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The Marche fun\u00e9raire des ouvriers<\/em> was probably conceived as a sequel to the Baku Symphony of Sirens<\/em> composed in 1922, for the fifth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Besides the choir of this song, which is entirely in keeping with the sacred musical tradition of Orthodox Russia, its great innovation lies in the fact that, in place of the orchestra, it is the sirens, on the scale of an entire industrial city, that have been substituted for musical instruments.<\/p>\n The Revolution\u2019s moulting took place here even in music. Avraamov had already celebrated it in Baku, then in Nizhny Novgorod and Moscow in the following years, seeking to extend the orchestra\u2019s sections to the whole city, setting off under his orders cannons, sirens, foghorns, steam whistles of trains amid other detonating sound manifestations. This time, in place of the age-old tradition of the church bells of the former Orthodox religion, the funeral knell is now given by a sound that symbolises this new sound order which another revolution, an industrial one this time, overthrew and then replaced with factory sirens. Those monumental factories from which are heard the resounding sirens that, henceforth, set the rhythm of the daily life and the day of all the workers.<\/p>\n Industrial music thus becomes a formidable tool of Soviet propaganda.<\/p>\n Edgard Var\u00e8se had admittedly already introduced the siren into the midst of his orchestra, notably in Am\u00e9riques<\/em><\/a> (1918-1921), then in Hyperprism<\/em><\/a> (1923) and Ionisation<\/em><\/a> (1933); it is also found in the film Ballet M\u00e9canique<\/em><\/a> (1924) by Fernand L\u00e9ger and Dudley Murphy, under the musical direction of George Antheil, but with this example, in a still more radical gesture, Avraamov replaces the entire orchestra with the sound of sirens to accompany this choral funeral song.<\/p>\n For the death of its children, the factory thus also mourns its \u201cfaithful\u201d, martyrs of another kind, dead for the collectivist cause, celebrated to the sound of sirens tolling the knell of workers dead at work. After all, it is quite normal, in a world where \u201cthe plan\u201d, Sovietism and Stakhanovism have supplanted religion, that the funeral music of these workers should be performed by the factory itself.<\/p>\n With this example, which illustrates one of the purest products of Russian Futurism and Constructivism, we touch on the notion of a proletarian music which, evidently, opposes as radically as possible the bourgeois music of the salon.<\/p>\n At the same time, music leaves the confined space of the concert hall to take over another, far vaster space, now understood on the scale of the entire urban and industrial space.<\/p>\n One must imagine this scene where the choir is placed in the centre of a square and performs this religious song, surrounded by the sound of sirens resonating from all sides across the whole city around.<\/p>\n Here is a sonic reconstruction by Leopoldo Amigo and Miguel Molina released in 2008 in the indispensable box set Baku Symphony of Sirens<\/em><\/a>, which brings together sonic reconstruction and period archives of the Russian avant-garde.<\/p>\n\n\n