The Eccentric Soviet Composer Who Conducted a City: Arseny Avraamov and the Sound of a Future That Never Arrived

In Sep­tem­ber 1922, amid the fifth anniver­sary com­mem­o­ra­tions of the Octo­ber Rev­o­lu­tion in the cap­i­tal of Azer­bai­jan, a lit­tle-known Russ­ian music the­o­rist real­ized one of the most auda­cious son­ic projects of the ear­ly Sovi­et peri­od: The Sym­pho­ny of Sirens. His life is a sto­ry of rad­i­cal inven­tion, ide­o­log­i­cal fer­vor, and hear­ing the future of music long before any­one else could.

Staged in the oil port of Baku on Sep­tem­ber 23 (and tied to the broad­er Novem­ber anniver­sary cel­e­bra­tions), the event pro­posed a rad­i­cal premise. Rather than com­pos­ing for an orches­tra, Arse­ny Avraamov would orches­trate the city itself. Fac­to­ries, oil fields, ships, mil­i­tary units, air­craft, and massed cit­i­zens were to func­tion as ‘instru­ments’ in a sin­gle, coor­di­nat­ed com­po­si­tion.

Across Europe, avant-garde move­ments such as Futur­ism and Dada had already reject­ed inher­it­ed aes­thet­ic forms and embraced rup­ture, machin­ery, and the vio­lence of moder­ni­ty. A decade pri­or, Ital­ian com­pos­er Lui­gi Rus­so­lo had already called for the inclu­sion of indus­tri­al noise in music. Avraamov extend­ed this log­ic fur­ther. His aim was both aes­thet­ic and polit­i­cal: to dis­solve the bound­ary between music, indus­try, and rev­o­lu­tion­ary spec­ta­cle. Indus­tri­al­iza­tion was both per­former and per­for­mance. The work aligned aes­thet­ic rad­i­cal­ism with polit­i­cal sym­bol­ism, pre­sent­ing mech­a­nized sound as the audi­ble expres­sion of a new social­ist order.

Avraamov’s ini­tial con­cept envi­sioned a “sym­pho­ny of the city” dis­trib­uted across miles of urban space. Although the Baku per­for­mance was more con­tained than orig­i­nal­ly imag­ined and faced sev­er­al issues, it remains unprece­dent­ed in scale to this day. All major fac­to­ries and oil fields were instruct­ed to sound their sirens in coor­di­na­tion. The Caspi­an flotil­la con­tributed foghorns; loco­mo­tives added whis­tles; artillery and machine gun fire were incor­po­rat­ed as com­po­si­tion­al ele­ments; planes entered the sky; church bells, long asso­ci­at­ed with the old order, were fold­ed into the com­po­si­tion; and a mass choir of thou­sands par­tic­i­pat­ed vocal­ly, while onlook­ers were encour­aged to join in the singing.

Cen­tral to the event was an instru­ment Avraamov designed specif­i­cal­ly for the occa­sion: the Magis­tral. Con­struct­ed from fifty steam whis­tles mount­ed to pipes and oper­at­ed by twen­ty-five musi­cians, it was built to be con­trolled in a man­ner anal­o­gous to a key­board instru­ment. A sep­a­rate unit of twen­ty-five per­form­ers aboard the tor­pe­do boat Dos­toiniy han­dled a sep­a­rate set of whis­tles, expand­ing the tonal field across the har­bor. Mean­while, Avraamov served as a con­duc­tor, coor­di­nat­ing the entire per­for­mance from a tow­er over­look­ing the port, using col­ored sig­nal flags and field tele­phones to coor­di­nate the dis­persed sound sources.

The wave of the first flag sig­nalled a can­non to fire. The first shot sig­naled the fac­to­ries’ sirens; sub­se­quent shots acti­vat­ed dock and flotil­la sirens in sequence. A mil­i­tary brass band began march­ing toward the har­bor. Loco­mo­tive horns and machine-gun bursts entered the tex­ture, accom­pa­nied by the whis­tles of the Magis­tral. At one point, sea­planes lift­ed off as thou­sands of voic­es shout­ed “Hur­rah.”

The Inter­na­tionale emerged grad­u­al­ly, begin­ning as a faint cho­rus before expand­ing into a massed choral state­ment. Lat­er, the brass band intro­duced La Mar­seil­laise, while can­nons fired into the sea and machine guns into the sky. Church bells joined at the height of the crescen­do, col­laps­ing sacred and indus­tri­al sound into a sin­gle over­whelm­ing field. The com­po­si­tion con­clud­ed abrupt­ly after a final con­ver­gence of sirens, choir, brass, and the Magis­tral. Final­ly, a weighty silence hung over the city, its res­i­dents hav­ing just wit­nessed one of the most ambi­tious music per­for­mances in human his­to­ry.

This moment was the lit­er­al and metaphor­i­cal height of Avraamov’s career. every­thing he had worked on pri­or and imme­di­ate­ly fol­low­ing this moment was cen­tered around this moment. Much of what fol­lowed would ref­er­ence this moment, but none would match its scale or its clar­i­ty of intent. In Baku, Avraamov briefly achieved what he had the­o­rized: the total trans­for­ma­tion of music into a rev­o­lu­tion­ary instru­ment.

In life, Avraamov was known to peo­ple by many iden­ti­ties. Depend­ing on the moment and the wit­ness, he appeared as a cos­sack, mil­i­tant rev­o­lu­tion­ary, inven­tor, acousti­cian, com­pos­er, vagrant, pro­fes­sion­al horse rid­er, folk­lorist, jour­nal­ist, sailor, gym­nast, oil work­er, com­mis­sar, cir­cus clown, and more. He was insti­tu­tion­al­ly embed­ded in the young Sovi­et cul­tur­al appa­ra­tus: a found­ing par­tic­i­pant in Pro­letkult, affil­i­at­ed with a stag­ger­ing amount of cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tions through­out his life­time. He orga­nized research soci­eties, estab­lished a sound lab­o­ra­to­ry, and became one of the ear­li­est fig­ures in the USSR to defend a doc­tor­al dis­ser­ta­tion in a musi­cal-sci­en­tif­ic field. He encoun­tered fig­ures at the cen­ter of Sovi­et pow­er, includ­ing Lenin and lead­ing Moscow poet Yes­enin, yet spent equal time among remote moun­tain vil­lagers in Cen­tral Asia.

Even his name was unsta­ble. Across dif­fer­ent peri­ods he appeared as Arse­ny Avraamov, Revarsavr, Dmit­ry Don­skoy, Arslan Ibrahim-ogly Adamov, and Axel Smith, among oth­ers. His man­i­festos on the “music of the future” were signed with cryp­tic alias­es: Ars (short­ened form of Arse­ny, but also the latin word for “art”), Az, and occa­sion­al­ly Perdi­tur (latin for “destroy­er”). He sel­dom revealed his true name to any­one.

The con­tra­dic­tions extend­ed into his world­view. He reject­ed reli­gious author­i­ty and tra­di­tion­al sacred music, yet repeat­ed­ly invoked bib­li­cal lan­guage and imagery in his writ­ings, embraced names with scrip­tur­al over­tones, and was known to under­stand the Hebrew lan­guage, despite nev­er ref­er­enc­ing it in his extant work. Like his com­po­si­tions, Avraamov’s intel­lec­tu­al life moved between rev­o­lu­tion, rit­u­al, sci­ence, and mys­ti­cism, a fig­ure attempt­ing to redesign sound while still speak­ing in the sym­bol­ic vocab­u­lary of the past in the ser­vice of the mate­ri­al­ist future.

At the cen­ter of his think­ing was a rejec­tion of the West­ern well-tem­pered sys­tem. To Avraamov, the twelve-tone octave was not a neu­tral con­ven­tion but a tech­no­log­i­cal con­straint that shaped how peo­ple heard the world. He even­tu­al­ly pro­posed a 48-tone “ultra­chro­mat­ic” scale, the Welt­ton­sys­tem, intend­ed to rec­on­cile tem­pered tun­ing with the nat­ur­al over­tone spec­trum. Micro­tonal­i­ty, for him, was not dec­o­ra­tive com­plex­i­ty but a cor­rec­tive: a way to align musi­cal pitch with the physics of sound itself. This defined his life’s work, and his hos­til­i­ty to tra­di­tion­al tun­ing could bor­der on the the­atri­cal. In con­ver­sa­tion with Com­mis­sar Ana­toly Lunacharsky, he report­ed­ly sug­gest­ed burn­ing every piano in Rus­sia, argu­ing that the instru­ment embod­ied the ide­o­log­i­cal rigid­i­ty of tem­pered har­mo­ny.

Over his life­time, Avraamov was incred­i­bly pro­lif­ic and his exper­i­ments extend­ed well beyond large-scale urban per­for­mance. As ear­ly as 1916 he explored prim­i­tive forms of sound syn­the­sis and sam­pling. A decade lat­er, became a pio­neer of elec­tron­ic sound, devis­ing meth­ods for trans­fer­ring sound waves direct­ly onto film stock while work­ing on the sound­track of the first Sovi­et sound film, gen­er­at­ing audio from drawn shapes rather than record­ed vibra­tion, pre­ced­ing the first com­mer­cial­ly avail­able com­put­er music by decades. In oth­er projects he attempt­ed to soni­fy alge­bra­ic equa­tions and even chem­i­cal orbital struc­tures, treat­ing sci­en­tif­ic data as poten­tial musi­cal mate­r­i­al.

Accounts of Avraamov’s life are com­pli­cat­ed by his own ten­den­cy toward myth­mak­ing. In addi­tion to his many alias­es, he cul­ti­vat­ed an aura around him­self and occa­sion­al­ly dra­ma­tized details, yet the broad out­line of his biog­ra­phy is well doc­u­ment­ed across mul­ti­ple sources.

He was born Arse­ny Mikhailovich Kras­nokut­sky on the Maly Nesve­tay farm near Novocherkassk into a pros­per­ous and well-edu­cat­ed Don Cos­sack fam­i­ly. His father, Mikhail Kharitonovich Kras­nokut­sky, was a major gen­er­al while his moth­er taught lit­er­a­ture. Nat­u­ral­ly, Arseny’s broth­er Alek­san­dr became both an offi­cer and a poet. His fam­i­ly’s rep­u­ta­tion car­ried a dis­tinc­tion that car­ried pres­tige before the Rev­o­lu­tion and poten­tial dan­ger after­ward. Avraamov rarely used his birth name in adult­hood, aware that asso­ci­a­tion with a high-rank­ing impe­r­i­al offi­cer could prove fatal in the volatile polit­i­cal cli­mate he was grow­ing up in. Accord­ing to his daugh­ter, the sur­name “Avraamov” first arose sim­ply to dis­tin­guish him from numer­ous Kras­nokut­skys in his native vil­lage, though its Old Tes­ta­ment res­o­nance gave it sym­bol­ic weight, and it was often a name cho­sen by priests rather than peo­ple in sec­u­lar fields. For a Cos­sack officer’s son to adopt such a name was unusu­al, but for an artist seek­ing dis­tance from mil­i­tary lin­eage as well as a break with inher­it­ed roles, it made a cer­tain sense. Though he sel­dom spoke about his par­ents, it was nonethe­less his ances­try that secured entry into elite cadet edu­ca­tion.

Despite some musi­cal edu­ca­tion begin­ning at the age of five, his upbring­ing point­ed firm­ly toward a mil­i­tary career. As a teenag­er he began his stud­ies in mil­i­tary sci­ences at the Don Cadet Corps in Novocherkassk. Still, he found an oppor­tu­ni­ty to explore oth­er inter­ests. At the Corps he com­bined for­mal stud­ies with pri­vate musi­cal pur­suits, learn­ing instru­ments and attempt­ing ear­ly com­po­si­tions. Yet the insti­tu­tion­al envi­ron­ment suf­fo­cat­ed him, and he turned his atten­tion to anoth­er inter­est: pol­i­tics. At fif­teen he imag­ined shak­ing the foun­da­tions of the soci­ety he lived in any way he could.

As ear­ly as 1901, Avraamov orga­nized a secret cir­cle com­prised of like-mind­ed cadets who shared an inter­est in the Decem­brists, an ear­ly attempt at stag­ing a rev­o­lu­tion in Rus­sia, as well as and the ideals of the French Rev­o­lu­tion. The group also revered oth­er rev­o­lu­tion­ary fig­ures from his­to­ry such as the rebel Sten­ka Razin, a sub­ject Avraamov attempt­ed to write an ear­ly opera on based on a poem of anoth­er writer, Dmit­ry Navrot­sky. Mem­bers of the group were espe­cial­ly fans of the work of French writer Félix Gras, who pub­lished a his­tor­i­cal nov­el of the French Rev­o­lu­tion just five years before.

Despite his father’s rank, he nev­er intend­ed to serve as an offi­cer and aimed for some­thing beyond the bounds of soci­ety. “When we part­ed at the end of our course (in 1903), we made tra­di­tion­al vows to each oth­er: to give our lives for free­dom and the peo­ple, to revive the for­mer glo­ry of the Cos­sacks.” Avraamov recalled. Fol­low­ing his edu­ca­tion in Novocherkassk, his par­ents forced him to con­tin­ue his edu­ca­tion in St. Peters­burg at the Mikhailovsky Artillery School, which he protest­ed. “There, I pur­sued a tac­tic of sab­o­tag­ing my stud­ies… I excelled in high­er math­e­mat­ics, chem­istry, and artillery—but in all oth­er sub­jects, I stub­born­ly received “1s” and even “0s”… Of course, at that time, I dili­gent­ly con­tributed to lib­er­al youth mag­a­zines and played music, always wait­ing for the oppor­tu­ni­ty to “do” some­thing so dras­tic that I would be “kicked out” of the School myself.” Less than a year into his edu­ca­tion in St. Peters­burg, he inten­si­fied his cam­paign of aca­d­e­m­ic sab­o­tage and polit­i­cal dis­sent. After deliv­er­ing a speech con­demn­ing both the mil­i­tary edu­ca­tion sys­tem and the broad­er gov­ern­ment order, he was brand­ed a dan­ger­ous rev­o­lu­tion­ary, placed under police super­vi­sion, and effec­tive­ly end­ed his mil­i­tary career before it even began. This, along with his pur­pose­ly fail­ing grades, gave him the result he had hoped for. He was expelled and sent back home to his par­ents.

He was unde­terred, by autumn 1904 he was trav­el­ing between Russ­ian towns par­tic­i­pat­ing in social-demo­c­ra­t­ic polit­i­cal orga­niz­ing on behalf of var­i­ous stu­dent groups. Soon he moved to Ukraine and enrolled at the Kiev Poly­tech­nic Insti­tute, a place that car­ried a rep­u­ta­tion for being a hotbed of polit­i­cal dis­si­dence fol­low­ing a 1899 strike that result­ed in the expul­sion, arrest, and exile of 32 stu­dents as well as the for­ma­tion of an under­ground rev­o­lu­tion­ary com­mit­tee con­nect­ed to the city’s wider move­ments. Just six months into his edu­ca­tion there, attempts at rev­o­lu­tion once again took hold, this time all across the Russ­ian Empire.

On Jan­u­ary 15, 1905, Avraamov joined his fel­low stu­dents in seiz­ing the insti­tute build­ing using fire hoses and impro­vised chem­i­cal bombs. Fol­low­ing the events of Bloody Sun­day just a week lat­er, the stu­dents dug in, estab­lish­ing a com­mune some 150 to 200 stu­dents strong, lend­ing their sup­port to social­ist rev­o­lu­tion­ary and social demo­c­ra­t­ic par­ties that were cur­rent­ly par­tic­i­pat­ing in wider unrest across the empire. The com­mune served as a major cen­ter of rev­o­lu­tion­ary activ­i­ty in Kiev before it was sub­dued by a com­bined effort of police and mil­i­tary. Fol­low­ing the Octo­ber Man­i­festo issued by Emper­or Nicholas II in an attempt to restore order, the rev­o­lu­tion­ary activ­i­ty died down for the moment and Avraamov returned to Novocherkassk. Deter­mined to con­tin­ue the momen­tum, he deliv­ered a pro-com­mu­nist speech almost imme­di­ate­ly upon arrival and imme­di­ate­ly faced the threat of reprisal. He fled once again to Ros­tov, only to find volence engulfed the region there as well, a close friend had been killed in a pogrom, and he once again left before he could be tar­get­ed.

The months that fol­lowed were marked by con­stant move­ment and deep­en­ing under­ground involve­ment. On the road back toward Kiev he received a Mauser rifle from a sym­pa­thet­ic mil­i­tant, an Armen­ian ter­ror­ist, which he kept for years as his polit­i­cal activ­i­ties inten­si­fied and he came under fur­ther scruti­ny. Upon return­ing to the city, he found rel­a­tive safe­ty in the form of fal­si­fied doc­u­ments under the name Dmit­ry Ivanovich Don­skoy along with a “wife” to lend cre­dence to the iden­ti­ty, arranged by his allies in the Ukrain­ian rev­o­lu­tion­ary move­ment. The arrange­ment proved short-lived. On Novem­ber 18th, 1905, he was once again involved in an armed insur­rec­tion. In the process, author­i­ties searched his apart­ment and dis­cov­ered bomb-mak­ing mate­ri­als hid­den in a laun­dry bas­ket, forc­ing him to flee. He spent months evad­ing arrest before return­ing to Ros­tov in spring 1906, still only twen­ty, to find famil­iar polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tions he could have once count­ed on dis­man­tled and repres­sion ongo­ing.

At this point he attempt­ed a deci­sive rup­ture with his past. Aban­don­ing the Don­skoy iden­ti­ty and with­draw­ing from direct rev­o­lu­tion­ary activ­i­ty, he turned toward an unex­pect­ed field: music. Deter­mined to escape the mil­i­tary envi­ron­ment entire­ly, he left for Moscow in 1906 and, against his par­ents’ wish­es, enrolled in the Music and Dra­ma School of the Phil­har­mon­ic Soci­ety, study­ing the­o­ry and com­po­si­tion.

Up to this moment, music had appeared only inter­mit­tent­ly, as a child­hood les­son, a cadet’s pas­time, or a par­al­lel inter­est along­side pol­i­tics and agi­ta­tion. The abrupt­ness of the shift is strik­ing. As he lat­er wrote, with notable under­state­ment: “I decid­ed to pur­sue musi­cal stud­ies and the fol­low­ing year enrolled in the Moscow Phil­har­mon­ic School, major­ing in com­po­si­tion, where I stud­ied until 1912.” The deci­sion marked more than a career change. It redi­rect­ed a rev­o­lu­tion­ary tem­pera­ment toward the struc­tures of sound itself, a move that would even­tu­al­ly lead him to chal­lenge not only musi­cal tra­di­tion but the acoustic foun­da­tions of mod­ern life.

Com­pared with the tur­bu­lence of his ear­ly rev­o­lu­tion­ary years, the peri­od between rough­ly 1908 and 1912 brought a mea­sure of sta­bil­i­ty. Dur­ing these years Avraamov immersed him­self in for­mal musi­cal study in Moscow. From 1908 to 1911 he stud­ied music the­o­ry in the class­es of the Moscow Phil­har­mon­ic Soci­ety under Ilya Pro­topopov and Arse­ny Kore­shchenko, while also tak­ing pri­vate com­po­si­tion lessons with the com­pos­er Sergei Taneyev. By 1910 he had begun pub­lish­ing as a music crit­ic under the pseu­do­nym Ars, con­tribut­ing essays and com­men­tary to stu­dent newslet­ters as well as Moscow and St. Peters­burg peri­od­i­cals, includ­ing the week­ly Music, the jour­nals Musi­cal Con­tem­po­rary and Letopis (Chron­i­cle), as well as the Ger­man mag­a­zine Melos. In choos­ing music over a mil­i­tary career, he became the first mem­ber of his large Cos­sack fam­i­ly to pur­sue an artis­tic pro­fes­sion.

Deter­mined to sev­er ties with the mil­i­ta­rized envi­ron­ment in which he had been raised, he pur­sued rig­or­ous musi­cal lit­er­a­cy train­ing. Pro­topopov, a com­pos­er and teacher of the­o­ret­i­cal dis­ci­plines who wrote pri­mar­i­ly for Ortho­dox litur­gi­cal ser­vices, pro­vid­ed a foun­da­tion in the­o­ry and church music tra­di­tions. Kore­shchenko, a Moscow Con­ser­va­to­ry grad­u­ate and for­mer stu­dent of the Con­ser­va­to­ry’s Pro­fes­sor of Piano Pavel Pab­st, taught har­mo­ny and solfeg­gio and was known for operas such as Belshazzar’s Feast and The Angel of Death, the bal­let The Mag­ic Mir­ror, inci­den­tal music for Euripi­des’ tragedies, sym­phon­ic works, a lyric sym­pho­ny, the can­ta­ta Don Juan, and arrange­ments of Armen­ian and Geor­gian songs. Kore­shchenko had also been active as a crit­ic since his stu­dent years, writ­ing on musi­cal cul­ture and par­tic­u­lar­ly on the songs of the Don Cos­sacks, a con­nec­tion that like­ly res­onat­ed with Avraamov’s own back­ground.

Dur­ing this peri­od Avraamov com­posed ear­ly cham­ber works that adhered to clas­si­cal and tra­di­tion­al styles. Among them were Romance for Vio­lin and Piano, a lyri­cal piece for vio­lin with piano accom­pa­ni­ment, and Russ­ian Dance, a com­po­si­tion evok­ing folk rhythms through con­ven­tion­al orches­tra­tion. These works, like­ly direct­ly made under train­ing under Taneyev and Pro­topopov, show his ini­tial engage­ment with West­ern clas­si­cal tech­niques before his lat­er break toward rad­i­cal exper­i­men­ta­tion. His for­mal musi­cal edu­ca­tion last­ed only about six years, yet in that time he acquired pro­fi­cien­cy in vio­lin and piano per­for­mance, the­o­ry, and com­po­si­tion, a remark­ably rapid accom­plish­ment.

After com­plet­ing his stud­ies in 1912, Avraamov briefly stud­ied com­po­si­tion and orches­tra­tion with Rim­sky-Kor­sakov and returned to the Don region. There he worked as a music crit­ic and lec­tur­er, orga­niz­ing what he called “sym­phon­ic chapels” in pub­lic read­ing rooms and lead­ing musi­cal-ethno­graph­ic expe­di­tions to Don Cos­sack vil­lages. These expe­di­tions doc­u­ment­ed folk tra­di­tions but also func­tioned as vehi­cles for polit­i­cal agi­ta­tion and pro­pa­gan­da, as he lat­er acknowl­edged. His activ­i­ties drew atten­tion from author­i­ties; he was report­ed­ly press-ganged, cap­tured, and thrown into mil­i­tary ser­vice.

Before long, his past caught up with him. While serv­ing in a Cos­sack mil­i­tary divi­sion, his ear­ly life as a rev­o­lu­tion­ary resur­faced and he was arrest­ed and jailed for pro­pa­gan­da activ­i­ties. Remark­ably, he man­aged to escape impris­on­ment, fled north, and even­tu­al­ly reached Swe­den and lat­er Nor­way, now under the name Axel Smith.

What fol­lowed was one of the most improb­a­ble episodes of his life. In 1913 he joined a trav­el­ing cir­cus troupe. Pre­sent­ed as a Jig­it, or a tra­di­tion­al Cau­casian eques­tri­an rid­er, he per­formed gym­nas­tic rou­tines on hor­i­zon­tal bars, demon­strat­ed feats of Cos­sack trick rid­ing, and worked as a musi­cal clown. Fol­low­ing a short stint as a com­pos­er writ­ing for local plays and per­for­mances, he was lat­er hired on as a sailor in Nor­way, work­ing as a stok­er on steamships. After less than a year, now aboard the Swedish car­go ship Malm­land, he trav­eled through Hol­land and Ger­many and final­ly made his way back toward Rus­sia.

Arriv­ing back in the Russ­ian Empire by boat, Avraamov attempt­ed to cross the bor­der and was prompt­ly arrest­ed. He was released under an impe­r­i­al amnesty issued to mark the 300th anniver­sary of the Romanov dynasty, arrest­ed again soon after­ward, and ulti­mate­ly declared men­tal­ly unfit, a bureau­crat­ic maneu­ver that end­ed the imme­di­ate cycle of deten­tion. At this point music returned deci­sive­ly to the fore­ground. He left for Moscow and St. Peters­burg, resumed musi­cal research and inven­tion, and reen­tered the press as a crit­ic and the­o­rist.

These years, oscil­lat­ing between con­ser­va­to­ry train­ing, ethno­graph­ic field­work, polit­i­cal per­se­cu­tion, and itin­er­ant life under assumed names, reveal a fig­ure in con­stant motion. Even in this osten­si­bly “peace­ful” phase, Avraamov’s life unfold­ed as a sequence of abrupt trans­for­ma­tions, each widen­ing his under­stand­ing of sound, per­for­mance, and the social role of music.

Set­tling first in St. Peters­burg between 1914 and 1916 he grad­u­al­ly rejoined the intel­lec­tu­al and musi­cal cir­cles he had aban­doned years ear­li­er. He became a mem­ber of the edi­to­r­i­al boards of Muzykalny Sovre­men­nik (Musi­cal Con­tem­po­rary) and Letopis (Chron­i­cle), while in Moscow he worked for Muzy­ka mag­a­zine. In a series of arti­cles pub­lished dur­ing these years he elab­o­rat­ed his the­o­ry of micro­ton­al ultra­chro­mat­ic music and pro­posed new instru­ments capa­ble of per­form­ing it.

Ultra­chro­ma­tism refers to an expan­sion of the con­ven­tion­al twelve-tone equal-tem­pered sys­tem into fin­er divi­sions of pitch, align­ing it close­ly with micro­tonal­i­ty. Emerg­ing in the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry through fig­ures such as Ivan Wyschne­grad­sky, it reject­ed the lim­its of stan­dard chro­mati­cism by employ­ing micro-inter­vals — quar­ter-tones and small­er — to open new har­mon­ic and melod­ic ter­rain.

This idea was most pop­u­lar with the Futur­ists, a move­ment that sought to break deci­sive­ly with the cul­tur­al weight of the past and align art with the speed, machin­ery, and vio­lence of mod­ern life. Emerg­ing in Italy before the First World War, and tak­ing an espe­cial­ly strong hold in Rus­sia, Futur­ism reject­ed tra­di­tion, cel­e­brat­ed indus­try and urban ener­gy, and demand­ed forms of expres­sion capa­ble of match­ing a mech­a­nized age.

Rus­so­lo, a major influ­ence for many Futur­ists in Rus­sia, called for music to absorb the son­ic real­i­ty of the indus­tri­al age, treat­ing mechan­i­cal and urban sound as legit­i­mate musi­cal mate­r­i­al. Yet for many Futur­ists and post-Futur­ist exper­i­menters such as Avraamov, this was only a begin­ning: the goal was not mere­ly to incor­po­rate new sounds, but to redesign the very foun­da­tions of musi­cal struc­ture and lis­ten­ing itself.

Despite his errat­ic biog­ra­phy, Avraamov had already estab­lished a rep­u­ta­tion as a for­mi­da­ble crit­ic and the­o­rist. Com­pos­er Niko­lai Roslavets wrote a let­ter of intro­duc­tion to fel­low musi­cian and Futur­ist the­o­rist Niko­lai Kul­bin urg­ing him to assist “the skilled musi­cian and the most tal­ent­ed jour­nal­ist writ­ing main­ly con­cern­ing art.”

At the cen­ter of Avraamov’s work was now a sweep­ing ambi­tion: to reform the very struc­ture of music. Armed with for­mal train­ing, he redi­rect­ed his rev­o­lu­tion­ary zeal toward sound itself. He denounced the twelve-tone, octave-based equal tem­pera­ment sys­tem, which he believed had dis­tort­ed human hear­ing for cen­turies, and argued that the piano, as its most vis­i­ble embod­i­ment, sym­bol­ized a crip­pling con­straint on musi­cal per­cep­tion. In his arti­cles, he explic­it­ly reject­ed the well-tem­pered scale that had dom­i­nat­ed West­ern music since the era of Johann Sebas­t­ian Bach.

He began for­mu­lat­ing ultra­chro­mati­cism in the mid-1910s, argu­ing that tra­di­tion­al West­ern har­mo­ny imposed arti­fi­cial lim­its on sound. In 1915 his essay Ultra­chro­mati­cism or Omni­tonal­i­ty, pub­lished in Muzykalny Sovre­men­nik, he pro­posed a sys­tem that would tran­scend dia­ton­ic and chro­mat­ic struc­tures through microin­t­er­vals. As with many Futur­ists exper­i­ment­ing with sound, this was inspired by Alexan­der Scriabin’s expand­ed har­mon­ic lan­guage. Avraamov reject­ed fixed tem­pera­ments as obsta­cles to nat­ur­al acoustic evo­lu­tion.

In 1916, in The Com­ing Sci­ence of Music and the New Era in the His­to­ry of Music, he out­lined a math­e­mat­i­cal mod­el of musi­cal process­es, pre­dict­ed tech­niques akin to mod­ern sound syn­the­sis, and empha­sized spec­tral analy­sis over dis­crete pitch sys­tems. It begins with a resound­ing protest against lim­i­ta­tion: “Sci­ence gave me the legal right to cre­ate tim­bres near­ly a cen­tu­ry ago, hav­ing bro­ken down every son­ic col­or into its com­po­nent parts, pin­point­ing to me pre­cise­ly all the ele­ments from which I can syn­thet­i­cal­ly recre­ate any tim­bre I desire! Why should I lim­it myself to crude, imper­fect approx­i­ma­tions, con­tent myself with the “achieve­ments” of some unknown, per­haps semi-lit­er­ate, mas­ters who inspire not a shred of respect? For what? … Lis­ten care­ful­ly to the into­na­tions of human speech, com­pare its lim­it­less capac­i­ty for the evo­lu­tion of tim­bre with the most per­fect instru­ments we have in music — the cel­lo and the vio­lin: how poor their capa­bil­i­ties are, how mur­der­ous­ly monot­o­nous is all the “cham­ber music” of a cen­tu­ry and a half up to and includ­ing today! … “What if it were already pos­si­ble today to trans­form a sus­tained flute chord into a pow­er­ful brass tut­ti with­in ten sec­onds (com­plete­ly imper­cep­ti­ble to the audi­to­ry sense), and then, three sec­onds lat­er, trans­form it just as imper­cep­ti­bly into the calm and clear tim­bre of a clar­inet­to?”

To accom­plish this, he argued that by study­ing the phys­i­cal struc­ture of sound grooves on a phono­graph record and recon­struct­ing them syn­thet­i­cal­ly, “one can cre­ate syn­thet­i­cal­ly any, even the most fan­tas­tic sound by mak­ing a groove with a prop­er shape, struc­ture and depth”. He pro­posed ana­lyz­ing sound curves, direct­ing a res­onat­ing nee­dle, and con­struct­ing grooves of pre­cise shape and depth to gen­er­ate entire­ly new sounds, a con­cept antic­i­pat­ing sam­pling, resyn­the­sis, and mod­ern phys­i­cal-mod­el­ing syn­the­sis. The seed that would lat­er grow to become the syn­the­siz­er and lat­er dig­i­tal music pro­duc­tion as we know it today.

He wrote that sci­ence had already pro­vid­ed the means to decom­pose tim­bre into com­po­nent ele­ments and recom­bine them syn­thet­i­cal­ly, mak­ing it pos­si­ble to trans­form one instru­men­tal col­or into anoth­er imper­cep­ti­bly over time. He imag­ined devices employ­ing tun­ing forks, elec­tro­mag­net­ic cur­rents, and con­trolled over­tone acti­va­tion to morph a flute chord into brass sonor­i­ty and then into clar­inet tone. He com­pared the expres­sive rich­ness of human speech with the rel­a­tive monot­o­ny of orches­tral instru­ments and argued that com­posers should be able to sculpt tim­bre as flu­id­ly as melody.

Avraamov insist­ed that musi­cal knowl­edge, scales, rhythm, har­mo­ny, coun­ter­point, and instru­men­ta­tion, could be placed on a rig­or­ous sci­en­tif­ic foun­da­tion. Math­e­mat­ics, he argued, was essen­tial not only to pitch rela­tions but to tim­bre itself, requir­ing analy­sis of over­tone series and the phys­i­cal motion of strings, reeds, and air columns. He envi­sioned a future “sci­ence of music” that would sys­tem­atize these prin­ci­ples into a coher­ent doc­trine of cre­ative pos­si­bil­i­ties.

As with his con­tem­po­raries in Rosso­lo, Wyschne­grad­sky, and oth­ers, Avraamov argued that dis­cussing ultra­chro­mat­ic pos­si­bil­i­ties was mean­ing­less with­out new instru­ments capa­ble of real­iz­ing them. Exist­ing instru­ments, he believed, were fun­da­men­tal­ly unsuit­able. The new instru­ment, he argued, need­ed to meet three require­ments. First­ly, a sus­tained tone with real-time dynam­ic con­trol. Sec­ond­ly, a com­plete­ly free into­na­tion across a con­tin­u­ous pitch spec­trum, and last­ly, poly­phon­ic capa­bil­i­ty enabling a sin­gle per­former to pro­duce com­plex har­mon­ic struc­tures.

As an ini­tial solu­tion he devised the bowed poly­chord, an instru­ment capa­ble of pro­duc­ing an “unlim­it­ed vari­ety of har­mon­ic com­plex­es” with­in a con­tin­u­ous scale. A mechan­i­cal instru­ment whose bow wheel was oper­at­ed by foot, the bowed poly­chord an imprac­ti­cal but sym­bol­ic step towards a new musi­cal prac­tice. Giv­en his recent work as a cir­cus musi­cian and clown, the mechan­i­cal inge­nu­ity of the device may owe some­thing to per­for­mance spec­ta­cle as much as acousti­cal the­o­ry. Its absence of fixed pitch­es was intend­ed to retrain hear­ing dis­tort­ed by what he called the “Bach lega­cy,” ren­der ear­li­er reper­toire unre­pro­ducible, and stim­u­late new har­mon­ic forms. By now he was propos­ing divi­sion of the octave into 48 equal microin­t­er­vals.

“J.S. Bach, one of the great­est true Futur­ists of his cen­tu­ry, exem­pli­fies the sad fate of Futur­ism in gen­er­al: despite the unat­tain­able (even for us) dimen­sions of his genius, his work can be accept­ed today only with sig­nif­i­cant for­mal reser­va­tions… Hence the furi­ous van­dal­ism (and uncer­e­mo­ni­ous, at that) to which the great artist falls vic­tim before our very eyes. It is impos­si­ble to jus­ti­fy the van­dals, but it is not dif­fi­cult to under­stand them: no mat­ter how much the artist con­sid­ers him­self supe­ri­or to moder­ni­ty, he is still its flesh and blood, and future gen­er­a­tions, if they appre­ci­ate his genius, will at least out­grow it both emo­tion­al­ly and tech­ni­cal­ly: the bland after­taste of the “his­tor­i­cal” will be an eter­nal temp­ta­tion for them to rec­ti­fy their fad­ed palates with the hot pep­pers of mod­ernism.” he wrote.

Hav­ing described Bach as both a Futur­ist of his era and a crim­i­nal for delay­ing the log­i­cal evo­lu­tion of sound, his posi­tioned the musi­cal past in rev­o­lu­tion­ary terms: both foun­da­tion and obsta­cle, but his the­o­ries were not just noise that fell upon deaf ears. In the same year as his essay was pub­lished, he was already teach­ing Musi­cal Acoustics at the Pres­man Con­ser­va­to­ry in Ros­tov-on-Don. Dur­ing this peri­od he con­tin­ued writ­ing about arti­fi­cial tim­bre cre­ation, effec­tive­ly antic­i­pat­ing syn­the­siz­ers decades before their wide­spread appear­ance. Although he had found ear­ly insti­tu­tion­al suc­cess, his con­flicts with the law did not cease. Lat­er that same year, he had again faced trou­ble, this time in St. Peters­burg, report­ed­ly after being mis­tak­en for some­one else, though he ulti­mate­ly proved his iden­ti­ty and remained out of prison or com­pul­so­ry mil­i­tary ser­vice. As the First World War swept across Europe, Avraamov large­ly avoid­ed the con­flict. His broth­er Alek­san­dr, hav­ing still remained an offi­cer in the mil­i­tary, met a harsh­er fate, dying on the front­lines of the war just a year before Rus­si­a’s involve­ment end­ed.

The piv­otal year of 1917 in Russ­ian his­to­ry reshaped not only the coun­try’s polit­i­cal order but the intel­lec­tu­al and artis­tic tra­jec­to­ry of the young com­pos­er and the­o­rist Arse­ny Avraamov. In the months sur­round­ing the rev­o­lu­tion, he moved deci­sive­ly from spec­u­la­tive inquiry into music the­o­ry toward insti­tu­tion­al, tech­no­log­i­cal, and ide­o­log­i­cal action. His writ­ings from this peri­od called for a union between artis­tic prac­tice and sci­en­tif­ic analy­sis, argu­ing that music could no longer remain a mys­ti­cal or pure­ly intu­itive art. Instead, he urged col­lab­o­ra­tion among com­posers, engi­neers, math­e­mati­cians, and physi­cists to uncov­er the objec­tive laws under­ly­ing sound and musi­cal per­cep­tion.

This vision began to take insti­tu­tion­al form in the spring of 1917, when Avraamov, inven­tor Evge­ny Sholpo, and the young math­e­mati­cian and musi­col­o­gist Sergei Dian­in found­ed the Leonar­do da Vin­ci Soci­ety in St. Peters­burg. The group took inspi­ra­tion from Leonardo’s syn­the­sis of art and sci­ence, embrac­ing empir­i­cal inves­ti­ga­tion and tech­no­log­i­cal exper­i­men­ta­tion as tools for under­stand­ing the mechan­ics of artis­tic cre­ation. Their goal was noth­ing less than a par­a­digm shift in music the­o­ry and tech­nique ground­ed in inter­dis­ci­pli­nary research.

Cen­tral to the Society’s research was the idea of “non-per­form­ing music”, sound pro­duced through tech­no­log­i­cal means rather than tra­di­tion­al instru­men­tal per­for­mance. This con­cept, build­ing on Avraamov’s essay from the year before, imag­ined what mem­bers described as an “alchem­i­cal” trans­for­ma­tion of music: the gen­er­a­tion of sound lib­er­at­ed from tra­di­tion­al nota­tion, the phys­i­cal lim­i­ta­tions of per­form­ers and instru­ments, and antic­i­pat­ing a mech­a­nized and sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly con­trolled son­ic future. From these inves­ti­ga­tions emerged the ear­ly foun­da­tions of what would become drawn sound, a tech­nique in which sound waves could be direct­ly inscribed onto film and con­vert­ed into audio dur­ing play­back. The con­cep­tu­al roots of this idea can be traced to the futur­ist spec­u­la­tions of Velimir Khleb­nikov, whose vision­ary writ­ings imag­ined new tech­no­log­i­cal lan­guages and sen­so­ry sys­tems. This would be an idea Avraamov would return to and con­tin­ue to devel­op in lat­er exper­i­ments with syn­thet­ic and graph­ic sound.

The Octo­ber Rev­o­lu­tion accel­er­at­ed Avraamov’s ambi­tions for change. Sweep­ing reforms desta­bi­lized social hier­ar­chies and cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions, pro­duc­ing an atmos­phere in which rad­i­cal artis­tic ideas could be pur­sued with unprece­dent­ed urgency. In lit­er­a­ture, this spir­it man­i­fest­ed in the explo­sive futur­ist verse of Vladimir Mayakovsky; in visu­al art, in Kaz­imir Malevich’s Black Square and the Supre­ma­tist rejec­tion of rep­re­sen­ta­tion; In film this was best reflect­ed in the provoca­tive cin­e­matog­ra­phy of Dzi­ga Ver­tov and Sergei Eisen­stein. For what con­cerned Avraamov, the change in music came in the form of pro­pos­als to abol­ish bour­geois con­cert tra­di­tions alto­geth­er and bring music out of the elit­ist music halls and into the streets.

Avraamov embraced the rev­o­lu­tion not as an observ­er but as a par­tic­i­pant. He was present at Smol­ny dur­ing the rev­o­lu­tion­ary peri­od and soon col­lab­o­rat­ed with Ana­toly Lunacharsky, the new­ly appoint­ed People’s Com­mis­sar of Edu­ca­tion. Adopt­ing the pseu­do­nym “Rev-Ars-Avr” (“Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Arse­ny Avraamov”), he became deeply involved in build­ing a new Sovi­et musi­cal cul­ture aligned with pro­le­tar­i­an ideals. Lunacharsky, a trans­la­tor, pub­li­cist, art his­to­ri­an, crit­ic, and writer, saw the poten­tial in Avraamov and allowed him a degree of influ­ence in the cul­tur­al affairs of the new Sovi­et state.

From 1917 to 1918, Avraamov assumed key posi­tions with­in emerg­ing Sovi­et cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions. He served as Gov­ern­men­tal Com­mis­sar of Arts with­in Narkom­pros (the People’s Com­mis­sari­at for Edu­ca­tion) and head­ed the Musi­cal Depart­ment of Pro­letkult (Pro­le­tar­i­an Cul­ture) in Pet­ro­grad, an orga­ni­za­tion ded­i­cat­ed to cul­ti­vat­ing a dis­tinct­ly pro­le­tar­i­an cul­ture inde­pen­dent of bour­geois tra­di­tions. In these roles, he advo­cat­ed for mass par­tic­i­pa­tion, indus­tri­al sound sources, and new col­lec­tive forms of musi­cal expres­sion intend­ed for work­ers rather than elite audi­ences.

In 1918, under Lunacharsky’s direc­tion, Avraamov also worked with­in the music sec­tor of Narkom­pros, includ­ing serv­ing as Head of the Arts Depart­ment of Naro­braz (The Com­mit­tee for Edu­ca­tion) in Kazan, where he over­saw musi­cal cul­ture in Tatarstan. His respon­si­bil­i­ties includ­ed reor­ga­niz­ing cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions, pro­mot­ing new edu­ca­tion­al mod­els, and encour­ag­ing musi­cal forms that reflect­ed rev­o­lu­tion­ary ide­ol­o­gy and region­al diver­si­ty, all while teach­ing eth­nol­o­gy at the con­ser­va­to­ry and serv­ing as pro­fes­sor of the­o­ret­i­cal dis­ci­plines, although this role proved short-lived, report­ed­ly end­ing after a falling-out with Ana­toly Lunacharsky as the Civ­il War soon over­took insti­tu­tion­al con­cerns. Avraamov con­tin­ued his work with­in the army’s polit­i­cal depart­ments while direct­ing region­al arts divi­sions in sev­er­al cities con­sid­ered strate­gi­cal­ly and cul­tur­al­ly impor­tant: Nizh­ny Nov­gorod, Kazan, Sara­tov, and Ros­tov. In the lat­ter city, he found time to serve as a pro­fes­sor at the Con­ser­va­to­ry.

That same year, he began serv­ing as a cul­tur­al cura­tor with­in the Polit­i­cal Depart­ment of the Red Army, where he orga­nized edu­ca­tion­al and agi­ta­tion­al ini­tia­tives intend­ed to strength­en Bol­she­vik morale among sol­diers and cul­ti­vate ide­o­log­i­cal uni­ty. These efforts aligned close­ly with broad­er Bol­she­vik strate­gies of mass agi­ta­tion: cul­ture was to func­tion not as elite orna­ment but as a tool for forg­ing class con­scious­ness.

Con­cur­rent­ly, he edit­ed the agit­prop army news­pa­per On Guard of the Rev­o­lu­tion, posi­tion­ing print media along­side music edu­ca­tion as instru­ments of ide­o­log­i­cal dis­sem­i­na­tion. His writ­ings and crit­i­cism also appeared in region­al news­pa­pers includ­ing Don­skaya Zhizn, Utro Yuga, Don­skiye Oblast­nye Vedo­mosti, and Ros­tovskaya Rech, extend­ing his influ­ence into the civic press.

For Avraamov, how­ev­er, polit­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion was only the begin­ning. He con­tin­ued to envi­sion a trans­for­ma­tion just as pro­found in the realm of sound: the dis­man­tling of inher­it­ed tonal sys­tems, the mech­a­niza­tion of sound pro­duc­tion, and the cre­ation of a sci­en­tif­ic, tech­no­log­i­cal­ly medi­at­ed music suit­ed to an indus­tri­al soci­ety. The rev­o­lu­tion­ary upheaval of 1917 pro­vid­ed both the ide­o­log­i­cal jus­ti­fi­ca­tion and the insti­tu­tion­al frame­work through which he could begin con­struct­ing that future.

At the cen­ter of Avraamov’s reform pro­gram was the cre­ation of a uni­ver­sal musi­cal sys­tem ground­ed in micro­tonal­i­ty, par­tic­u­lar­ly a quar­ter-tone tech­nique. He regard­ed the twelve-tone equal tem­pera­ment sys­tem not mere­ly as inad­e­quate but as active­ly harm­ful, claim­ing it had dulled audi­to­ry per­cep­tion and con­strained musi­cal thought. “Freed from the mold of tem­pera­ment” he wrote, “human hear­ing will achieve such advances in the sub­tle­ty of melod­ic per­cep­tion that we can bare­ly dream of today. Folk song, whose inter­vals our ‘cul­tured’ hear­ing still can­not accu­rate­ly dis­cern, serves as a guar­an­tee of the non-utopi­an nature of our dreams. Is our ear real­ly more coarse­ly con­struct­ed? Is the sys­tem­at­ic dis­tor­tion of hear­ing by Bach’s lega­cy the cause? One way or anoth­er, the near future will tell… for we live ‘on the eve.’ ” Folk songs, accord­ing to Avraamov’s expe­ri­ence, were an art whose inter­vals trained musi­cians often failed to per­ceive accu­rate­ly, prov­ing to him that such refine­ment was not utopi­an but immense­ly use­ful towards the devel­op­ment of a tru­ly uni­ver­sal the­o­ry of music.

Avraamov sought to replace the fixed chro­mat­ic scale with what he described as a con­tin­u­ous scale. Instead of twelve even­ly spaced pitch­es with­in an octave, mod­ern acoustics revealed an unbro­ken son­ic con­tin­u­um gov­erned by math­e­mat­i­cal rela­tion­ships. Using this frame­work, he cal­cu­lat­ed sys­tems of quar­ter-tones, eighth-tones, and fin­er sub­di­vi­sions, argu­ing that any point with­in the con­tin­u­um could be coor­di­nat­ed into har­mo­ny. He com­pared the shift to a prim­i­tive count­ing sys­tem sud­den­ly dis­cov­er­ing math­e­mat­i­cal analy­sis: the dis­con­tin­u­ous series of dis­crete notes would give way to a dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed con­tin­u­um capa­ble of gen­er­at­ing entire­ly new melod­ic modes and har­mon­ic rela­tion­ships.

With­in this con­tin­u­ous spec­trum, Avraamov believed human­i­ty could final­ly notate and ana­lyze the modal sys­tems embed­ded in folk tra­di­tions across Eura­sia. He was con­vinced that ultra­chro­mat­ic the­o­ry would allow pre­vi­ous­ly elu­sive inter­val­lic sub­tleties to be doc­u­ment­ed and pre­served. To test his ideas, he again under­took folk­lore expe­di­tions through­out the Ros­tov region and trav­eled across Kaza­khstan, Dages­tan, and oth­er parts of the Cau­ca­sus and Cen­tral Asia, col­lect­ing melodies that defied West­ern tonal cat­e­go­riza­tion. He saw these tra­di­tions not as ethno­graph­ic curiosi­ties but as evi­dence of alter­na­tive tonal log­ics sup­pressed by Euro­pean stan­dard­iza­tion.

Among ear­ly pio­neers of micro­tonal­i­ty, Avraamov was dis­tinc­tive in pur­su­ing the era­sure of bound­aries between pitch-based har­mo­ny and the spec­tral fab­ric of sound itself. He imag­ined ultra­chro­mat­ic instru­ments not sim­ply as tools for access­ing new scales but as mech­a­nisms capa­ble of addi­tive syn­the­sis, con­struct­ing sound from its com­po­nent over­tones and there­by align­ing musi­cal prac­tice with acoustic sci­ence.

Avraamov under­stood that the­o­ret­i­cal argu­ments alone would not suf­fice; he sought val­i­da­tion through field research, ped­a­gogy, and prac­ti­cal experimentation.After one year since the rev­o­lu­tion, a new idea had formed in his mind, one that would grow to become his defin­ing work, and bring his son­ic utopi­anism into the pub­lic sphere on an unprece­dent­ed scale.

Writer Ana­toly Marien­gof, in his mem­oirs My Cen­tu­ry, My Friends and Girl­friends, recalled that on the first anniver­sary of the Octo­ber Rev­o­lu­tion, Avraamov pro­posed con­duct­ing a Hero­ic Sym­pho­ny per­formed not by an orches­tra but by the whis­tles of fac­to­ries, plants, and loco­mo­tives across Moscow. He pledged to retune and coor­di­nate these indus­tri­al instru­ments with autho­riza­tion from the Coun­cil of People’s Com­mis­sars, and he sub­mit­ted the idea to Lunacharsky. “That would be mag­nif­i­cent!” said the Peo­ple’s Com­mis­sar of Edu­ca­tion. “And it would be per­fect­ly in keep­ing with this great occa­sion… I will imme­di­ate­ly report your pro­pos­al to Com­rade Lenin… But, I con­fess,” Lunacharsky added hes­i­tant­ly (he report­ed­ly had a dif­fi­cult time say­ing no to Avraamov), “I con­fess, I’m not entire­ly sure Com­rade Lenin will agree to your bril­liant project. Vladimir Ilyich, you see, loves the vio­lin and the piano…”

In response, Avraamov derid­ed the piano as an “inter­na­tion­al bal­alai­ka,” an instru­ment designed to rein­force the con­straints of equal tem­pera­ment. His dis­like of the piano was pos­si­bly even fur­ther inten­si­fied by this response. Some years lat­er, he sub­mit­ted a new pro­pos­al to Lunacharsky sug­gest­ing the burn­ing of all pianos in Rus­sia, view­ing them as sym­bols of a tonal regime that had dis­tort­ed human hear­ing for cen­turies. The pro­pos­al, clear­ly, was not signed. He like­wise argued that tra­di­tion­al orches­tral instru­ments and reper­toire should be dis­card­ed to make way for new­ly invent­ed instru­ments in addi­tion to a ultra­chro­mat­ic musi­cal lan­guage. These incen­di­ary pro­pos­als ignit­ed fierce debates in the music press at the time.

Although such rad­i­cal mea­sures were nev­er imple­ment­ed, and could hard­ly have erased cen­turies of musi­cal her­itage, the under­ly­ing ideas endured. Quar­ter-tone and micro­ton­al approach­es lat­er re-emerged in the works of post-war com­posers such as Alfred Schnit­tke, Eduard Artemiev, Edi­son Denisov, and Sofia Gubaiduli­na, con­firm­ing that the ques­tions Avraamov posed about tun­ing, per­cep­tion, and the struc­ture of sound would remain cen­tral to mod­ern music. In Avraamov’s world­view, ultra­chro­mat­ic the­o­ry was not an eso­teric tech­ni­cal exer­cise but a path­way toward a new audi­to­ry con­scious­ness, one aligned with social­ist inter­na­tion­al­ism, sci­ence, glob­al musi­cal diver­si­ty, and the son­ic real­i­ties of mod­ern life. How­ev­er, in the moment, the idea of a sym­pho­ny on a grand scale using ele­ments of the city itself took on a new prece­dence for Avraamov.

It was dur­ing these Civ­il War years that he began test­ing ideas that would cul­mi­nate in his most famous work. In 1919, his time in Nizh­ny Nov­gorod includ­ed what he lat­er described as a “rehearsal” for a future large-scale indus­tri­al com­po­si­tion, an ear­ly pre­cur­sor to the Sym­pho­ny of Sirens, though the work was not real­ized in its entire­ty. Through­out this peri­od, Avraamov treat­ed cul­tur­al pro­duc­tion as a form of polit­i­cal infra­struc­ture. Lec­tures, pub­li­ca­tions, and musi­cal orga­ni­za­tion were designed to reach work­ers and sol­diers direct­ly, bypass­ing the bour­geois con­cert hall in favor of acces­si­ble, col­lec­tive forms of par­tic­i­pa­tion. This project would be no dif­fer­ent. Though doc­u­men­ta­tion from this per­for­mance does not seem to have sur­vived, it is known that the expe­ri­ence gave him the orga­ni­za­tion­al expe­ri­ence need­ed to attempt the work again.

As the years went on, Avraamov moved fur­ther and fur­ther away from the cen­ter of Sovi­et pow­er, most­ly in ser­vice of his inter­est in dis­cov­er­ing folk music tra­di­tions and due to his strained rela­tions with Sovi­et author­i­ties in the midst of the civ­il war. In 1921 Avraamov was appoint­ed head of the arts depart­ment in Dages­tan, a post­ing that quick­ly exposed the lim­its of rev­o­lu­tion­ary cul­tur­al pol­i­cy when it col­lid­ed with deeply root­ed local tra­di­tions. He began with a cam­paign con­sis­tent with his broad­er cru­sade against the musi­cal past, a pro­gram involv­ing the con­fis­ca­tion and planned destruc­tion of pianos from wealthy and respect­ed Dages­tani house­holds, instru­ments he regard­ed as sym­bols of bour­geois cul­ture and the despised tem­pered sys­tem. The move pro­voked imme­di­ate resent­ment. Resis­tance from the com­mu­ni­ty forced him to aban­don direct inter­ven­tion and redi­rect his efforts toward folk­lore expe­di­tions in Dages­tani vil­lages, where he hoped to doc­u­ment indige­nous musi­cal prac­tices and, in keep­ing with his the­o­ries, uncov­er evi­dence of alter­na­tive tonal sys­tems.

Even this approach met hos­til­i­ty. Vil­lagers viewed the out­sider, a polit­i­cal func­tionary and self-pro­claimed music rev­o­lu­tion­ary, with sus­pi­cion. Avraamov respond­ed with the­atri­cal inge­nu­ity. He sought the assis­tance of a local mul­lah, who issued him a doc­u­ment with the fol­low­ing text: “The bear­er of this doc­u­ment, Arslan Ibrahim-ogly Adamov, was born a Mus­lim. How­ev­er, he lived and stud­ied in Rus­sia for many years, and there­fore has a poor mem­o­ry of the lan­guage and cus­toms. He should not be held account­able if he says or does some­thing incor­rect­ly; on the con­trary, he should be helped in every­thing and taught if he does­n’t know any­thing…”

Rein­vent­ed once again, Avraamov shaved his head, grew a mus­tache, dressed in nation­al cos­tume, and trav­eled under his adopt­ed iden­ti­ty. The trans­for­ma­tion proved remark­ably effec­tive. Vil­lagers wel­comed him into their homes, seat­ed him in places of hon­or, and offered food and hos­pi­tal­i­ty; musi­cians per­formed for him, allow­ing him to observe and record local tra­di­tions at close range. Behind the con­vivial facade, how­ev­er, he con­tin­ued polit­i­cal work: he cam­paigned for the com­mu­nists, sched­uled par­ty meet­ings to coin­cide with Fri­day prayers in order to divert atten­dance from the mosque, and, in an effort to main­tain cred­i­bil­i­ty, even cov­ered the walls of the local club with quo­ta­tions from the Qur’an.

The strat­e­gy even­tu­al­ly back­fired. Reports of his con­tra­dic­to­ry behav­ior reached author­i­ties in Makhachkala, prompt­ing a com­mis­sion of par­ty offi­cials to inves­ti­gate. He was accused of duplic­i­ty, stripped of his par­ty card, and report­ed­ly threat­ened with exe­cu­tion. As in sev­er­al ear­li­er episodes of his life, Avraamov avoid­ed the worst out­come only by flee­ing, leav­ing behind anoth­er region where his per­son­al the­atrics had col­lid­ed with volatile results.

Chased out of Dages­tan, he found him­self in Azer­bai­jan, liv­ing under his lat­est assumed iden­ti­ty and work­ing as a labor­er in an oil field. Even in this pre­car­i­ous exile, his tech­ni­cal inge­nu­ity dis­tin­guished him. He pro­posed prac­ti­cal improve­ments that sig­nif­i­cant­ly stream­lined work­flow at the enter­prise, draw­ing the atten­tion of super­vi­sors. Rec­og­nized for both his intel­li­gence and orga­ni­za­tion­al abil­i­ty, he was trans­ferred to Baku to work in his spe­cial­ty with­in the arts depart­ment. It was in this rapid­ly indus­tri­al­iz­ing Caspi­an port city that the Sym­pho­ny of Sirens would first be real­ized.

Now in its fifth year, the anniver­sary of the Octo­ber Rev­o­lu­tion was marked on Novem­ber 7, 1922, by Avraamov’s stag­ing of his most famous work, the Sym­pho­ny of Sirens, in the port town of Baku. For this under­tak­ing, Avraamov worked with choirs num­ber­ing in the thou­sands; foghorns from the entire Caspi­an flotil­la; two artillery bat­ter­ies; full infantry reg­i­ments; hydroplanes; twen­ty-five steam loco­mo­tives and whis­tles; and every fac­to­ry siren in the city. He also devised a portable instru­ment specif­i­cal­ly for the event, a machine which he called the Magis­tral: an ensem­ble of twen­ty to twen­ty-five tuned steam whis­tles cal­i­brat­ed to the pitch­es of “The Inter­na­tionale,” “La Mar­seil­laise,” and “Var­sha­vian­ka.”

Avraamov did not con­ceive the work as a spec­ta­cle for pas­sive spec­ta­tors. Instead, he intend­ed the active par­tic­i­pa­tion of the pop­u­lace, whose excla­ma­tions and singing would merge into the son­ic mass, uni­fied by a shared rev­o­lu­tion­ary will. His reflec­tions on the poten­tial of music, and on the envi­ron­men­tal sounds that shape col­lec­tive con­scious­ness, help clar­i­fy the ulti­mate mean­ing of the Sym­pho­ny of Sirens:

“Col­lec­tive work, from farm­ing to the mil­i­tary, is incon­ceiv­able with­out songs and music. One may even think that the high degree of orga­ni­za­tion in fac­to­ry work under cap­i­tal­ism might have end­ed up cre­at­ing a respectable form of music orga­ni­za­tion. How­ev­er, we had to arrive at the Octo­ber Rev­o­lu­tion to achieve the con­cept of the Sym­pho­ny of Sirens. The Cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem gives rise to anar­chic ten­den­cies. Its fear of see­ing work­ers march­ing in uni­ty pre­vents its music being devel­oped in free­dom. Every morn­ing, a chaot­ic indus­tri­al roar gags the peo­ple. … But then the rev­o­lu­tion arrived. Sud­den­ly, in the evening — an unfor­get­table evening — a Red Peters­burg was filled with many thou­sands of sounds: sirens, whis­tles and alarms. In response, thou­sands of army lor­ries crossed the city loaded with sol­diers fir­ing their guns in the air. … At that extra­or­di­nary moment, the hap­py chaos should have had the pos­si­bil­i­ty of being redi­rect­ed by a sin­gle pow­er able to replace the songs of alarms with the vic­to­ri­ous anthem of The Inter­na­tionale. The Great Octo­ber Rev­o­lu­tion! — once again, sirens and work in the can­non whole of Rus­sia with­out a sin­gle voice uni­fy­ing their orga­ni­za­tion.”

The com­pos­er him­self lat­er set down detailed instruc­tions for the prop­er real­iza­tion of the “Sym­pho­ny of Horns.” These guide­lines were pub­lished after the sec­ond stag­ing, a year lat­er, in “Gorn,” the jour­nal of the All-Russ­ian Pro­letkult. At the cen­ter of this uncon­ven­tion­al orches­tra stood the horn main­line, what Avraamov regard­ed as the essen­tial melod­ic engine of the work. He insist­ed that the most effec­tive con­fig­u­ra­tion was mobile, specif­i­cal­ly in the form of a loco­mo­tive car. The main­line con­sist­ed of sev­er­al dozen cylin­dri­cal horns mount­ed along a sin­gle steam pipe. Pitch was adjust­ed by short­en­ing the air col­umn, and the total num­ber of tones cor­re­spond­ed to the melody of the Inter­na­tionale, which Avraamov quot­ed direct­ly; addi­tion­al pitch­es were added for har­mon­ic sup­port. At the same time, he left open the pos­si­bil­i­ty that an expand­ed set of tones could allow per­form­ers a degree of cre­ative lat­i­tude. In the 1923 arti­cle pub­lished in Gorn, Avraamov described the device in prac­ti­cal, almost engi­neer­ing terms:

“The set­up of the Magis­tral is very sim­ple: 20 to 50 horns (usu­al­ly cylin­dri­cal, as they are eas­i­er to adjust) are screwed onto a com­mon pipe. The pipe is shaped accord­ing to the instal­la­tion loca­tion: straight, semi­cir­cu­lar, two- or three-legged—it makes no dif­fer­ence from a sound stand­point. It’s impor­tant that the steam sup­ply be cen­tered, and that drain cocks or valves be installed at the ends to drain water before playing—otherwise, water will be eject­ed through the horns’ valves, and the rhyth­mic pre­ci­sion of the per­for­mance will be lost.”

This steam-whis­tle organ, known as the Magis­tral, func­tioned as a mobile instru­ment through which Avraamov pro­posed to per­form the sym­pho­ny, incor­po­rat­ing loco­mo­tive whis­tles spe­cial­ly tuned accord­ing to his ultra­chro­mat­ic pitch con­cepts. An elec­tri­fied musi­cal key­board con­trolled elec­tric valves that acti­vat­ed the whis­tles; this con­trol inter­face was to be mount­ed in the loco­mo­tive driver’s cab­in. In the ear­ly 1920s, fac­to­ry sirens, ubiq­ui­tous and unmis­tak­ably mod­ern, were con­sid­ered a rev­o­lu­tion­ary replace­ment for “bour­geois” church bells and became cen­tral com­po­nents in the con­struc­tion of new sound machines.

Sirens were con­ceived as a dis­tinct instru­men­tal group with­in the work. Their pitch­es could sound inde­pen­dent­ly, clus­ter into chords, or glide in par­al­lel and con­trary motion, pro­duc­ing shift­ing har­mon­ic mass­es rather than fixed tonal rela­tion­ships. Their behav­ior con­tained an ele­ment of con­tin­gency, depen­dent on per­former skill and tim­ing. With suf­fi­cient­ly adept oper­a­tors, he sug­gest­ed, sirens might even­tu­al­ly assume har­mon­ic or melod­ic roles, but this remained a spec­u­la­tive fron­tier: human­i­ty was only begin­ning to grasp the prin­ci­ples gov­ern­ing their “spe­cif­ic har­mo­ny and melody.”

From Avraamov’s own descrip­tions, a clear hier­ar­chy of sound sources emerges. The prin­ci­pal instru­ments were the Magis­tral and the indi­vid­ual whis­tles of fac­to­ries, naval ves­sels, and oth­er loco­mo­tives. The Magis­tral, togeth­er with mass choir and brass band, car­ried the melod­ic mate­r­i­al. Artillery bat­ter­ies and machine guns sup­plied rhythm. Bells were includ­ed in this lat­ter cat­e­go­ry: “Bell tolling—alarm, funer­al, and jubilant—is used in the appro­pri­ate episodes, with­out regard for the har­mon­ic con­cept,” Avraamov wrote.

Dis­trib­uted groups of sta­tion­ary whis­tles from oil fields, fac­to­ries, docks, depots, and steam plants were tuned into “com­pact har­monies” and deployed to cre­ate vast spa­tial sound images. Can­non salvos sig­naled their entrances, and the tim­ing of these sig­nals had to account for acoustic dis­tance: the sound of the sig­nal gun and the response of the whis­tles need­ed to align at the cel­e­bra­tion square. Dur­ing the per­for­mance of the Inter­na­tionale, dis­tant whis­tle groups remained silent because the can­non was repur­posed as a bass drum. Machine-gun fire sim­u­lat­ed drum rolls and exe­cut­ed com­plex rhyth­mic fig­ures, while blank vol­leys and rapid bursts pro­vid­ed dra­mat­ic son­ic punc­tu­a­tion. Yet Avraamov did not total­ly aban­don tra­di­tion­al expres­sive means: in addi­tion to bells, choral singing remained inte­gral to the work’s massed son­ic tex­ture.

Auto­mo­biles were also incor­po­rat­ed into the son­ic plan. If enough vehi­cles with tun­able horns were avail­able, the com­pos­er envi­sioned form­ing an inde­pen­dent tim­bre-har­mon­ic group from them. More often, how­ev­er, cars were treat­ed as sources of noise tex­ture, along­side the low pass­es of sea­planes and oth­er air­craft, whose engines con­tributed broad, dron­ing lay­ers to the urban sound field, in his words to “gen­er­ate stun­ning effects that cre­ate a stun­ning emo­tion­al impact.” Yet these ele­ments were val­ued as much for their vis­cer­al force as for any musi­cal pre­ci­sion.

The pres­ence of heavy weapon­ry, star­tling to lat­er observers, had prac­ti­cal log­ic. “Because of the large area of dis­tri­b­u­tion of the fac­to­ry sirens,” he explained in the arti­cle, “it is nec­es­sary to have at least one heavy gun for sig­nalling pur­pos­es with the capac­i­ty to shoot live car­tridges. (Shrap­nel is not suit­able for this – burst­ing off in the air is most dan­ger­ous and gives a sec­ond explo­sion sound, which can con­fuse the per­form­ers.)”. Field artillery dou­bled as a “large drum,” and expe­ri­enced machine gun­ners, shoot­ing live belt-fed ammu­ni­tion, “not only sim­u­late a drum­beat, but also beat out com­plex rhyth­mic fig­ures. A gun shoot­ing with blank car­tridges as well as gun­fire with fre­quent packs are good for vivid scene sounds.””

Coor­di­na­tion of such a dis­persed orches­tra required a pur­pose-built con­duct­ing tow­er erect­ed at an ele­vat­ed site near the per­for­mance cen­ter. Avraamov spec­i­fied that “the sim­plest device is a pair of tele­graph poles joined at the ends with a ‘Swedish mast.’ At the top is a plat­form with a bar­ri­er,” with sock­ets for sig­nal poles or a rope mech­a­nism for hoist­ing flags. The struc­ture had to pro­vide a clear line of sight under open sky, while marine-style sig­nal flags, cho­sen for max­i­mum vis­i­bil­i­ty, car­ried visu­al cues to the fleet, loco­mo­tives, artillery bat­ter­ies, machine-gun crews, and motor vehi­cles posi­tioned so they could see the sig­nals direct­ly. A field tele­phone sta­tion linked the tow­er to the bat­tery, cel­e­bra­tion area, fir­ing range, and key per­former groups; a pow­er­ful mega­phone and direct human relays pro­vid­ed redun­dan­cy. Con­duct­ing duties were divid­ed phys­i­cal­ly: “Con­duct­ing (met­ric) is done with the right hand; artillery and oth­er sig­nals are fired with the left,” and the bat­ter­ies were placed clos­er to the cel­e­bra­tion zone than the tow­er to pre­vent delays in fir­ing.

From this tow­er, Avraamov con­duct­ed an envi­ron­ment rather than an ensem­ble, inte­grat­ing steam, steel, com­bus­tion, and human voic­es into a uni­fied acoustic rit­u­al. What appeared chaot­ic was in fact a rig­or­ous­ly engi­neered sys­tem designed to reor­ga­nize the indus­tri­al sound­scape into col­lec­tive music, an audi­to­ry archi­tec­ture intend­ed to replace the frag­ment­ed noise of mod­ern indus­try with a coor­di­nat­ed son­ic emblem of rev­o­lu­tion­ary soci­ety.

Avraamov even antic­i­pat­ed the need for rehearsal and repli­ca­tion. The work could be prac­ticed indoors using small sin­gle-tone instru­ments such as har­mo­ni­ums, clay whis­tles, children’s tin whis­tles, stand­ing in for indus­tri­al horns. The sur­viv­ing mate­ri­als pro­vid­ed to per­form­ers of the Sym­pho­ny reveal how rad­i­cal­ly the work depart­ed from con­ven­tion­al nota­tion. Instead of staff nota­tion, Avraamov used the text of Inter­na­tionale and oth­er songs includ­ed in the work with syl­la­bles under­lined to indi­cate tim­ing and dura­tion. These “text notes” coor­di­nat­ed son­ic events across the dis­persed ensem­ble, trans­lat­ing a rev­o­lu­tion­ary anthem into a tem­po­ral grid for indus­tri­al sound.

The con­cept was nev­er intend­ed as a sin­gu­lar spec­ta­cle con­fined to one city. As Avraamov urged, “We want every city with a dozen steam boil­ers to orga­nize a wor­thy ‘accom­pa­ni­ment’ to the Octo­ber cel­e­bra­tions … and we pro­vide here instruc­tions for orga­niz­ing a ‘Sym­pho­ny of Sirens’ adapt­ed to var­i­ous local con­di­tions. After a suc­cess­ful exper­i­ment [in Baku], this is no longer dif­fi­cult: all that is need­ed is ini­tia­tive and ener­gy” The work was thus con­ceived as mod­u­lar and repro­ducible, capa­ble of being scaled and rein­ter­pret­ed accord­ing to local indus­tri­al resources and urban acoustics.

It may seem sur­pris­ing that Arse­ny Avraamov, a drift­ing, rest­less fig­ure more bohemi­an engi­neer than dis­ci­plined par­ty func­tionary, at times dis­graced or side­lined else­where in the Sovi­et Union, was grant­ed the resources and offi­cial per­mis­sion nec­es­sary to real­ize a project on the scale of the Sym­pho­ny of Sirens. His tech­ni­cal accom­plish­ments and rep­u­ta­tion as an inno­va­tor cer­tain­ly lent cred­i­bil­i­ty, yet the broad­er cli­mate of the ear­ly post-Rev­o­lu­tion­ary years was equal­ly deci­sive. The peri­od was marked by a volatile open­ness to exper­i­men­ta­tion, espe­cial­ly where art inter­sect­ed with indus­try, labor, and mass mobi­liza­tion. The rev­o­lu­tion­ary project aimed at total social inte­gra­tion: the uni­fi­ca­tion of work­ers, fac­to­ries, com­mu­ni­ca­tion sys­tems, and civic space into a sin­gle col­lec­tive organ­ism. With­in such a frame­work, the idea of using an entire city as a musi­cal instru­ment did not appear absurd but sym­bol­i­cal­ly pre­cise. More­over, the con­cep­tu­al foun­da­tions of the sym­pho­ny were not Avraamov’s alone; writ­ers, the­o­rists, and cul­tur­al orga­niz­ers had already artic­u­lat­ed par­al­lel visions of indus­tri­al sound as a col­lec­tive artis­tic medi­um.

Even while sta­tioned far from the prin­ci­pal cen­ters of Sovi­et avant-garde activ­i­ty, he fol­lowed devel­op­ments close­ly, absorb­ing ideas cir­cu­lat­ing through Pro­letkult net­works, futur­ist the­o­ry, and the emerg­ing aes­thet­ics of indus­tri­al moder­ni­ty. These encoun­ters sharp­ened a vision that had been form­ing for years: a son­ic event con­struct­ed not from orches­tral instru­ments but from the sound infra­struc­ture of mod­ern life. In this peri­od of dis­tance and obser­va­tion, the con­cept that would become the Sym­pho­ny of Sirens first cohered into a prac­ti­cal form.

One influ­ence stands beyond dis­pute. Through­out his man­i­festos and pro­gram­mat­ic writ­ings, Avraamov repeat­ed­ly invoked the poet Alek­sei Gastev as both inspi­ra­tion and proof of con­cept. In his arti­cle A New Era of Music, he repro­duced in full “Order 06” from Gastev’s A Pack­et of Orders, the con­clud­ing cycle of Gastev’s Poet­ry of the Worker’s Strike, pub­lished only a year before the Sym­pho­ny of Sirens pre­miered in Baku.

Avraamov explic­it­ly acknowl­edged that he imag­ined the music of the new cen­tu­ry under the influ­ence of Gastev’s poet­ry, repro­duc­ing the fol­low­ing text:

“Asia — all on the note D.
Amer­i­ca — a chord high­er.
Africa — B‑flat.

The Radio Con­duc­tor.
Cyclone cel­lo — solo.
Forty tow­ers — with a bow.
Orches­tra along the equa­tor.
Sym­pho­ny along the par­al­lel 7.
Cho­rus­es along the merid­i­an 6.
Elec­tric strings to the cen­ter of the earth.
Sus­tain the globe of the earth in music
for the four sea­sons.
Sound in orbit for four months pianis­si­mo.
Make four min­utes of vul­cano-for­tis­si­mo.
Cut off for a week.
Burst into vul­cano-for­tis­si­mo crescen­do.
Main­tain on vul­cano for six months.
Start from scratch.
Col­lapse the orches­tra.”

The work reads as a brief set of instruc­tions (not unlike Avraamov’s) for a sym­pho­ny per­formed on a plan­e­tary scale, seem­ing­ly only a few steps high­er in order of mag­ni­tude fol­low­ing the Sym­pho­ny of Sirens. Anoth­er text by Gastev, “Man­i­fes­ta­tion” (pub­lished in 1918 in the Pro­letkult jour­nal The Future), reveals even more clear­ly the con­cep­tu­al roots of Avraamov’s lat­er son­ic spec­ta­cles. The pas­sages read less like metaphor than an oper­a­tional score for indus­tri­al sound:

“Orches­tras! Orches­tras!” they shout from the tow­ers.
Two hun­dred hand-picked strongmen—boilers—locomotives step for­ward, tune the cho­rus of horns, the cho­rus strikes instant­ly, and the sound salvos rush ahead of the divi­sion.
Music intend­ed for cities, depart­ments, states…
The trum­pets stretch out.
Their sullen pride grows.
The fiery sta­tions rage.
The giant search­lights flare up instant­ly.
Then they go out.
The horns cease.
Sig­nal silence…
Only two min­utes. Min­utes, like an era.
— An explo­sion of light and music.
And a hur­ri­cane of work begins.
The musi­cal boil­ers thun­der “Green Shoots.”
— A thou­sand-pipe locomotive—our greet­ings!
— Pipes, smoke. Your foul labor is not wast­ed. Smoke.
— Boil­ers, con­tin­ue your anthem.
— Com­posers’ Work­shop! — A sym­pho­ny to the can­nons imme­di­ate­ly!
Boil­ers, thun­der “Vic­to­ry!”
Thun­der “Vic­to­ry,” but qui­et­ly tran­si­tion to “Alarm­ing.”
— Boil­ers, “Vic­to­ry!”
Pipes, march!
Cer­e­mo­ni­al!
Smoke to the heav­ens! Hands, wave your black hands across the earth.
Fac­to­ries, dance in a cir­cle!
Strike the oil tanks,
Strike with steam ham­mers!
Demon­stra­tors, take a rest.”

From Gastev’s poem Man­i­fes­ta­tion, he bor­rowed the slo­gan “Music intend­ed for cities, depart­ments, states.” Gastev is also cred­it­ed with intro­duc­ing the word sym­pho­ny into the con­text of indus­tri­al moder­ni­ty; as ear­ly as 1919 he called for the cre­ation of “a sym­pho­ny of work­ers’ strikes and the clat­ter and roar of machin­ery.”

Gastev’s grand, utopi­an poet­ic uni­verse, con­struct­ed from the hyper­bol­ic musi­cal­i­ty of indus­tri­al civ­i­liza­tion, aligned close­ly with Avraamov’s own think­ing. Both men shared an unusu­al syn­the­sis of tech­ni­cal ratio­nal­ism and pro­pa­gan­dis­tic fer­vor, treat­ing art not sim­ply as aes­thet­ic expres­sion but as a tool for reor­ga­niz­ing per­cep­tion, labor, and col­lec­tive life. Their works often func­tioned as blue­prints as much as artis­tic state­ments, com­bin­ing engi­neer­ing log­ic, polit­i­cal urgency, and vision­ary spec­ta­cle.

Here the indus­tri­al city becomes orches­tra, instru­ment, and per­former. Sirens, boil­ers, loco­mo­tives, search­lights, smoke, and human labor merge into a coor­di­nat­ed son­ic and visu­al mass event—the pre­cise log­ic Avraamov would lat­er attempt to engi­neer. What Gastev artic­u­lat­ed poet­i­cal­ly, Avraamov sought to ren­der oper­a­tional. Such ideas were wide­spread in the rev­o­lu­tion­ary cul­tur­al atmos­phere. In 1918, poet Boris Kushner’s man­i­festo The Rev­o­lu­tion of Mate­ri­als, pub­lished in the Pro­letkult jour­nal Our Way (which also print­ed sev­er­al of Avraamov’s arti­cles), declared:

“The music of the future will have to be per­formed for vast pub­lic gath­er­ings. Per­haps for entire cities at once … Where there is a need for sounds that can be heard in the con­di­tions of urban life—on the streets, in work­shops, at pub­lic fes­ti­vals attend­ed by thousands—there one must resort to spe­cial appa­ra­tus… There is no risk in pre­dict­ing that mod­ern musi­cal instru­ments … will not long remain in the prac­tice of social­ist music.”

Such state­ments demon­strate that Avraamov’s project was not an iso­lat­ed eccen­tric­i­ty but part of a broad­er reimag­in­ing of sound, space, and col­lec­tive expe­ri­ence. The ear­li­est pro­le­tar­i­an hol­i­days had already revealed how rad­i­cal­ly the func­tion of music was chang­ing in pub­lic life. With­in this cli­mate, per­mis­sion for the sym­pho­ny became both polit­i­cal­ly sym­bol­ic and cul­tur­al­ly log­i­cal. By 1922–23, while prepar­ing and refin­ing the work in Baku, Avraamov taught at the Com­mu­nist Par­ty High School and worked as a cul­tur­al orga­niz­er at mil­i­tary cours­es for the Cen­tral Com­mit­tee of the Azer­bai­jani Com­mu­nist Youth Union in Armavir. These insti­tu­tion­al roles placed him at the inter­sec­tion of pro­pa­gan­da, edu­ca­tion, and mass spec­ta­cle, pre­cise­ly the ter­rain on which the Sym­pho­ny of Sirens would unfold.

On the morn­ing of the fifth anniver­sary of the Octo­ber Rev­o­lu­tion, Novem­ber 7, 1922, the port of Baku was mobi­lized with the pre­ci­sion of a mil­i­tary oper­a­tion. Orders spec­i­fied that by 7:00 a.m. every ves­sel belong­ing to the Gokasp (State Caspi­an Ship­ping Com­pa­ny), Voen­flot (Mil­i­tary Fleet), and Uzbekokaspiy (Caspi­an Sea Secu­ri­ty Direc­torate) fleets, includ­ing small steam launch­es, assem­ble at the rail­way pier to receive musi­cians and instruc­tions before tak­ing posi­tion near the cus­toms piers. The destroy­er Dos­toiny, equipped with its set of steam whis­tles, was sta­tioned ahead of the for­ma­tion oppo­site the sig­nal tow­er, with small­er ves­sels arrayed near­by. By 9:00 a.m. the fleet was to be ful­ly deployed. At the same hour, all avail­able loco­mo­tives, shunt­ing engines, local ser­vice trains, armored trains, and even those out of repair, were ordered to the pier, trans­form­ing the har­bor and rail yard into a uni­fied acoustic appa­ra­tus.

Human forces arrived in par­al­lel. Cadets from the 4th Armavir Cours­es, stu­dents of the High­er Par­ty School, par­tic­i­pants from mil­i­tary train­ing pro­grams, stu­dents of the Azer­bai­jan State Con­ser­va­to­ry, and pro­fes­sion­al musi­cians were required to report no lat­er than 8:30 a.m. By 10:00 a.m. infantry, artillery bat­ter­ies, machine-gun units, armored vehi­cles, and motor trans­port took up their assigned posi­tions in accor­dance with the gar­ri­son order, while air­planes and sea­planes stood ready. Sig­nal­men were instruct­ed to sound dis­trict, sta­tion, and dock horns by 10:30 a.m., and even the tra­di­tion­al mid­day can­non was can­celled to make way for the care­ful­ly script­ed son­ic sequence that would fol­low.

What unfold­ed was not mere­ly a per­for­mance but a pro­grammed “sound pic­ture of alarm, the unfold­ing bat­tle, and the vic­to­ry of the Inter­na­tion­al Army,” as out­lined by Avraamov in the news­pa­per Bakin­sky Rabochy (The Baku Work­er). The sce­nario began with the “Alarm” After the first salute from the road­stead around noon, alarm horns sound­ed from the Zykh, Bely Gorod, Bibi-Hey­bat, and Bailov dis­tricts of the city. Sub­se­quent can­non shots trig­gered suc­ces­sive lay­ers: dock horns, fac­to­ry sirens of the Chernogorod dis­trict, naval sig­nals, and the move­ment of artillery cadets led by a brass band play­ing Var­shavyan­ka. With the eigh­teenth can­non, city fac­to­ries joined and sea­planes took off; by the twen­ti­eth, rail­way whis­tles and remain­ing loco­mo­tives entered while machine-gun units and infantry received sig­nals direct­ly from the conductor’s tow­er. The siren built to a max­i­mum inten­si­ty before end­ing with the twen­ty-fifth can­non and an “all clear” sig­nal.

The sec­ond part of the work, the “Bat­tle” began with a triple chord of sirens announc­ing the tran­si­tion. Sea­planes descend­ed, the crowd at the pier shout­ed “Hur­rah!”, and at a sig­nal the Inter­na­tionale sound­ed four times. Dur­ing the sec­ond half-stan­za, the com­bined brass band entered with La Mar­seil­laise. On the melody’s first rep­e­ti­tion the entire square joined in cho­rus, singing all three stan­zas. Through­out this sec­tion, fac­to­ry whis­tles and rail­way sig­nals fell silent, allow­ing the rev­o­lu­tion­ary hymn to dom­i­nate the acoustic field.

Last­ly came the “The Apoth­e­o­sis of Vic­to­ry.” A gen­er­al solemn chord sound­ed across the city, accom­pa­nied by vol­leys and bell ring­ing for three min­utes, fol­lowed by a cer­e­mo­ni­al march. The “Inter­na­tionale” was repeat­ed twice more dur­ing the final pro­ces­sion, and after the third per­for­mance a final uni­fied chord of sirens and horns sound­ed across Baku and its dis­tricts. At least, that was the intend­ed oper­at­ing pro­ce­dure as out­lined by Avraamov.

Exe­cu­tion of the event fell under the respon­si­bil­i­ty of mil­i­tary and port author­i­ties as well as Azneft (State Asso­ci­a­tion of Azer­bai­jan Oil Indus­try) and par­tic­i­pat­ing edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tions. The scale guar­an­teed tech­ni­cal chal­lenges, yet accord­ing to accounts cit­ed by schol­ar Sergei Rumyant­sev, the “orches­tra” did indeed car­ry out its instruc­tions and the anniver­sary cel­e­bra­tion pro­ceed­ed as planned. How­ev­er, it was not exe­cut­ed per­fect­ly. One descrip­tion of the event appears in the mem­oirs of com­pos­er Lidiya Ivano­va, daugh­ter of Sym­bol­ist poet Vyach­eslav Ivanov, pub­lished in 1992. Writ­ing about her time in Baku, she described the scene: “At the solemn hour, a large group of peo­ple gath­ered to lis­ten, but the sym­pho­ny fell apart. A can­non was heard, then a whis­tle, a can­non, anoth­er whis­tle, and sud­den­ly the can­non fell silent. The sirens also fell silent, then each began to emit its own sound at ran­dom, first singly, and then all togeth­er, roar­ing at the top of their lungs. It turned out that a ship had appeared on the hori­zon, and the author­i­ties had for­bid­den the can­non to fire.”

The tech­ni­cal prob­lems were hard­ly sur­pris­ing giv­en the unprece­dent­ed scale of the under­tak­ing. Coor­di­nat­ing indus­tri­al sirens, artillery, ships, loco­mo­tives, air­craft, and massed per­form­ers across an indus­tri­al port city was a logis­ti­cal exper­i­ment as much as an artis­tic one. Rely­ing large­ly on Avraamov’s own pub­li­ca­tions, Rumyant­sev’s opti­mistic assess­ment stands in ten­sion with the total silence of the local press after the fact, a silence also not­ed by Russ­ian avant-garde schol­ar Andrei Kru­sanov. For many lat­er com­men­ta­tors, the absence of cov­er­age sug­gests not tri­umph but con­fu­sion, indif­fer­ence, or dis­ap­point­ment.

The dif­fi­cul­ties were not only tech­ni­cal but due to a fun­da­men­tal dis­con­nect with the work’s intend­ed audi­ence. Avraamov’s premise rest­ed on the belief that horns, can­non fire, and indus­tri­al sirens would be as leg­i­ble and emo­tion­al­ly res­o­nant to the pro­le­tar­i­an pub­lic as rev­o­lu­tion­ary songs, brass bands, or church bells. In prac­tice, audi­ences unac­cus­tomed to avant-garde exper­i­men­ta­tion heard some­thing very dif­fer­ent: songs were obscured by mechan­i­cal roar, tonal rela­tion­ships dis­solved in open air, and the indus­tri­al sound mass reg­is­tered less as music than as pure noise. Even had the coor­di­na­tion been flaw­less, the work would like­ly have encoun­tered the same soci­o­log­i­cal bar­ri­er faced by Futur­ist and avant-garde art more broad­ly when addressed to mass audi­ences. Pop­u­lar taste tends toward the famil­iar; just as with abstract visu­al art, noise-based and micro­ton­al exper­i­ments were intel­li­gi­ble main­ly to a small cir­cle of avant-garde prac­ti­tion­ers.

Despite con­test­ed recep­tion, the per­for­mance rep­re­sent­ed the fullest real­iza­tion of Avraamov’s urban sym­phon­ic con­cept to date. The col­lab­o­ra­tive force of all par­ties involved served to trans­form Baku into a test­ing ground for a new form of civic music. The exper­i­ment, whether viewed as tri­umph or fail­ure, demon­strat­ed the fea­si­bil­i­ty of orga­niz­ing an entire city as an instru­ment and brought Avraamov renewed insti­tu­tion­al respect, encour­ag­ing his return to the cen­ters of Sovi­et pow­er with proof that the indus­tri­al sound­scape could be mobi­lized as rev­o­lu­tion­ary art. The work was now sched­uled for anoth­er large-scale pre­sen­ta­tion in exact­ly a year, this time in Moscow.

In the back­ground of this per­for­mance and its prepa­ra­tions, Avraamov’s per­son­al life was just as unsta­ble and impro­vi­sa­tion­al as his artis­tic projects. While in Azer­bai­jan he adopt­ed the sur­name Adamov and met a new part­ner, Eva. The peri­od sur­round­ing the Sym­pho­ny of Sirens coin­cid­ed with a new domes­tic chap­ter: he and Eva would have a son, also named Arse­ny, born near­ly at the same time as the sec­ond per­for­mance of the Sym­pho­ny of Sirens.

Eva was nei­ther his first nor last wife. Dur­ing an ear­li­er post­ing in Kazan he had entered anoth­er mar­riage, and lat­er in Ros­tov he became involved with a pianist named Revek­ka Zhiv, whom he lat­er described as embody­ing the same essen­tial image he would see in all of his wives to come. Con­tem­po­rary accounts sug­gest that he pos­sessed a strong per­son­al mag­net­ism: despite fre­quent con­flicts with admin­is­tra­tors and author­i­ties, he attract­ed devot­ed friends and fol­low­ers, par­tic­u­lar­ly women. Over time he main­tained mul­ti­ple wives who report­ed­ly coex­ist­ed with­out open con­flict. He framed this arrange­ment as a delib­er­ate social exper­i­ment, free of jeal­ousy or pos­ses­sive­ness, and claimed it rep­re­sent­ed a reformed mod­el of mar­riage con­sis­tent with his broad­er rev­o­lu­tion­ary utopi­an think­ing.

Phys­i­cal­ly, he cul­ti­vat­ed the image of unusu­al endurance and strength. A gym­nast and capa­ble rid­er from youth, he report­ed­ly remained ath­let­ic well into mid­dle age. In his late fifties he was said to still be able to per­form full rota­tions on a hor­i­zon­tal bar, and while near six­ty he gath­ered mush­rooms in forests out­side Moscow while mov­ing on his hands. Nat­u­ral­ly, he fathered numer­ous chil­dren. Although not all sur­vived the war years, one son, Her­man, lat­er worked to pre­serve and pro­mote his father’s lega­cy, ensur­ing many of his sto­ries could be told now.

Not every­one who encoun­tered him found him per­sua­sive. Lidiya Ivano­va, hav­ing also direct­ly encoun­tered him in Baku’s local cir­cles of artists and musi­cians, described the man as thus: “A musi­cian named Avraamov appeared in Baku. He was a lanky, red-haired enthu­si­ast, seem­ing­ly starv­ing. Every­one pitied him, fed him, and lis­tened to his the­o­ries. One of the major civic hol­i­days was approach­ing, and Avraamov con­ceived the idea of ​​cel­e­brat­ing it with an unprece­dent­ed, grandiose, nation­al sym­pho­ny … Avraamov declared that, despite the fail­ure, he had nev­er felt greater than when he con­duct­ed a can­non with a 60-mile orches­tra. Avraamov lived a lit­tle longer in Baku on the mon­ey he received for his sym­pho­ny and, hav­ing bor­rowed as much as he could from acquain­tances, dis­ap­peared from the city, aban­don­ing his wife, whom he had already acquired dur­ing this time. His detrac­tors said that he sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly trav­eled to dif­fer­ent cities and then left them, leav­ing behind debts and a local wife.”

Accounts like Ivanova’s com­pli­cate the hero­ic image. They present a fig­ure who inspired loy­al­ty and curios­i­ty but also frus­tra­tion: a vision­ary orga­niz­er of sound and spec­ta­cle whose ambi­tions often exceed­ed the social, tech­ni­cal, and insti­tu­tion­al struc­tures avail­able to sus­tain them.

Avraamov returned to Moscow in Sep­tem­ber 1923 with a rep­u­ta­tion that sug­gest­ed tri­umph but a per­son­al sit­u­a­tion that sug­gest­ed col­lapse. He arrived with­out sta­ble hous­ing or reli­able income, drift­ing between tem­po­rary arrange­ments while attempt­ing to con­vert noto­ri­ety into paid work, most­ly con­tin­u­ing to write arti­cles. Nights were often spent at the leg­endary Pega­sus Stall, the poet­ry café run by Futur­ists and Imag­in­ists, where sym­pa­thet­ic artists allowed him to eat and sleep on cred­it. In cor­re­spon­dence with Revek­ka, he described the arrange­ment with a par­tic­u­lar humor:

“The only advance pay­ment I received from pub­lish­ers I have spent on an over­coat etc. It was nec­es­sary. I eat at the Pega­sus Stall — the cafe of the Imag­in­ists — gratis, on account of future bless­ings, lodg­ing for the night in a sep­a­rate room — in a word, I am shar­ing the sta­ble with Pega­sus.”

The con­trast between vision­ary ambi­tion and mate­r­i­al pre­car­i­ty was stark. Even as he depend­ed on the good­will of avant-garde cir­cles to sur­vive, he was prepar­ing a sec­ond large-scale real­iza­tion of his siren sym­pho­ny.

The Moscow ver­sion of his mas­ter­work, often referred to as “Sym­pho­ny in A”, was to be mount­ed with­in months fol­low­ing his arrival in the yard of the MOGES (Moscow Asso­ci­a­tion of State Pow­er Plants) Cen­tral Ther­mal Pow­er Sta­tion for cel­e­bra­tions mark­ing the sixth anniver­sary of the Rev­o­lu­tion. Con­di­tions proved far less favor­able than in Baku although the Moscow ver­sion car­ried per­son­al sym­bol­ism. In its title and open­ing fan­fares, Avraamov encod­ed the names of two women cen­tral to his life, his wife Olga and his lover Revek­ka. Writ­ing to Revek­ka, he framed the tonal cen­ter itself as inti­mate sym­bol­ism:

“Things have set­tled down at the ‘Sirens’: funds have been allo­cat­ed for the ‘per­son­nel’ of the orga­niz­ers and performers—there are no more obsta­cles. Now, once I’ve found a place for my son, I’ll get to work with all my ener­gy. Olga will work with me … Your symphony’s theme—its tonality—is that both the chil­dren and I have always called it ‘A’ … let it be A, the final chord of the theme—the ton­ic of the entire sym­pho­ny…”

He had met Revek­ka in August 1923 dur­ing a short stay in Ros­tov. She came for pri­vate piano lessons and found him in an absurd but reveal­ing sit­u­a­tion: he owned only one suit, which was being washed and ironed, and he received her naked while wait­ing for it to dry. By the next les­son he was con­vinced he was in love; soon after­ward he con­clud­ed he would have to choose between mar­riage and flight. True to habit, he chose the lat­ter. By the time he had resur­faced in Moscow a month lat­er, he began send­ing pas­sion­ate let­ters promis­ing great works of art in her name, bear­ing grandiose and con­trived titles such as “Revtrac­tate (Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Trac­tate) on Nov­muzer. ‘With­out Ances­tors,’ USSR, 6th year of the first cen­tu­ry.” Ever the true believ­er, he saw the start of the rev­o­lu­tion as year zero, even going so far as to rename the months.

Dur­ing this same peri­od he wrote pro­lif­i­cal­ly (most­ly out of eco­nom­ic neces­si­ty), con­tributed to Prav­da and Izves­tia, and report­ed­ly planned an avant-garde peri­od­i­cal with Leon Trot­sky titled Hotel for Trav­el­ers to the Beau­ti­ful. He received invi­ta­tions to teach at the Moscow Con­ser­va­to­ry and pur­sued new the­o­ret­i­cal writ­ings while con­tin­u­ing to orga­nize the com­ing per­for­mance of his Sym­pho­ny. Yet the mate­r­i­al facts remained unchanged: he still slept in the Pega­sus Stall because he had nowhere else to live.

By this point his per­son­al life was as lay­ered as his artis­tic schemes. The Moscow horns sym­bol­ized not only rev­o­lu­tion­ary spec­ta­cle but his emo­tion­al entan­gle­ments: Revek­ka in Ros­tov; Olga work­ing beside him; and anoth­er wife from Kazan who sud­den­ly reap­peared in Moscow from his past. The com­pos­er who sought to unite cities into a sin­gle acoustic organ­ism was, in pri­vate life, orches­trat­ing a sim­i­lar­ly improb­a­ble har­mo­ny, bal­anc­ing over­lap­ping rela­tion­ships, utopi­an man­i­festos, irreg­u­lar jobs, and grand artis­tic promis­es while drift­ing through the cap­i­tal with­out a fixed address.

As the anniver­sary approached, news­pa­pers pro­mot­ed the event as a “con­cert of fac­to­ry whis­tles” and a “series of num­bers on rev­o­lu­tion­ary themes,” phras­es that both attract­ed atten­tion and qui­et­ly mis­rep­re­sent­ed what lis­ten­ers were about to encounter. By mid­day on Novem­ber 7, crowds poured toward the Mosk­va Riv­er, fill­ing the embank­ments and clus­ter­ing along the Bol­shoy Moskvoret­sky Bridge and Bol­shoy Ustin­sky Bridge. Artillery pieces lined the river­banks. Steam loco­mo­tives, fac­to­ry sirens, can­nons, and whis­tles were coor­di­nat­ed across the city, while spec­ta­tors searched for van­tage points from which they could grasp the scale of the promised spec­ta­cle. Avraamov him­self climbed to the roof of a four-sto­ry build­ing so he could be seen from both sides of the riv­er. From this impro­vised podi­um he once more raised his col­ored flags to sig­nal the begin­ning of the per­for­mance.

The largest con­cen­tra­tion of lis­ten­ers gath­ered near the Pow­er Sta­tion, where a sin­gu­lar instru­ment had been installed: anoth­er Magis­tral, designed specif­i­cal­ly for the sym­pho­ny. The appa­ra­tus con­sist­ed of rough­ly fifty whis­tles tuned to dif­fer­ent pitch­es as stu­dents from the Moscow Con­ser­va­to­ry oper­at­ed the device by pulling wires and open­ing valves, releas­ing jets of steam that pro­duced tone.

The sound that fol­lowed was not mere­ly loud but phys­i­cal­ly over­whelm­ing. Musi­cians and spec­ta­tors alike stuffed cot­ton and clamped hands over their ears to pro­tect their hear­ing. At close range the sound mass dis­solved into a vio­lent blur; only at a dis­tance could its lay­ered com­po­nents be per­ceived as a uni­fied son­ic field. Even so, Avraamov con­sid­ered the result insuf­fi­cient. His ambi­tion was noth­ing less than to sat­u­rate the entire city in sound.

Eye­wit­ness­es described pan­ic and fas­ci­na­tion in equal mea­sure. Many lis­ten­ers, expect­ing a sim­ple steam whis­tle con­cert, instead encoun­tered a son­ic shock­wave. Some heard only a “pow­er­ful roar” and “cacoph­o­ny,” espe­cial­ly those clos­est to the sound source. Oth­ers, posi­tioned far­ther away, strug­gled to rec­og­nize the famil­iar rev­o­lu­tion­ary melodies embed­ded with­in the indus­tri­al din. The inac­cu­rate adver­tis­ing and place­ment of key instru­ments cre­at­ed what crit­ics lat­er called a fatal “premise”: lis­ten­ers were psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly unpre­pared, poor­ly posi­tioned, and con­front­ed with unfa­mil­iar son­ic tex­tures that con­found­ed expec­ta­tions.

Despite con­fu­sion, the spec­ta­cle cap­ti­vat­ed observers. The news­pa­per Izves­tia VTsIK described the per­for­mance: “It was dif­fi­cult to dis­cern famil­iar motifs in this mon­strous melody. How­ev­er, the horns of Moscow’s fac­to­ries and steam loco­mo­tives pro­duced a cap­ti­vat­ing impres­sion. This pow­er­ful response from across Moscow shook the air for a long time, rem­i­nis­cent of the ring­ing of bells. The impres­sion of this extra­or­di­nary roll call was tru­ly majes­tic.”

Jour­nal­ist A. Uglov, sta­tioned near the main whis­tle line in the MOGES court­yard, report­ed the phys­i­cal force of the sound: “A rehearsal was impos­si­ble; the simul­ta­ne­ous blast of sev­er­al horns was so over­whelm­ing not every­one could stand it. Cot­ton in the ears helped lit­tle. Some horns pro­duced dif­fer­ent sounds than dur­ing test­ing. The melody could not be estab­lished… the fail­ure of the first attempt should not be dis­cour­ag­ing; the sec­ond should be approached more exper­i­men­tal­ly.”

A report in Rabochaya Gaze­ta (The Work­ers Gazette) empha­sized the the­atri­cal chore­og­ra­phy of the per­for­mance: “The con­duc­tor waved a flag… the per­cus­sion thun­dered… what fol­lowed could only be heard from a dis­tance; those present were occu­pied with one thing: plug­ging their ears lest their eardrums burst.”

Recep­tion reflect­ed these con­tra­dic­tions. Some could bare­ly hear coher­ent struc­ture depend­ing on where they stood; oth­ers heard but could not rec­og­nize famil­iar melodies embed­ded in com­plex har­mon­ic tex­tures. Avraamov him­self was dis­sat­is­fied with the com­pro­mis­es imposed on the per­for­mance: “…we were giv­en, for exam­ple, only 27 can­non shots! And that was for a bass drum! And there were no machine guns at all… only rifle salvos! And over Red Square, at the same time as us, two dozen air­planes were buzzing…” In addi­tion, live ammu­ni­tion, essen­tial for the intend­ed son­ic impact, was pro­hib­it­ed. He con­clud­ed that “there wasn’t enough sound for Moscow,” attribut­ing part of the prob­lem to the place­ment of the main whis­tle line in a court­yard rather than on a roof, and to the den­si­ty of har­monies that ren­dered rec­og­niz­able tunes strange­ly opaque.

Avraamov lat­er con­trast­ed the Moscow per­for­mance unfa­vor­ably with the ear­li­er Baku stag­ing, which he con­sid­ered a suc­cess­ful exper­i­ment. Yet he reject­ed claims of out­right fail­ure. Per­form­ers were con­fi­dent enough to parade their “Siren Sym­pho­ny” ban­ner across Red Square after­ward, and when the con­duc­tor descend­ed from the roof, horns sound­ed an impromp­tu salute as the per­form­ers cheered at the suc­cess­ful real­iza­tion of their spec­ta­cle.

Con­tem­po­raries who lat­er ana­lyzed the Moscow per­for­mance iden­ti­fied sev­er­al fac­tors that explain why it failed to secure broad pub­lic approval. First was the psy­cho­log­i­cal fram­ing of the event: audi­ences arrived expect­ing a cel­e­bra­to­ry “con­cert of fac­to­ry whis­tles,” not a rad­i­cal exper­i­ment in indus­tri­al polypho­ny. Sec­ond was the uneven spa­tial dis­tri­b­u­tion of lis­ten­ers. Because the sound sources were dis­persed across a wide urban field, per­cep­tion depend­ed entire­ly on where one stood. Third was the place­ment of the main whis­tle line, Magis­tral, which had been installed in the court­yard of the pow­er sta­tion rather than ele­vat­ed on a roof, lim­it­ing its pro­jec­tion. Final­ly, ear­ly pub­lic­i­ty and crit­i­cal com­men­tary had already cast the Sirens as a futur­is­tic mon­stros­i­ty threat­en­ing tra­di­tion­al music, prim­ing many to hear chaos rather than com­po­si­tion. That mis­lead­ing pub­lic­i­ty and ear­ly com­men­tary por­tray­ing the work as a mon­strous assault on “real music” shaped pub­lic recep­tion before a sin­gle note sound­ed. Just as with the per­for­mance in Baku, the peo­ple of Moscow, inex­pe­ri­enced with the avant-garde, were unsure what to make of the per­for­mance.

No record­ings of the Moscow or Baku per­for­mances were ever made. In the ear­ly 1920s there sim­ply was no record­ing tech­nol­o­gy capa­ble of cap­tur­ing a work dis­persed across an entire city involv­ing fac­to­ry sirens, artillery, loco­mo­tives, and steam whis­tles spread over tens of miles of urban space. What sur­vives is most­ly in the form of scores, dia­grams, let­ters, press accounts, and, much lat­er, stu­dio recon­struc­tions assem­bled in the 2000s, although the orig­i­nal acoustic real­i­ty, depen­dent on weath­er, geog­ra­phy, dis­tance, tech­nol­o­gy, and mass coor­di­na­tion, was fun­da­men­tal­ly unre­peat­able.

Sev­er­al years lat­er, at the dawn of Sovi­et sound cin­e­ma, Arse­ny Avraamov him­self attempt­ed to approx­i­mate that son­ic expe­ri­ence using the tools avail­able to film pro­duc­tion. While work­ing on Abram Room’s 1930 A Plan for Great Works, the first Sovi­et sound film, he revis­it­ed the Octo­ber anniver­sary per­for­mance. “In 1923, I was orga­niz­ing a sym­pho­ny of whis­tles, con­duct­ing with a flag, while artillery was fir­ing on the oth­er side of the bridge. This was the Octo­ber anniver­sary. When I remind­ed Room of this, he depict­ed the moment.” he recalled. When he described the event to Room, the direc­tor recre­at­ed the moment cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly, although the film does not seem to have sur­vived. In the late 1920s and ear­ly 1930s, as Sovi­et film tran­si­tioned to syn­chro­nized sound, Avraamov worked at Sovki­no on ear­ly sound-on-film pro­duc­tions, syn­the­siz­ing indus­tri­al and envi­ron­men­tal nois­es using har­mo­ni­um, piano, and mechan­i­cal sound sources, dynamos, engines, and avi­a­tion noise, con­tin­u­ing his pur­suit of noise as com­po­si­tion­al mate­r­i­al.

These exper­i­ments did not emerge in iso­la­tion. In ear­ly 1920s Rus­sia, per­for­mance lab­o­ra­to­ries such as Niko­lai Foreg­ger and Vsevolod Meyerhold’s the­atri­cal cir­cles and the work­shop envi­ron­ment around Sergei Eisen­stein encour­aged the incor­po­ra­tion of indus­tri­al rhythm and mechan­i­cal sound into per­for­mance. Cul­tur­al his­to­ri­an René Fülöp-Miller observed in 1926: ““The same idea also ruled the true pro­le­tar­i­an music: it, too, empha­sized the rhythms which cor­re­spond­ed to the uni­ver­sal and imper­son­al ele­ments of human­i­ty. The new music had to embrace all the nois­es of the mechan­i­cal age, the rhythm of the machine, the din of the great city and the fac­to­ry, the whirring of dri­ving-belts, the clat­ter­ing of motors, and the shrill notes of motor-horns.” Bol­she­vik cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions embraced this ten­den­cy, build­ing noise instru­ments and orga­niz­ing “noise orches­tras” intend­ed to pro­duce a tru­ly mod­ern music, in the form of fugues of machin­ery, indus­tri­al imi­ta­tion, and total son­ic envi­ron­ments.

Avraamov’s own fol­low-up work extend­ed these ideas into the­atri­cal and staged per­for­mance before his shift to the medi­um of film. In Novem­ber 1923, imme­di­ate­ly fol­low­ing the Moscow debut of his Sym­pho­ny, he com­posed Shum­rhith­muzi­ka (Nois­er­hyth­mu­sic) for Sergei Tretyakov’s pro­duc­tion Do You Hear, Moscow?, staged by Sergei Eisen­stein for the First Work­ers’ The­atre of Moscow Pro­lekult. The inter­lude score called for carpenter’s tools: files, saws (man­u­al and mechan­i­cal), grind­ing wheels, axes, ham­mers, sledge­ham­mers, logs, nails, planes, and chains to be per­formed with­out embell­ish­ment, the orig­i­nal labor rhythms copied and orga­nized into a har­mon­ic struc­ture. The piece treat­ed labor itself as musi­cal per­for­mance — decades before indus­tri­al music groups such as Test Dept or Ein­stürzende Neubaut­en would pop­u­lar­ize sim­i­lar strate­gies.

Through­out the 1920s Avraamov exper­i­ment­ed with retuned pianos, har­mo­ni­ums, and impro­vised noise sources along­side sym­phon­ic instru­ments, devel­op­ing approach­es to sound orga­ni­za­tion that antic­i­pate lat­er elec­troa­coustic and spec­tral prac­tices. His acoustic phi­los­o­phy reject­ed the divi­sion between music and noise: both were orga­nized sound, dif­fer­ing only in com­plex­i­ty and struc­ture. Increas­ing com­po­si­tion­al den­si­ty could trans­form music into noise; fur­ther orga­ni­za­tion could trans­form noise into music.

He demon­strat­ed these ideas in the Pega­sus Stall, per­form­ing “rev­o­lu­tion­ary opus­es” on a rebuilt piano for an audi­ence of poets includ­ing Sergei Yes­enin, Vadim Sher­shenevich, Ana­toly Marien­gof, and Rurik Ivnev. Inspired by a line from one of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poems about play­ing a noc­turne on a drain­pipe flute, he per­formed on retuned pianos using small gar­den rakes strapped to his hands to strike dense clus­ters beyond the reach of human fin­gers. Around this time he even demon­strat­ed such tech­niques even for Vladimir Lenin and Nadezh­da Krup­skaya, an exper­i­ment that report­ed­ly failed to impress.

In the wake of the Sym­pho­ny’s Moscow per­for­mance, Avraamov con­tin­ued to scale his ambi­tions upward. If sirens across a city were insuf­fi­cient, he imag­ined sound pro­ject­ed from the sky. While devel­op­ing pro­pos­als for the State Insti­tute for Musi­cal Sci­ence (GIMN) in the mid-1920s, he advanced a con­cept he called “Topo­graph­i­cal Acus­tics”:

As he argued, sci­ence must pro­vide new means: radio-musi­cal instru­ments of immense scale “What are we sup­posed to do if our ‘cham­ber’ sound sys­tems have out­lived their use­ful­ness, if even the pow­er of fac­to­ry whis­tles isn’t enough to reach Moscow’s ‘audi­ence’? What are we sup­posed to do? Demand new, mod­ern-scale means from sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy!” The com­pos­er then out­lined the pro­gram­mat­ic goals of the new musi­cal sci­ence: “The design of radio-musi­cal instru­ments of colos­sal social and vital sig­nif­i­cance: unlim­it­ed increase in sound vol­ume with ide­al into­na­tion and tim­bre accu­ra­cy… Topo­graph­ic acoustics: the study of the con­di­tions for the pow­er­ful sound of musi­cal instru­ments over entire cities.”

In oth­er words, he pro­posed pow­er­ful elec­troa­coustic devices mount­ed on air­craft capa­ble of broad­cast­ing sound across vast ter­ri­to­ries. By 1927 he was already envi­sion­ing an “Aerosym­pho­ny,” sug­gest­ing that if sirens lacked suf­fi­cient pow­er, devices like those of Léon Theremin could be installed on air­planes or zep­pelins fly­ing above Moscow. Hav­ing once con­duct­ed a city from the ground, Avraamov now imag­ined work­ing from above, orches­trat­ing the air itself.

It would not be a stretch to infer that the idea of hear­ing sound ema­nat­ing from the sky had divine con­no­ta­tions for Avraamov, as he often framed sound in near-reli­gious terms, treat­ing it not mere­ly as an artis­tic medi­um but as a force capa­ble of shap­ing col­lec­tive con­scious­ness. In the same arti­cle where he out­lined the logis­tics of the Sym­pho­ny of Sirens, he intro­duced the project in the fol­low­ing way: “Of all the arts, music pos­sess­es the great­est social­ly orga­niz­ing pow­er. The most ancient myths tes­ti­fy to human­i­ty’s aware­ness of this pow­er since time immemo­r­i­al. Orpheus tames wild beasts with music. Joshua shat­ters the strong­holds of Jeri­cho with his trum­pets. Amphion rais­es majes­tic tem­ples from the rocks with the sound of his lyre: stone colos­si rise of their own accord to his music. Pythago­ras hears the “har­mo­ny of the spheres” in cos­mic mechan­ics itself, in the move­ment of the heav­en­ly bod­ies.”

Between 1923 and 1926 he spent a peri­od work­ing in Dages­tan before return­ing to Moscow. His cir­cum­stances grad­u­al­ly sta­bi­lized when he secured a posi­tion at the State Insti­tute for Musi­cal Sci­ence (GIMN), where he con­tin­ued research into acoustics, tun­ing sys­tems, and large-scale sound pro­jec­tion. Even as his mate­r­i­al con­di­tions improved, his ambi­tions remained plan­e­tary: to reor­ga­nize lis­ten­ing itself, and with it, the social body.

The years fol­low­ing Sym­pho­ny of Sirens marked an accel­er­a­tion rather than a cul­mi­na­tion in Arse­ny Avraamov’s project to remake music at the lev­el of physics, tech­nol­o­gy, and social orga­ni­za­tion. In 1927 he encoun­tered what he con­sid­ered one of the most con­se­quen­tial devel­op­ments of the era: the elec­tron­ic instru­ment devised by Leon Theremin. Writ­ing with vis­i­ble frus­tra­tion, he not­ed that the Sovi­et press had respond­ed “chill­ily, avari­cious­ly and unsym­pa­thet­i­cal­ly” to the Ros­fil’s (Russ­ian Phil­har­mon­ic Soci­ety) demon­stra­tion of the device. While he acknowl­edged the instru­ment was not an absolute nov­el­ty, Theremin had shown an ear­li­er pro­to­type years pri­or, Avraamov insist­ed that only now had it reached gen­uine artis­tic impor­tance.

For Avraamov, the Theremin was not mere­ly anoth­er instru­ment but a struc­tur­al break with the past and a cru­cial com­po­nent in bring­ing his goal of a new sys­tem of music to real­i­ty. He described it as “the biggest musi­cal event of our days,” open­ing bound­less prospects and con­sti­tut­ing a “social rev­o­lu­tion in the art of music.” Its sig­nif­i­cance lay in its abil­i­ty to lib­er­ate sound from mechan­i­cal con­straints and fixed pitch sys­tems. He argued that the devel­op­ment of the instru­ment plant­ed “the first real mine under the foun­da­tion of the for­mer musi­cal world and simul­ta­ne­ous­ly one of the cor­ner­stones of the basis of the future. It won’t be a prim­i­tive-hand­made Sym­pho­ny of Sirens!”. The Theremin’s con­tin­u­ous pitch and tim­bral con­trol sug­gest­ed an expand­ed tonal sys­tem, renewed con­nec­tions with East­ern musi­cal tra­di­tions sup­pressed by equal tem­pera­ment, deep­er syn­the­sis with speech into­na­tion, and the emer­gence of what he called a new “dif­fer­en­tial music” built from par­al­lel and counter-mov­ing glis­san­di rather than dis­crete notes.

This con­ver­gence of sci­ence and sound aligned direct­ly with the next step in Avraamov’s own the­o­ret­i­cal work. On June 1, 1927, he launched the Asso­ci­a­tion for the Revival of Music, an attempt to extend the philo­soph­i­cal lega­cy of his pre-rev­o­lu­tion Leonar­do da Vin­ci Soci­ety into the new tech­no­log­i­cal era. The new group includ­ed Theremin and com­mis­sar Boris Krasin, but it was short-lived, its momen­tum hav­ing col­lapsed when Theremin’s men­tor Abram Ioffe secured patents for the instru­ment and sent the inven­tor on an inter­na­tion­al trip to Europe and the Unit­ed States, depriv­ing the asso­ci­a­tion of its cen­tral fig­ure.

Avraamov con­tin­ued unde­terred. He joined the State Insti­tute for the His­to­ry of Arts in Leningrad and that sum­mer trav­eled with Theremin to the 1927 Inter­na­tion­al Exhi­bi­tion of Music in the Life of Nations in Frank­furt am Main, where they rep­re­sent­ed the USSR and where Avraamov pre­sent­ed his ultra­chro­mat­ic tonal the­o­ry. There he unveiled the frame­work that would define his lat­er work: a uni­ver­sal 48-tone sys­tem, or Welt­ton­sys­tem. Devel­oped in his 1927 the­sis The Uni­ver­sal Sys­tem of Tones, the sys­tem sought to merge the equal-tem­pered scale with the nat­ur­al over­tone series, dis­solv­ing bound­aries between pitch, tim­bre, and noise. He envi­sioned it not sim­ply as micro­ton­al har­mo­ny but as a foun­da­tion for addi­tive syn­the­sis and new acoustic archi­tec­tures.

Avraamov’s the­o­ret­i­cal ambi­tions extend­ed beyond acoustics into cul­tur­al recon­struc­tion. Writ­ing in 1927 for the State Acad­e­my of Artis­tic Sci­ences, he declared the immi­nent birth of a new dis­ci­pline: “We are on the eve of the birth of a new artis­tic dis­ci­pline, a true prod­uct of our time, an era of social rev­o­lu­tion. I am speak­ing of musi­cal eth­nol­o­gy, which is replac­ing the decrepit and out­lived musi­cal ethnog­ra­phy”. Folk-song research, he argued, had failed because it attempt­ed to force non-Euro­pean musi­cal sys­tems into the twelve-semi­tone frame­work. Notat­ing songs with sharps and flats dis­tort­ed their into­na­tion­al real­i­ty, mak­ing any sci­en­tif­ic analy­sis unre­li­able. “until it was estab­lished beyond a doubt that folk song writ­ing absolute­ly does not fit with­in the nar­row con­fines of the Euro­pean 12-semi­tone sys­tem … any reli­able sci­en­tif­ic analy­sis of musi­cal folk­lore was out of the ques­tion.”

He insist­ed that the Octo­ber Rev­o­lu­tion had cre­at­ed con­di­tions for gen­uine cul­tur­al self-deter­mi­na­tion among the many peo­ples of the Sovi­et Union. Impos­ing Euro­pean tonal tem­plates on non-Euro­pean tra­di­tions, he warned, would con­sti­tute a crime against the future inter­na­tion­al cul­ture. “Every peo­ple, no mat­ter how small,” he argued, “can and must con­tribute their mite to the trea­sury of the future uni­ver­sal cul­ture.” The cen­tral obsta­cle lay in nota­tion: with­out pre­cise sym­bol­ic sys­tems capa­ble of cap­tur­ing micro-into­na­tions and tim­bral nuance, oral tra­di­tions could not devel­op large-scale com­po­si­tion­al forms or be trans­mit­ted accu­rate­ly across gen­er­a­tions.

To approx­i­mate the rich­ness of glob­al musi­cal into­na­tion, Avraamov argued that the octave must con­tain at least forty-eight divi­sions; a more pre­cise sys­tem might require eighty-four, and even that would remain a com­pro­mise rel­a­tive to math­e­mat­i­cal­ly pure tun­ing. He fur­ther observed that the tim­bral inven­tive­ness of folk tra­di­tions far exceed­ed that of Euro­pean art music, which his­tor­i­cal­ly drew upon folk sources only inter­mit­tent­ly. “It’s time to final­ly approach folk music not mere­ly as raw mate­r­i­al for artis­tic pro­cess­ing, but as a valu­able phe­nom­e­non in its own right, one of immense cul­tur­al and his­tor­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance. It’s time to begin a pre­cise study of the unique modes of song, the result of which alone will enable us to cre­ate a ful­ly applic­a­ble musi­cal nota­tion for each eth­nic group.”

To cap­ture this rich­ness, he pro­posed expand­ing the octave to at least forty-eight tones; greater pre­ci­sion might require eighty-four. Even that, he not­ed, would still fall short of math­e­mat­i­cal­ly exact rep­re­sen­ta­tion. Euro­pean music, in his view, lagged behind folk tra­di­tions in tim­bral inven­tive­ness, which West­ern com­posers mere­ly bor­rowed from time to time to enhance their own indi­vid­ual works.

His advo­ca­cy of the Welt­ton­sys­tem was tied to this broad­er effort to rec­on­cile physics, per­cep­tion, and musi­cal struc­ture. The sys­tem sought to com­bine the equal-tem­pered scale with the nat­ur­al over­tone series while dis­solv­ing the divide between pitched har­mo­ny and the spec­tral fab­ric of sound itself. Unlike oth­er micro­ton­al pio­neers, Avraamov treat­ed ultra­chro­mat­ic instru­ments not mere­ly as tools for new har­monies but as vehi­cles for addi­tive syn­the­sis, capa­ble of con­struct­ing com­plex tim­bres from com­po­nent fre­quen­cies.

Amid the surge of inter­est in micro­ton­al, “ultra­chro­mat­ic” music, Russ­ian exper­i­ments in syn­thet­ic sound were large­ly framed through a micro­ton­al lens. Researchers and com­posers focused on how to approx­i­mate the nat­ur­al over­tone series while pre­serv­ing the prac­ti­cal ben­e­fits of equal tem­pera­ment. The result was a pro­lif­er­a­tion of new har­mon­ic sys­tems built on expand­ed tem­pera­ments, each attempt­ing to rec­on­cile acoustic real­i­ty with the struc­tur­al flex­i­bil­i­ty required for mod­ern com­po­si­tion and sound pro­duc­tion. Numer­ous alter­na­tive tem­pera­ments were pro­posed, includ­ing Avraamov’s 48- and 96-step scales, Boris Yankovsky’s 72-step sys­tem, Pavel Leiberg’s 41-step divi­sion, and Andrei Samoilov’s Ober-Unter-Tone har­mon­ic the­o­ry. These efforts sought to rec­on­cile over­tone-based nat­ur­al tun­ing with the prac­ti­cal advan­tages of equal tem­pera­ment.

Avraamov’s fas­ci­na­tion with sound’s phys­i­cal inscrip­tion pushed him fur­ther into pro­to-dig­i­tal think­ing, Avraamov pushed the impli­ca­tions of his work fur­ther than most of his con­tem­po­raries were pre­pared to fol­low. In his essay Production–Reproduction, Arse­ny Avraamov built off his the­o­ries orig­i­nal­ly pro­posed in 1916 and once again called for a sci­en­tif­ic study of phono­graph grooves to deter­mine exact­ly which graph­ic forms cor­re­spond to spe­cif­ic acoustic phe­nom­e­na.

Although large­ly self-taught as an acousti­cian, Avraamov’s think­ing was ground­ed in ear­ly encoun­ters with the sci­en­tif­ic acoustics of Her­mann von Helmholtz. Well before the estab­lish­ment of ded­i­cat­ed elec­tron­ic music stu­dios, he pro­posed sam­pling, ana­lyz­ing, and resyn­the­siz­ing sound. He urged lab­o­ra­to­ry exper­i­ments to mea­sure groove length, width, depth, and cur­va­ture, to com­pare mechan­i­cal­ly pro­duced grooves with hand-made inscrip­tions, and to refine what he called a “groove-man­u­script score” to final­ly real­ize sound syn­the­sis based on math­e­mat­i­cal mod­el­ing of the acoustic prop­er­ties of sound­ing objects. The pro­pos­al antic­i­pates what is now known as phys­i­cal mod­el­ing syn­the­sis, or the gen­er­a­tion of sound by sim­u­lat­ing how mate­ri­als vibrate rather than by record­ing or elec­tron­i­cal­ly oscil­lat­ing tones. Sev­er­al years lat­er, Lás­zló Moholy-Nagy would artic­u­late a sim­i­lar con­cept in Cen­tral Europe.

Between 1929 and 1930, Avraamov trans­lat­ed these the­o­ret­i­cal con­cerns into prac­tice at the Cen­tral Lab­o­ra­to­ry of Wire Com­mu­ni­ca­tion in Leningrad, where he pio­neered graph­i­cal sound syn­the­sis after join­ing the team pro­duc­ing the Sovi­et Union’s first sound film, The Plan of Great Works, direct­ed by Abram Room. Based in Leningrad at Shorin’s Cen­tral Lab­o­ra­to­ry of Wire Com­mu­ni­ca­tion, he worked along­side inven­tor Evge­ny Sholpo and ani­ma­tor Mikhail Tsekhanovsky. The group attempt­ed to build a sound­track that would sat­is­fy both their exper­i­men­tal ambi­tions and the more con­ser­v­a­tive expec­ta­tions of polit­i­cal over­seers. Avraamov lat­er recalled that he want­ed to avoid con­ven­tion­al musi­cal cues entire­ly and pur­sue noise, but vis­it­ing offi­cials and cul­tur­al admin­is­tra­tors react­ed with con­fu­sion, dis­miss­ing the results as “chaos,” forc­ing the team into com­pro­mise and com­pose more tra­di­tion­al sounds.

Using an ani­ma­tion stand, geo­met­ric wave­forms and orna­men­tal pat­terns were drawn on paper and pho­tographed onto a film’s opti­cal sound­track. Dur­ing play­back, a pho­to­cell con­vert­ed the light vari­a­tions into elec­tri­cal sig­nals, enabling pre­cise con­trol over pitch, tim­bre, glis­san­di, and polypho­ny with­out instru­ments or per­form­ers. Sound could be gen­er­at­ed from alge­bra­ic equa­tions, geo­met­ric forms, or orna­men­tal motifs.

By Octo­ber 1929, the first film reel was devel­oped, bring­ing Avraamov clos­er to a long-stand­ing goal: the direct syn­the­sis of sound. It was Tsekhanovsky who pro­posed using visu­al orna­ment as an audio source, sug­gest­ing that Egypt­ian or Greek dec­o­ra­tive pat­terns, such as the frieze of an ancient Greek tem­ple, might func­tion as wave­forms. From this moment, graph­i­cal sound was born. The team began pro­duc­ing what they var­i­ous­ly called “orna­men­tal,” “drawn,” or “syn­thet­ic” sound: hand-ren­dered shapes pho­tographed onto opti­cal sound­tracks and trans­lat­ed into audio through pho­to­elec­tric play­back, a prac­tice root­ed in Futur­ist the­o­ry.

In 1930, Avraamov became the first com­pos­er to pub­licly demon­strate sound works cre­at­ed entire­ly through draw­ing. Using geo­met­ric pro­files, orna­men­tal motifs, and abstract wave­forms, he pho­tographed hand-ren­dered shapes onto opti­cal sound­tracks with an ani­ma­tion stand. When pro­ject­ed and read by a pho­to­elec­tric sys­tem, these draw­ings pro­duced audi­ble tones with­out the use of instru­ments or per­form­ers. On 20 Feb­ru­ary 1930 he out­lined the emerg­ing method in a lec­ture to the sound-on-film group at ARRK, and lat­er that year, on 30 August at the First Con­fer­ence on Ani­ma­tion Tech­niques in Moscow, he for­mal­ly pre­sent­ed the tech­nique under the title Orna­men­tal Sound Ani­ma­tion.

Observers imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­nized the sig­nif­i­cance of the demon­stra­tion. Vladimir Solev lat­er recalled that at the dawn of sound film Avraamov had already exhib­it­ed exper­i­men­tal pieces “based on geo­met­ric pro­files and orna­ments, pro­duced pure­ly with drawn meth­ods,” after which his assis­tants went on to devel­op their own vari­a­tions. By Octo­ber 1930 the tech­nique was described pub­licly in E. Veisenberg’s arti­cle Ani­ma­tion of Sound, mark­ing its tran­si­tion from lab­o­ra­to­ry exper­i­ment to a repro­ducible artis­tic method.

Two months lat­er, film­mak­er Mikhail Tsekhanovsky elab­o­rat­ed on the impli­ca­tions of drawn sound in his essay on sound film, not­ing that the tech­niques devel­oped by Avraamov in Moscow and by Evge­ny Sholpo and Geor­gy Rim­sky-Kor­sakov in Leningrad opened the pos­si­bil­i­ty for sound and image to evolve in par­al­lel from the first frame to the last. “we are achiev­ing a real pos­si­bil­i­ty of gain­ing a new lev­el of per­fec­tion: both sound and the visu­al can­vas will be devel­op­ing com­plete­ly in par­al­lel from the first to the last frame… Thus drawn sound film is a new artis­tic trend in which for the first time in our his­to­ry music and art meet each oth­er.”

By the ear­ly 1930s, Sovi­et lab­o­ra­to­ries had already learned to sam­ple instru­men­tal tim­bres and were exper­i­ment­ing with syn­thet­ic voice pro­duc­tion. Between 1929 and 1934, Avraamov con­tributed to mul­ti­ple sound-film projects while head­ing the sound lab­o­ra­to­ry at the Research Insti­tute of Cin­e­matog­ra­phy, help­ing define the acoustic vocab­u­lary of ear­ly Sovi­et cin­e­ma.

Avraamov’s lat­er work antic­i­pat­ed sev­er­al pil­lars of mod­ern sound prac­tice. After con­tribut­ing to the sound­track of A Plan for Great Works, he con­tin­ued exper­i­ment­ing with sound syn­the­sis, edit­ing, and mon­tage, work­ing meth­ods that involved phys­i­cal­ly manip­u­lat­ing opti­cal sound­tracks led to what musi­col­o­gist Andrey Smirnov lat­er iden­ti­fied as the inven­tion of graph­i­cal sound. These exper­i­ments, along with his use of sam­pling-like tech­niques and noise syn­the­sis, place Avraamov among the ear­ly prog­en­i­tors of what is now broad­ly cat­e­go­rized as elec­tron­ic music.

The tech­nique behind graph­i­cal sound relied on pho­to­elec­tric con­ver­sion. A beam of light passed through a trans­par­ent strip or rotat­ing disc bear­ing a drawn wave­form; vari­a­tions in the draw­ing altered light inten­si­ty, which a sele­ni­um cell con­vert­ed into cor­re­spond­ing volt­age changes and thus audi­ble pitch and tim­bre. Sim­i­lar sound-on-film and pho­to­elec­tric syn­the­sis sys­tems pro­lif­er­at­ed inter­na­tion­al­ly in the ear­ly 1930s, includ­ing Tönende Orna­mente by Oskar Fischinger and Tönende Hand­schrift by Rudolf Pfen­ninger, as well as instru­ments such as Spielmann’s Super­pi­ano and Welte’s Licht-Ton Orgel, appar­ent­ly devel­oped inde­pen­dent­ly of their Sovi­et col­leagues. These par­al­lel devel­op­ments placed Avraamov’s work with­in a glob­al shift toward syn­the­siz­ing sound from light, math­e­mat­ics, and graph­ic form—an ear­ly blue­print for mod­ern elec­tron­ic audio.

Avraamov’s exper­i­ments coin­cid­ed with his advo­ca­cy of the ultra­chro­mat­ic 48-tone sys­tem, out­lined in his 1927 the­sis The Uni­ver­sal Sys­tem of Tones, pre­sent­ed in Berlin, Frank­furt, and Stuttgart. His micro­ton­al pro­pos­als pre­dat­ed con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous devel­op­ments such as Geor­gy Rimsky-Korsakov’s quar­ter-tone research and Julián Carrillo’s Sonido 13, but Avraamov alone linked expand­ed pitch sys­tems with syn­thet­ic sound pro­duc­tion and graph­ic nota­tion. He also served as sound design­er for Piatilet­ka: The Plan of Great Works, help­ing bring these ideas into cin­e­mat­ic prac­tice.

Avraamov reject­ed any strict divi­sion between music and noise, treat­ing both as forms of orga­nized sound. Indus­tri­al and mechan­i­cal tim­bres could be recre­at­ed acousti­cal­ly: the hum of a dynamo motor using semi­tone inter­vals in low reg­is­ters, the vibra­tion of an air­craft through beat­ing fourths, or fac­to­ry sirens approx­i­mat­ed with organ pipes and close micro­phone place­ment. Com­plex indus­tri­al rhythms were con­struct­ed using pre­pared grand pianos to sim­u­late ham­mer strikes, while bell tones could be repro­duced through dense piano chord clus­ters. When dead­lines required, actu­al noise could be record­ed direct­ly, but his guid­ing prin­ci­ple remained syn­the­sis and trans­for­ma­tion rather than raw cap­ture. Though the archive has been lost, doc­u­men­ta­tion indi­cates that the work antic­i­pat­ed lat­er devel­op­ments in elec­tron­ic com­po­si­tion, opti­cal syn­the­sis, and indus­tri­al sound aes­thet­ics by sev­er­al decades.

Like Avraamov, Fischinger also lat­er wrote that orna­ment and music are direct­ly con­nect­ed: “Between orna­ment and music per­sist direct con­nec­tions, which means that Orna­ments are Music. If you look at a strip of film from my exper­i­ments with syn­thet­ic sound, you will see along one edge a thin strip of jagged orna­men­tal pat­terns. These orna­ments are drawn music — they are sound: when run through a pro­jec­tor, these graph­ic sounds broad­cast tones of a hith­er­to unheard puri­ty, and thus, quite obvi­ous­ly, fan­tas­tic pos­si­bil­i­ties open up for the com­po­si­tion of music in the future”

In the Sovi­et con­text, how­ev­er, light-sound syn­the­sis attract­ed par­tic­u­lar atten­tion, part­ly due to the lin­ger­ing influ­ence of Alexan­der Scri­abin and his synes­thet­ic the­o­ries link­ing sound, col­or, and spir­i­tu­al per­cep­tion on young Sovi­et musi­cians and artists, despite pass­ing away over a decade and a half ear­li­er. Researchers quick­ly real­ized that drawn sound could gen­er­ate tran­si­tion­al timbres—hybrid tones shift­ing between instru­men­tal families—long before elec­tron­ic syn­the­sis made such trans­for­ma­tions com­mon­place. Each mem­ber of the orig­i­nal team that devel­oped Room’s film saw the process as a path toward their own ambi­tions: Avraamov toward ultra­chro­mat­ic son­ic struc­tures, Sholpo toward per­former-less instru­ments, and the ani­ma­tors toward a uni­fied audio­vi­su­al lan­guage.

In the autumn of 1930, Avraamov estab­lished the Multzvuk Group, a lab­o­ra­to­ry-style col­lec­tive ded­i­cat­ed to research in graph­i­cal sound and ultra­chro­mat­ic har­mo­ny. The team was small but spe­cial­ized: a tech­ni­cal draughts­man and cam­era­man Niko­lai Zhe­lyn­sky, ani­ma­tor Niko­lai Voinov, and acousti­cian Boris Yankovsky. Yankovsky played a cen­tral role, trans­lat­ing musi­cal scores into Avraamov’s forty-eight-step micro­ton­al Welt­ton­sys­tem and into Andrey Samoilov’s Ober-Unter-Tone har­mon­ic sys­tem. Final scores were encod­ed using Yankovsky’s sev­en­ty-two-step ultra­chro­mat­ic scale; dynam­ic gra­da­tions were indi­cat­ed through vari­a­tions in light expo­sure (cam­era diaphragm set­tings), while tem­po and rhyth­mic motion were con­trolled by frame counts. Avraamov con­duct­ed acoustic exper­i­ments in mul­ti-expo­sure opti­cal record­ing, enabling glis­san­di, tim­bral cross-fades, and poly­phon­ic lay­er­ing — a prim­i­tive form of mul­ti­track sound syn­the­sis. Between 1930 and 1931 he also taught an elec­tive course at the Moscow Con­ser­va­to­ry titled His­to­ry and The­o­ry of Tone Sys­tems.

The Multzvuk group ini­tial­ly oper­at­ed at Mos­film in Moscow before relo­cat­ing in 1931 to the Sci­en­tif­ic Research Insti­tute for Film and Pho­tog­ra­phy (NIKFI), where it became known as the Syn­ton­film Lab­o­ra­to­ry. Fund­ing was dis­con­tin­ued in Decem­ber 1932; the group moved briefly to Mezhrabpom­film before clos­ing in 1934 on eco­nom­ic grounds, offi­cial­ly deemed unable to jus­ti­fy its costs. Despite its short lifes­pan, the lab­o­ra­to­ry func­tioned as a pro­to­type for the mod­ern elec­tron­ic music stu­dio: a research envi­ron­ment com­bin­ing com­po­si­tion, acoustics, engi­neer­ing, and image-based sound pro­duc­tion.

Dur­ing its four years of activ­i­ty, the group pro­duced more than 2,000 meters of opti­cal sound film. These includ­ed exper­i­men­tal films and stud­ies such as Orna­men­tal Ani­ma­tion, Chi­nese Tune, Organ Chords, Unter­tonikum, Pre­lude, Stac­ca­to Stud­ies, Danc­ing Etude, and Flute Study. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, none of the work has sur­vived. The nitrate film archive was stored in Avraamov’s apart­ment and is believed to have been burned between 1936 and 1938 when his sons stole and used the high­ly flam­ma­ble film stock to make rock­ets and smoke bombs.

The clo­sure of the sound lab­o­ra­to­ry was to be expect­ed, as the broad­er polit­i­cal cli­mate was shift­ing rapid­ly. By the mid-1930s, Social­ist Real­ism had been con­sol­i­dat­ed as the offi­cial doc­trine of Sovi­et art. Exper­i­men­tal prac­tices asso­ci­at­ed with the 1920s avant-garde—microtonality, elec­tron­ic instru­ments, graph­i­cal sound, and abstract for­mal sys­tems were increas­ing­ly labeled “for­mal­ist.” In offi­cial rhetoric, for­mal­ism sig­ni­fied elit­ism, tech­ni­cal excess, and a fail­ure to serve pro­le­tar­i­an ide­ol­o­gy. Avraamov’s ultra­chro­mat­ic the­o­ries and syn­thet­ic sound exper­i­ments fell square­ly with­in this cat­e­go­ry. By 1934, non­con­form­ing artis­tic work was being mar­gin­al­ized or open­ly denounced across cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions.

In 1935, Avraamov attempt­ed to reestab­lish a research plat­form with­in a more insti­tu­tion­al set­ting. Togeth­er with com­pos­er and polit­i­cal fig­ure Boris Krasin and the­o­rist Alex­ei Ogolevets, he helped found the Autonomous Research Sec­tion (ANTES) at the Union of Com­posers in Moscow. ANTES aimed to con­tin­ue inves­ti­ga­tion into new tonal sys­tems, elec­tron­ic instru­ments, graph­i­cal sound, and syn­thet­ic film tech­niques. Its mem­ber­ship includ­ed sev­er­al lead­ing inven­tors of ear­ly elec­tron­ic instru­ments: Andrey Volodin (Ekvodin), Alexan­der Ivanov (Emiri­ton), Kon­stan­tin Koval­sky (Theremin), and Niko­lai Ananiev (Sonar). Geor­gy Rim­sky-Kor­sakov, grand­son of Niko­lai Rim­sky-Kor­sakov, head­ed the Leningrad branch.

ANTES rep­re­sent­ed the last major insti­tu­tion­al con­tin­u­a­tion of the exper­i­men­tal ener­gy of the 1920s. Its lifes­pan was brief. On 28 Jan­u­ary 1936, the news­pa­per Prav­da pub­lished the arti­cle Mud­dle instead of Music, attack­ing the opera Lady Mac­beth of the Mtsen­sk Dis­trict by Dmitri Shostakovich. Although unsigned, the arti­cle has often been attrib­uted to high-rank­ing cul­tur­al author­i­ties, pos­si­bly includ­ing Pla­ton Kerzhent­sev, the new­ly-appoint­ed Chair­man of the Com­mit­tee on Arts Affairs. The pub­li­ca­tion marked the begin­ning of a sus­tained cam­paign against per­ceived for­mal­ism in music, which would cul­mi­nate in the 1946 Zhdanov Doc­trine, which set tra­di­tion­al clas­si­cal and work­er-ori­ent­ed music as the stan­dard, while for­bid­ding the pro­duc­tion and dis­sem­i­na­tion of any for­eign or avant-garde music such as jazz.

Lat­er that year, on 21 June 1936, Boris Krasin died. Short­ly after­ward, ANTES was dis­solved, and its exper­i­men­tal projects lost insti­tu­tion­al back­ing. While Avraamov was not pub­licly sin­gled out, his work, cen­tered on ultra­chro­mat­ic sys­tems, syn­thet­ic sound, and tech­ni­cal inno­va­tion, aligned poor­ly with the increas­ing­ly rigid expec­ta­tions of Social­ist Real­ism. By the mid-1930s, state pol­i­cy favored acces­si­ble, ide­o­log­i­cal­ly trans­par­ent com­po­si­tions over spec­u­la­tive or tech­no­log­i­cal­ly dri­ven exper­i­men­ta­tion. With­in this frame­work, Avraamov’s research pro­grams could no longer be sus­tained.

The apoth­e­o­sis of Arse­ny Avraamov’s cre­ative rad­i­cal­ism arrived in the ear­ly 1940s, when he sent a pro­pos­al direct­ly to Joseph Stal­in. The ges­ture was not an act of naïveté so much as the log­i­cal exten­sion of his life­long cam­paign against the tonal and insti­tu­tion­al con­ven­tions of West­ern music. Avraamov pro­posed a replace­ment to the Sovi­et nation­al anthem. He did so not for ide­o­log­i­cal rea­sons, nor because of the lyrics by Sergey Mikhalkov or specif­i­cal­ly the music by Alexan­der Alexan­drov, but because it remained root­ed in the clas­si­cal tonal sys­tem. To him, this rep­re­sent­ed a struc­tur­al con­ser­vatism at odds with a state that claimed rev­o­lu­tion­ary trans­for­ma­tion in every sphere of life.

Although some exper­i­ments with sound, par­tic­u­lar­ly graph­i­cal sound and its role in film, were reassessed dur­ing and fol­low­ing the end of the war, they con­tin­ued on with­out Avraamov and in the ser­vice of more tra­di­tion­al roles in cin­e­ma and arts on the whole, some­times as an eco­nom­ic mea­sure in the wake of post-war eco­nom­ic dif­fi­cul­ty. Evgeniy Sholpo, in par­tic­u­lar, con­tin­ued to cre­ate sound­tracks and give per­for­mances, billed to audi­ences as “music with­out per­form­ers and instru­ments.” seem­ing­ly hav­ing achieved the atmos­phere Avraamov had envi­sioned near­ly three decades pri­or.

How­ev­er, in the moment, Avraamov’s pro­pos­al must be under­stood in the broad­er con­text of ear­ly Sovi­et attempts to redesign cul­ture from the ground up. Date (and even year) reform, exper­i­ments with Latiniza­tion of Cyril­lic scripts, and sym­bol­ic pro­pos­als for new work­er-peas­ant alpha­bets reflect­ed a belief that every­thing could be remade. Avraamov extend­ed this log­ic to sound. In his let­ter, he argued that the anthem of the Sovi­et Union should be com­posed using an entire­ly new tonal frame­work, poten­tial­ly his own 48-tone sys­tem, and per­formed by syn­thet­ic means. He even imag­ined the anthem deliv­ered in the syn­the­sized voice of Vladimir Mayakovsky, whose declam­a­to­ry futur­ist style embod­ied the rev­o­lu­tion­ary voice of the new era.

The pro­pos­al was nev­er adopt­ed. Avraamov avoid­ed the harsh­er fates suf­fered by some exper­i­men­tal inno­va­tors, Leon Theremin, for exam­ple, was impris­oned in a labor camp, but Stal­in­ist cul­tur­al pol­i­cy deci­sive­ly favored neo­clas­si­cal clar­i­ty and ide­o­log­i­cal acces­si­bil­i­ty. After the cul­tur­al crack­down sig­naled by the 1936 Prav­da attack on for­mal­ism, mod­ernist exper­i­men­ta­tion became increas­ing­ly unten­able. Elec­tron­ic music and ultra­chro­mat­ic sys­tems, once framed as rev­o­lu­tion­ary, were recast as abstract, social­ly detached, and even bour­geois.

In 1935, at the age of fifty, he was sent to Nalchik, in the North Cau­ca­sus with his wife, Olga Karlov­na, and their six chil­dren, where his work took an old turn. The post-futur­ist prophet of indus­tri­al sound once again became a metic­u­lous col­lec­tor of tra­di­tion­al music. In Kabardi­no-Balka­ria he immersed him­self in the musi­cal cul­tures of the region, regard­ing the preser­va­tion of local tra­di­tions as a nation­al duty. Dur­ing this peri­od he gath­ered more than 300 authen­tic songs and instru­men­tal melodies and began com­pil­ing a vol­ume titled Kabardin and Balka­r­i­an Musi­cal Folk­lore. The man­u­script remained unfin­ished due to the out­break of World War II, but his field record­ings and tran­scrip­tions pre­served a sub­stan­tial body of musi­cal mate­r­i­al that might oth­er­wise have been lost.

This ethno­graph­ic work was not a retreat from his ear­li­er ideas but a con­tin­u­a­tion of them by oth­er means. Avraamov’s 24- and 48-tone untem­pered sys­tems allowed him to doc­u­ment micro­ton­al inflec­tions that con­ven­tion­al musi­col­o­gy could not cap­ture. The dis­tinc­tive pitch nuances of North Cau­casian melodies, slid­ing inter­vals, flex­i­ble into­na­tion, and non-equal divi­sions of the scale, could be record­ed with unprece­dent­ed pre­ci­sion. In this sense, his ultra­chro­mat­ic the­o­ries found prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tion not in futur­is­tic urban spec­ta­cles but in the preser­va­tion of ancient moun­tain tra­di­tions.

Avraamov sur­vived the tight­en­ing ide­o­log­i­cal cli­mate by adapt­ing his field of activ­i­ty rather than aban­don­ing his prin­ci­ples. The Sovi­et anthem remained firm­ly tonal and orches­tral, nev­er syn­the­sized, nev­er ultra­chro­mat­ic. Yet in the moun­tains of the Cau­ca­sus, he con­tin­ued pur­su­ing the same ques­tion that had dri­ven his work from the begin­ning: how to remake musi­cal sound so that it could ful­ly embody the com­plex­i­ty of human expres­sion and the acoustic real­i­ties of the world.

Con­tem­po­rary local press pro­files treat­ed the fam­i­ly as some­thing of a cul­tur­al curios­i­ty: a large house­hold trans­plant­ed from the Sovi­et avant-garde into the Cau­ca­sus moun­tains, rais­ing musi­cal­ly gift­ed chil­dren under con­di­tions far removed from the lab­o­ra­to­ries and stu­dios of Leningrad and Moscow. Olga Karlov­na spoke warm­ly to jour­nal­ists about their domes­tic life, while a pub­lished fam­i­ly pho­to­graph, now con­sid­ered rare, doc­u­ment­ed the composer’s new sur­round­ings.

Avraamov quick­ly became embed­ded in the republic’s cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions. For the 15th anniver­sary of Kabardi­no-Balka­r­i­an auton­o­my, he col­lab­o­rat­ed with Kabar­dian writer and poet Asker­bi Short­anov to cre­ate the lit­er­ary-musi­cal can­ta­ta The Hap­pi­ness of the Peo­ple. The pro­duc­tion was staged on a mon­u­men­tal scale: more than 3,000 par­tic­i­pants, includ­ing singers, instru­men­tal­ists, folk per­form­ers, read­ers, pro­fes­sion­al actors, and ama­teurs, took part in the per­for­mance.

His work in the region extend­ed across choral, orches­tral, and the­atri­cal forms. He com­posed a cycle of songs set to texts by Kabar­dian poet Ali Shogentsukov and also arranged Kabar­dian and Balkar songs based on local myth and his­to­ry, adapt­ing them for choir and solo per­for­mance.

Along­side choral arrange­ments, Avraamov pro­duced orches­tral works root­ed in region­al themes, includ­ing the March on a Kabar­dian Theme, the over­ture Aul Batyr, and Fan­ta­sy on Kabar­dian Themes, as well as sev­er­al choral com­po­si­tions. Unlike his ear­li­er ultra­chro­mat­ic exper­i­ments, these works were writ­ten for stan­dard sym­phon­ic instru­men­ta­tion and like­ly avoid­ed stepped microchro­mat­ic sys­tems; any micro­ton­al inflec­tions func­tioned orna­men­tal­ly rather than as struc­tural­ly autonomous inter­vals.

He con­tin­ued devel­op­ing sym­phon­ic treat­ments of tra­di­tion­al dance melodies, work­ing close­ly with the Kabardi­no-Balka­r­i­an Song and Dance Ensem­ble, espe­cial­ly its choral divi­sion, pro­duc­ing arrange­ments of folk songs, becom­ing the first com­pos­er to pro­vide orig­i­nal music for Kabar­dian and Balkar dra­mat­ic pro­duc­tions. With­in region­al cul­tur­al his­to­ries, Avraamov is fre­quent­ly iden­ti­fied as a Kabar­dian com­pos­er, a reflec­tion of both his long res­i­dence and his sub­stan­tial con­tri­bu­tions to the republic’s musi­cal life.

In 1938, after four years of rel­a­tive iso­la­tion in the Cau­ca­sus, Avraamov received a state prize of 5,000 rubles along with a health resort vouch­er to Kislovod­sk, prompt­ing him to return with his fam­i­ly to Moscow. His return, how­ev­er, coin­cid­ed with one of the most per­ilous moments in Sovi­et his­to­ry: the height of Great Ter­ror. The cap­i­tal had become a cul­tur­al waste­land shaped by fear and silence. Many artists and schol­ars had been impris­oned, exe­cut­ed, or dri­ven into obscu­ri­ty, while those who remained worked cau­tious­ly under the pres­sure of ide­o­log­i­cal scruti­ny. Soon after his return, sev­er­al of Avraamov’s for­mer col­leagues from Kabardi­no-Balka­ria were arrest­ed. Archival mate­ri­als he had left behind in the region dis­ap­peared along with oth­er doc­u­ments con­fis­cat­ed by the NKVD, eras­ing valu­able records of his research.

This moment marked an abrupt nar­row­ing of hori­zons for a com­pos­er who had spent decades push­ing the bound­aries of sound. In 1939 he pub­lished an arti­cle titled Syn­thet­ic Music, one of the last clear state­ments of his exper­i­men­tal vision before the out­break of war fur­ther reshaped Sovi­et cul­tur­al life.

Before the war, the Union of Sovi­et Com­posers had gath­ered doc­u­ments to award him the hon­orary title of “Hon­ored Work­er,” which would have pro­vid­ed mate­r­i­al pro­tec­tion. The files were lost dur­ing emer­gency wartime trans­port, along with oth­er par­ty records. In July 1940, com­pos­er Mikhail Gnesin wrote a let­ter sup­port­ing Avraamov’s peti­tion for increased state assis­tance:

“Arse­ny Mikhailovich Avraamov is one of the most out­stand­ing fig­ures in Sovi­et musi­cal art I have ever met in my life… A. Avraamov should also be rec­og­nized as a founder of Sovi­et musi­cal acoustics. The major­i­ty of Sovi­et schol­ars in the field of acoustics… are his pupils, or have begun their work under his influ­ence.”

The appeal had lit­tle effect. By the late 1930s, past achieve­ments in avant-garde exper­i­men­ta­tion car­ried lit­tle insti­tu­tion­al weight. Avraamov lived in near des­ti­tu­tion with his wife and ten chil­dren in a sin­gle-room Moscow flat, sur­viv­ing on a small pen­sion and irreg­u­lar work.

When the Ger­man inva­sion began in 1941, Avraamov refused to evac­u­ate from Moscow, remain­ing with his fam­i­ly in a dacha out­side the city. He seemed con­vinced the cap­i­tal would not fall. The deci­sion came at severe cost: wartime short­ages pushed the house­hold to the brink of star­va­tion. Dur­ing this peri­od he con­tin­ued draft­ing ambi­tious cre­ative plans, even as cir­cum­stances made their real­iza­tion impos­si­ble.

Despite hard­ship, he remained active where pos­si­ble. From 1941 to 1943 he direct­ed the Russ­ian Folk Choir found­ed by P. G. Yarkov, con­tin­u­ing his engage­ment with tra­di­tion­al music at a time when large-scale exper­i­men­ta­tion was polit­i­cal­ly and mate­ri­al­ly unten­able.

Despite sur­viv­ing the war years in Moscow, Avraamov’s life’s work was almost entire­ly destroyed, first by acci­dent, then by fear. The kilo­me­ters of opti­cal film pro­duced dur­ing the Multzvuk peri­od met a trag­ic end between 1936 and 1938. While Avraamov was work­ing in Kabardi­no-Balka­ria, his chil­dren secret­ly took the high­ly flam­ma­ble nitrate film stock, turned it into impro­vised smoke bombs and rock­ets, and ignit­ing them in the court­yard of their Moscow home. The archive was quick­ly reduced to ash. By the time he returned in 1938, lit­tle remained.

The sur­viv­ing doc­u­ments fared no bet­ter. In 1941, a fold­er con­tain­ing his per­son­al papers and research mate­ri­als was report­ed­ly thrown into a fur­nace. Avraamov often signed let­ters to Revek­ka with the words: “Love. Work. 700°,” sug­gest­ing a cre­ative tem­per­a­ture at white heat. The irony is stark: around 700 degrees Cel­sius is a typ­i­cal fur­nace tem­per­a­ture. It was, sym­bol­i­cal­ly and per­haps lit­er­al­ly, the tem­per­a­ture at which his lega­cy dis­ap­peared. What did not burn was dis­card­ed; a small por­tion was lat­er recov­ered and trans­ferred to the State Muse­um of Musi­cal Cul­ture, but in frag­men­tary con­di­tion, most­ly loose man­u­script pages with­out coher­ent order.

Anoth­er loss fol­lowed bureau­crat­ic cau­tion. The Union of Sovi­et Com­posers had col­lect­ed his doc­u­ments in con­nec­tion with award­ing him the title of Hon­ored Work­er. At the out­break of war, amid pan­ic and polit­i­cal sus­pi­cion, the mate­ri­als, togeth­er with his par­ty papers, were report­ed­ly destroyed. In the atmos­phere shaped by repres­sion and fear, preser­va­tion was a risk few were will­ing to take.

Yet even in these years of depri­va­tion, Avraamov con­tin­ued to think on an epic scale. In Novem­ber 1943, he com­plet­ed a long auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal state­ment addressed to the Cen­tral Com­mit­tee, begun ear­li­er that sum­mer. It end­ed with char­ac­ter­is­tic grandios­i­ty:

“At the Amer­i­can exhi­bi­tion ‘World of Tomor­row’ I will show such ‘exhibits’ that Amer­i­ca will shake… the Negroes will not hear their music in a tav­ern-jazz style, but in ‘nation­al in form, social­ist in con­tent.’ We will also write a real hymn of Vic­to­ry not on the help­less­ly-child­ish rhymes of Mikhalkov, but on the inge­nious (both in form and in con­tent) text of some new super-Mayakovsky who in a few months will come out of my poet­ic stu­dio.”

He out­lined con­crete pledges should he be rein­stat­ed in the Par­ty: to “Cre­ate and head a gen­uine Acad­e­my of Arts”; to launch edu­ca­tion­al work on “the nation­al-musi­cal prob­lem,” “syn­thet­ic music on film,” “elec­tron­ic musi­cal instru­ments,” “polyrhyth­mic orna­men­ta­tion,” and “new poet­ics”; to con­vene in Moscow an Inter­na­tion­al Con­gress on the Music of the Peo­ples of the World; to estab­lish a uni­ver­sal sci­en­tif­ic tran­scrip­tion of folk­lore based on his Welt­ton­sys­tem; even to build a pneu­mat­ic whis­tle organ in the Red Square for use dur­ing nation­al cel­e­bra­tions and mil­i­tary salutes.

Accord­ing to fam­i­ly accounts, a reply alleged­ly came direct­ly from Lavren­tiy Beria. Its mes­sage was brief: “There is a war on, do not engage in non­sense.”

On 19 May 1944, Avraamov he went to the Music Fund on Miusskaya Street to col­lect a pay­check. On the return jour­ney, his mon­ey, an entire month’s income, was stolen. Unable to pay the tram fare, he was forced to walk home under scorch­ing heat along Malaya Yaki­man­ka. By now, he suf­fered from heart trou­ble. Reach­ing the apart­ment bare­ly alive, he report­ed­ly asked his wife to fill his pipe, took a drag, and col­lapsed. His chil­dren ran out­side in pan­ic, cry­ing. A thun­der­clap sound­ed; rain began to fall. Arse­ny Mikhailovich Avraamov was dead. He was buried at Danilovskoye Ceme­tery. The fam­i­ly, impov­er­ished, could not afford a mon­u­ment. Over time, the unmarked grave, like so many oth­er mate­ri­als from his life, was lost.

Avraamov’s life closed as dra­mat­i­cal­ly as it had unfold­ed. A pio­neer of syn­thet­ic sound, ultra­chro­mat­ic har­mo­ny, and drawn audio, he out­paced his tech­no­log­i­cal era and ulti­mate­ly out­lived the insti­tu­tion­al con­di­tions that had briefly made his exper­i­ments pos­si­ble. Most of his works were destroyed, his archives scat­tered or burned. What remains is the record of an imag­i­na­tion that refused mod­er­a­tion.

Because of his exper­i­ments with graph­i­cal sound and syn­thet­ic audio, Arsény Avraamov is now regard­ed as one of the prog­en­i­tors of elec­tron­ic music. Work­ing decades before mag­net­ic tape, mod­u­lar syn­the­sis, or dig­i­tal sam­pling, he treat­ed sound as mate­r­i­al that could be con­struct­ed, drawn, spa­tial­ized, and engi­neered. In doing so, he expand­ed the idea of what music could be and where it could exist.

Music writer David Stubbs has argued that Avraamov imag­i­na­tive­ly extend­ed the very notion of musi­cal space, pre­fig­ur­ing lat­er envi­ron­men­tal sound works by Karl­heinz Stock­hausen. His approach also antic­i­pat­ed Pierre Schaeffer’s musique con­crète by col­laps­ing the bound­ary between art and every­day sound: loco­mo­tives, fac­to­ry sirens, artillery fire, and indus­tri­al horns were not back­ground noise but com­po­si­tion­al mate­r­i­al. Long before Scha­ef­fer record­ed trains in Paris, before John Cage reframed silence and chance as music, and long before Stock­hausen placed per­form­ers in heli­copters, Avraamov had already pro­posed the envi­ron­ment itself as an instru­ment.

His large-scale urban per­for­mances and spa­tial sound think­ing rede­fined com­po­si­tion as an all-encom­pass­ing event rather than a con­cert-hall expe­ri­ence. At the same time, his advo­ca­cy for micro­ton­al sys­tems and rejec­tion of the West­ern twelve-tone tem­pera­ment aligned with lat­er avant-garde attempts to expand the son­ic palette beyond con­ven­tion­al har­mo­ny.

Avraamov’s work dis­ap­peared from cir­cu­la­tion dur­ing the Stal­in era, and for decades his con­tri­bu­tions remained obscure. Schol­ar­ly inter­est revived in the 1990s, when post-Sovi­et archival access allowed researchers to reassess ear­ly Sovi­et sound exper­i­men­ta­tion. A piv­otal role was played by the Theremin Cen­ter at the Moscow State Con­ser­va­to­ry, found­ed by Andrei Smirnov in 1992. The cen­ter pre­served doc­u­ments and arti­facts that helped recon­struct Avraamov’s role in noise music, sound syn­the­sis, and graph­i­cal audio. Smirnov’s research cul­mi­nat­ed in Sound in Z (2013), which pre­sent­ed visu­al and tex­tu­al evi­dence of exper­i­ments long thought lost.

Only in the ear­ly 2000s did it become pos­si­ble to approx­i­mate the authen­tic acoustic field of the Sym­pho­ny of Sirens in a stu­dio set­ting using Avraamov’s orig­i­nal instruc­tions. The first mod­ern recon­struc­tion did not emerge from a state archive, aca­d­e­m­ic preser­va­tion pro­gram, or any offi­cial cam­paign to “restore cul­tur­al her­itage.” Instead, it appeared in a com­pi­la­tion of the ear­ly Sovi­et avant-garde, cre­at­ed through the efforts of an inde­pen­dent British label led by com­pos­er Chris Cut­ler, with prepa­ra­tion work car­ried out in Spain. There was no com­mer­cial log­ic behind the project and lit­tle expec­ta­tion of broad pub­lic demand. Its exis­tence sug­gests a dif­fer­ent motive: recog­ni­tion of the his­tor­i­cal and con­cep­tu­al impor­tance of ear­ly sound exper­i­men­ta­tion, and a desire among small net­works of musi­cians and researchers to recov­er over­looked avant-garde work.

A major mile­stone came in 2009, when com­pos­er Sergey Khis­ma­tov cre­at­ed a more elab­o­rate recon­struc­tion of the 1923 Moscow per­for­mance, Sym­pho­ny of Indus­tri­al Horns using archival descrip­tions, sam­pled indus­tri­al sounds, syn­the­siz­ers, and cus­tom tech­ni­cal process­es. Engi­neers recon­struct­ed the per­for­mance by plac­ing a sim­u­lat­ed lis­ten­er near Moskvoret­skaya Embank­ment and cal­cu­lat­ing dis­tances to fac­to­ry horn clus­ters, includ­ing Kras­ny Oktyabr, Serp i Molot, and Trekhgor­naya Man­u­fak­tu­ra. Delay times, reflec­tions from build­ing façades, dead zones, and even the day’s weath­er con­di­tions were mod­eled to recre­ate how sound prop­a­gat­ed through the urban envi­ron­ment. The result­ing record­ing offers a strik­ing approx­i­ma­tion of the orig­i­nal son­ic archi­tec­ture.

The recon­struc­tion relied on reports pub­lished in the Novem­ber 1923 issues of Izves­tia and Prav­da, as well as lat­er mem­oirs and eye­wit­ness accounts. From these sources, researchers were able to deter­mine the posi­tions of the prin­ci­pal sound sources: the Magis­tral, artillery units, rail­way sta­tions, and indus­tri­al sites, the sched­uled start time and rep­e­ti­tion cue, ele­ments of the open­ing “fan­fare,” and aspects of the over­all musi­cal struc­ture.

The record­ing also fol­lowed Avraamov’s own pub­lished instruc­tions, orig­i­nal­ly print­ed in three Baku news­pa­pers in Novem­ber 1922 on the eve of the first per­for­mance. By align­ing con­tem­po­rary acoustic mod­el­ing with these his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ments, the recon­struc­tion attempt­ed not mere­ly to imi­tate the noise of the event but to approx­i­mate its spa­tial log­ic: a city trans­formed into a dis­trib­uted instru­ment, coor­di­nat­ed across dis­tance, delay, and echo.

A live per­for­mance was again staged, ampli­fied through mul­ti-chan­nel speak­ers posi­tioned around Naryshkin Bas­tion in St. Peters­burg, the per­for­mance enveloped lis­ten­ers in a field of sirens, mechan­i­cal drones, and choral ele­ments. The audi­ence was rel­a­tive­ly small, var­ied, but intense­ly atten­tive: young musi­cians with sax­o­phones and gui­tars stood along­side punk girls and rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the aca­d­e­m­ic music com­mu­ni­ty. As the indus­tri­al waves of sound rolled across the fortress, birds scat­tered from the air. Tourists, encoun­ter­ing the per­for­mance unex­pect­ed­ly, appeared unsure whether they were wit­ness­ing a his­tor­i­cal reen­act­ment, a con­tem­po­rary art action, or an acoustic anom­aly. The composition’s exag­ger­at­ed indus­tri­al mass, its delib­er­ate mag­ni­fi­ca­tion of sirens, artillery, and mechan­i­cal tim­bre, func­tioned less as spec­ta­cle than as a recon­struc­tion of a utopi­an mod­ernist ges­ture that has since become emblem­at­ic of the ear­ly “indus­tri­al” avant-garde.

Exhi­bi­tions fur­ther cement­ed the redis­cov­ery. The 2014 “Gen­er­a­tion Z” pro­gram at Berlin’s Club Trans­me­di­ale fes­ti­val, co-curat­ed by Andrei Smirnov, dis­played Avraamov’s dia­grams and mechan­i­cal recon­struc­tions of ear­ly Sovi­et sound devices. FM Ein­heit, a mem­ber of Ein­stürzende Neubaut­en, whose per­for­mances mir­rored those of Avraamov’s, even went on to per­form a recre­ation per­for­mance of Sym­pho­ny of Sirens with Andreas Ammer in 2017 in Brno, Czechia, incor­po­rat­ing eight choirs, a steam train, sig­nal guns, ambu­lances, and can­nons in an attempt to approach the scale of the orig­i­nal.

Avraamov’s career defies sim­ple cat­e­go­riza­tion. Although he died in pover­ty and rel­a­tive obscu­ri­ty, his work antic­i­pat­ed micro­ton­al com­po­si­tion, elec­tron­ic syn­the­sis, mul­ti-chan­nel sound design, sam­pling, graph­i­cal audio, and large-scale envi­ron­men­tal per­for­mance. The Sym­pho­ny of Sirens remains his most cit­ed project, but it rep­re­sents only one facet of a broad­er vision: a total rethink­ing of sound as a con­struct­ed, spa­tial, and social phe­nom­e­non.

Long after the war and the destruc­tion of his archives, Avraamov’s influ­ence per­sists. In the ear­ly 1930s, Sovi­et researchers work­ing with him were already syn­the­siz­ing instru­men­tal tim­bres, vocal sounds, and noise sources to pro­duce com­plex poly­phon­ic tex­tures. Sequenc­ing, sound edit­ing, mul­ti-chan­nel play­back, wave­form design, these would become stan­dard tools of late-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry elec­tron­ic music. Avraamov pur­sued them half a cen­tu­ry ear­li­er, armed with film stock, geom­e­try, and a belief that the mod­ern world itself was an unfin­ished orches­tra.

In the pri­vate archive of Avraamov’s son Ger­man, a yel­lowed poster sur­vives. It adver­tis­es a “con­cert-demon­stra­tion” at which Arse­ny Avraamov would present his “music of the future.” The paper is frag­ile, yet it is one of the last tan­gi­ble traces of a com­pos­er whose ambi­tions were any­thing but small. Nev­er­the­less, his intel­lec­tu­al one remains forceful—best expressed in his own words. In 1917, on the eve of rev­o­lu­tion, he pub­lished an essay titled In the Wilds of Aes­thet­ics (Intu­ition or Eru­di­tion?). There he reflect­ed not on tech­nique, but on des­tiny: “we are nei­ther fright­ened nor deterred by either the pos­i­tive infin­i­ty of the future or the neg­a­tive infin­i­ty of the past, lost in the misty reach­es of inac­ces­si­bil­i­ty. With equal zeal, we plunge into the depths of bygone cen­turies and the dark­ness of future ones—in search of truth; we believe: it is there, at that nev­er-reached point where both infini­ties meet, clos­ing the great cir­cle of the world’s exis­tence.”

For Avraamov, art was not refine­ment but synthesis—an ever-expand­ing uni­fi­ca­tion of knowl­edge, per­cep­tion, and sound: “Syn­the­sis march­es vic­to­ri­ous­ly at the fore­front of human­i­ty, tear­ing away one by one the veils from the mys­ter­ies of the future, simul­ta­ne­ous­ly tear­ing off the philo­soph­i­cal masks from the idle spec­u­la­tions of prophet­ic astrologers and pay­ing trib­ute to the true prophets — the intu­itives, who it occa­sion­al­ly encoun­ters in the beyond of life.”

And he under­stood the impa­tience embed­ded in that ambi­tion: “Alas, the biped is impa­tient: his saga is too short! To die, bequeath­ing to his descen­dants the same ant’s lot, with­out tast­ing the fruits of his self­less labor? No, that’s too much. It may be illog­i­cal, self-delu­sion­al, but to see the stub­born­ly unclosed cir­cle com­plete is his pri­mor­dial dream. A pre-exhaus­tive synthesis—that is the true reli­gion of human­i­ty. To ascend the high­est of con­quered peaks and, with a sin­gle glance encom­pass­ing the vast­ness reced­ing into infin­i­ty, to pierce the for­bid­den veils with a pow­er­ful burst of inspiration—a task wor­thy of the great­est genius, a goal tru­ly of high art.”

The arc of his life sug­gests the cost of such think­ing. Avraamov was not mere­ly inno­v­a­tive; he was tem­po­ral­ly mis­aligned. He pro­posed sys­tems, instru­ments, and son­ic envi­ron­ments that had no sta­ble insti­tu­tion­al sup­port. Many of his ideas were dis­missed as eccen­tric or imprac­ti­cal. As Sovi­et cul­tur­al pol­i­cy hard­ened into con­ser­vatism, the ecosys­tem that briefly sus­tained rad­i­cal exper­i­men­ta­tion col­lapsed.

Before the Rev­o­lu­tion, the whis­tle car­ried coer­cive force. In Max­im Gorky’s nov­el Moth­er, it is described as hos­tile, almost vio­lent: “Every day over the work­ers’ set­tle­ment, in the smoky, oily air, the fac­to­ry whis­tle trem­bled and roared, and, obe­di­ent to the call, from the small gray hous­es sud­den peo­ple, who had not yet had time to refresh their mus­cles with sleep, ran out into the street like fright­ened cock­roach­es. In the cold gloom, they walked along the unpaved street toward the tall stone cages of the fac­to­ry. It await­ed them with indif­fer­ent con­fi­dence, illu­mi­nat­ing the mud­dy road with dozens of fat, square eyes. The mud smacked under­foot. Hoarse excla­ma­tions of sleepy voic­es echoed, coarse curs­es angri­ly tore the air, and oth­er sounds float­ed toward them—the heavy clat­ter of machin­ery, the growl of steam.”

Here the whis­tle is compulsion—an acoustic instru­ment of dis­ci­pline. After the Rev­o­lu­tion, how­ev­er, its mean­ing was recod­ed. The same sound could now sig­ni­fy col­lec­tive pow­er rather than sub­ju­ga­tion. Gastev’s poem reframed it as syn­chrony and uni­ty:

“When the morn­ing whis­tles sound in the work­ers’ sub­urbs, it’s not a call to cap­tiv­i­ty. It’s a song of the future.
We once worked in squalid work­shops and began work
at dif­fer­ent times each morn­ing.
And now, at eight o’clock in the morn­ing, the whis­tles sound for a mil­lion peo­ple.
Now, to the minute, we begin togeth­er.
A mil­lion peo­ple lift the ham­mer at the same moment.
Our first blows thun­der togeth­er.
What do the whis­tles sing?
“It’s the morn­ing hymn of uni­ty!”

For Avraamov, the fac­to­ry horn was there­fore not mere­ly an indus­tri­al arti­fact. It was a sym­bol in tran­si­tion: from coer­cion to coor­di­na­tion, from frag­men­ta­tion to mass syn­chro­niza­tion. In trans­form­ing whis­tles into instru­ments and cities into orches­tras, he was not sim­ply ampli­fy­ing noise. He was stag­ing the acoustics of a new social order—an attempt, how­ev­er fleet­ing, to close the “great cir­cle” he imag­ined between past and future.

Through­out his writ­ings, Avraamov repeat­ed­ly returned to the same point of depar­ture. Often, he placed at the head of his essays an epi­graph from Alex­ei Gastev’s 1918 poem “Horns.” The ges­ture was delib­er­ate. It con­densed his aes­thet­ic, polit­i­cal, and acoustic pro­gram into four lines: the trans­for­ma­tion of indus­tri­al sig­nal into col­lec­tive music, of coer­cion into futu­ri­ty, of noise into prophe­cy.

He allowed the poem to speak where argu­ment end­ed:

“When the morn­ing horns blare
in the work­ing-class out­skirts,
it’s not a call of cap­tiv­i­ty:
it’s the song of the future.”