{"id":1842,"date":"2014-12-22T00:50:39","date_gmt":"2014-12-21T23:50:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/?p=1842"},"modified":"2019-08-29T11:51:01","modified_gmt":"2019-08-29T09:51:01","slug":"arseny-avraamov-symphony-of-sirens-1922","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/en\/arseny-avraamov-symphony-of-sirens-1922\/","title":{"rendered":"SYMPHONY OF SIRENS, Arseny Avraamov (1922)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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In the early 1920s in Russia, Arseny Avraamov is probably the Russian composer who most emblematically represents a musical trajectory, still largely overlooked today, that follows the most experimental strand of Bruitist music in the wake of Russian Futurism.<\/p>\n

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In 1922, to celebrate the anniversary of the Revolution, he conceived a great city symphony that would be played in Baku not by traditional instruments but by sounds emanating from the entire city: artillery and cannon fire, factory sirens, steam whistles and battleship horns became, under his baton, or rather under his flags, since he conducted with flags himself from the top of a platform or from the rooftops, one of the most striking city symphonies in the history of music.<\/p>\n

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For this symphony on the scale of the entire city, he devised a complete system of steam whistles, covering the whole chromatic scale over more than an octave and a half, which allowed him to include in his city symphony melodies played by these steam machines, such as L\u2019Internationale<\/em> or La Marseillaise<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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Avraamov would later attempt to simplify this system with a device distributing the steam through different whistles, notably for the revival of the Symphony of Sirens<\/em> in Nivni Novgorod and then in Moscow in 1923.<\/p>\n

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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), and 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 integrates this play of sirens and whistles into his unheard-of orchestra, in which he extends every section to the entire city.<\/p>\n

He composed a score in which he integrated all these sound instruments.<\/p>\n

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For the more diffuse and distant sound events, Avraamov specified the triggering of sound events according to a very precise timeline, which each person in charge of a sound event had to obey.<\/p>\n

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Here is a sound reconstruction by Leopoldo Amigo and\u00a0 Miguel Molina, released in 2008 in the indispensable box set Baku Symphony of Sirens<\/em><\/a>, which brings together a sound reconstruction and period archives of the Russian avant-garde.<\/p>\n