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Baku was the capital of Azerbaijan, incorporated into the Soviet Union as a Socialist Republic in 1920. This day was a holiday to celebrate the anniversary of the Revolution. In those heady days five years before, Avraamov had spoken at the first conference on proletarian cultural education in Petrograd. On the panel with him was Osip Brik, Roman Jakobson’s friend at the time and later his director at the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment.^§AS1.4.1a

Avraamov was principal conductor on this day in 1922 as well as the symphony’s composer. Standing at the top of a specially made tower, he sent signals with colored flags and pistol shots to a team of co-conductors around the city. His orchestration called for factories to sound their sirens, navy ships in the harbor to blow their foghorns, field artillery to fire, railway locomotives to whistle, car horns to honk, and machine guns to ring out shots. Massed military bands played and choirs of school children around the city sang The Internationale:

“Stand up …

All the world’s starving and enslaved!

… take back what is ours–

Fire up the furnace and hammer boldly,

while the iron is still hot! …

All the power to the people of labor! …

We will build our new world.

He who was nothing will become everything!”

The crowds joined in. No mere audience, the masses were both performers and performance.²⁹⁷

Baku was an industrial city of great importance, center of the Soviet oil industry. The city was divided into ethnic enclaves with a recent history of conflict, and the performance embraced all quarters. The city’s three main newspapers, Baku’s Worker, Labor, and Communist, published instructions so the people could participate. Singing with the choirs, citizens engaged in a call-and-response between voice and machine across the cityscape. The symphonic narrative: first movement, revolutionary battle where bodies were invisible actors hidden by machines; second movement, revolutionary triumph where bodies became visible, animating machines.

In order to capture the full gamut of sound in his orchestrations, Avraamov created a microtonal system based on mathematical modeling, settling eventually on a 48-step “ultrachromatic” octave. He also developed a technique for sampling, analyzing, and synthesizing sounds.²⁹⁸ He called these musical designs the “Welttonsystem” or “World Tone System,” able to encompass all existing musical systems, including not only the twelve-tone Western system, but Java’s five-step system and India’s twenty-two-step system.²⁹⁹ This was the kind of music that would be required in performances like the one in Baku, capturing the musical sounds of machines as well as people, and the range of musical forms across the city’s ethnic enclaves.

Then, for Avraamov, a revelation pointing to the future of music, “the amazing invention of the young Soviet engineer, L.S. Theremin.” Avraamov wrote, “His ‘Theremin’ is not a simple ‘new musical instrument’ as our muscritics are thinking, no, it is a solution to the huge social-scientific-art problem; it is the first big step into the future, into our future – it is a social revolution in the art of music, its revival.” With its “full freedom of timbral and intonational nuances,” said Avraamov, the theremin – as the machine came to be called – could at last forge a connection between the Western tone system and the “grandiose art of the East.”³⁰⁰

The theremin was the world’s first electronic music-making machine, controlled by waving hands over radio antennae. Leon Theremin demonstrated it to Lenin in 1921, playing for him Glinka’s “Lark.” Impressed, Lenin invited him to tour Russia with the instrument, promoting the project of electrification.³⁰¹ Following Lenin’s lead, Soviet composers started to write music for the theremin.

Not only a sensation in the Soviet Union, Leon Theremin toured the world with his music machine.³⁰² Visiting the United States in 1925, he decided to stay, and registered a patent for his invention, “a method of and apparatus for … producing sounds in musical tones or notes of variable pitch, volume and timbre in realistic imitation of the human voice and various known musical instruments.”³⁰³ The commercial music giant, RCA, took out a license to manufacture. Robert Moog was later to adapt the theremin’s design, adding a keyboard and in 1964 creating the Moog Synthesizer. John Cage^§MS1.1.2a was an early adopter, and numerous “pop” musicians.

Theremin returned to the Soviet Union in 1938. Under the reign of suspicion during Stalin’s “Great Purge,” he was sent to Siberia. There his prodigious talents were put to work to create eavesdropping equipment, the most storied of which was in 1945 placed in the Great Seal of the United States in the US embassy building in Moscow, not to be discovered until 1952. Leon Sergeyevich Theremin was awarded the Stalin Prize in 1947, though not for his services to music.³⁰⁴

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²⁹⁷ Mel Gordon, 1992, “Songs from the Museum of the Future: Russian Sound Creation, 1910–30,” pp. 197–243 in Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-Garde, edited by D. Kahn and G. Whitehead, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 240–42; Delia Duong Ba Wendel, 2012, “The 1922 ‘Symphony of Sirens’ in Baku, Azerbaijan,” Journal of Urban Design 17(4):549–72.

²⁹⁸ Andrey Smirnov, 2013, Sound in Z: Experiments in Sound and Electronic Music in Early 20th Century Russia, London: Koenig Books, pp. 28–31.

²⁹⁹ Nikolai Izvolov, 1998, “The History of Drawn Sound in the USSR,” Animation Journal 54–59, p. 54.

³⁰⁰ Andrey Smirnov, 2013, Sound in Z: Experiments in Sound and Electronic Music in Early 20th Century Russia, London: Koenig Books, p. 43.

³⁰¹ Mel Gordon, 1992, “Songs from the Museum of the Future: Russian Sound Creation, 1910–30,” pp. 197–243 in Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-Garde, edited by D. Kahn and G. Whitehead, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 235; Andrey Smirnov, 2013, Sound in Z: Experiments in Sound and Electronic Music in Early 20th Century Russia, London: Koenig Books, p. 45.

³⁰² Albert Glinsky, 2000, Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage, Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

³⁰³ Leo Sergejewitsch Theremin, 1928, “Method of and Apparatus for the Generation of Sounds,” edited by U.S. Patent Office.

³⁰⁴ Andrey Smirnov, 2013, Sound in Z: Experiments in Sound and Electronic Music in Early 20th Century Russia, London: Koenig Books, pp. 55, 52.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 118–120. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Arseny Avraamov’s “Symphony of Factory Sirens” §AS1.4.2c