on: Wed, 19 Nov 2014 07:09:31 +0000
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