Baku 1922: The historic Soviet concert that predicted the entirety of modern music
These days we get the heebie-jeebies every time we read some tenuous story about AI becoming sentient but imagine living in an era whereby all of a sudden new-fangled machines called ‘cars’ are trundling down the road. It’s such a mind-bending proposition that it almost cost two young Italian boys their lives. In the process, it set up a movement that would soon forecast the future—a future that came to the fore well ahead of its time in Baku, 1922, as the Soviet Union geared up for a revolution in strangely prescient style.
As Arseny Avraamov approached the precipice of a purpose-built tower surveying the sprawling metropolis of Baku, he had a cultural revolution in mind. He was about to conduct an entire city in song. In a futurist melee, the might of man and machine would turn industry, sirens, choirs, bands, wailing babies, screaming banshees, a blasting salvo of ammunition, car horns, foghorns, cannons and a chorale of the finest musicians in the world into one unified song. An entire city and all of its workings were abuzz with song.
13 years earlier, a poet by the name of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, was speeding down the road in a brand-new car. A pair of young pals on bicycles, who were used to looking out for rogue donkeys and nothing more, were cycling along the same road when they suddenly had to swerve to avoid Marinetti’s death machine. In the anger and uproar that followed, the idea of futurism was seeded in the mind of Marinetti.
In that moment, Marinetti realised that machines were mightier than man. It was survival of the fittest and industry was far fitter than individuals. The near-miss of two humble lads resulted in Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto. Therein came the following decree: “We declare that the splendour of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath…a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.”
The Victory of Samothrace is a Hellenistic Greek sculpture of the goddess Nike standing on the bow of a ship. Aside from the missing head and arms it’s a cracking piece of work. But it doesn’t move, it doesn’t thunder along. It didn’t do anything, in fact. It was all now about doing, as he asserted: “Destroy the Museums. Crack syntax. Sabotage the adjective. Leave nothing but the verb.”
This radical notion spread as a new work of art, and it piqued the interest of a certain Russian composer. Avraamov cut an odd figure at the time—he was, essentially, a man interested in musical theory and propaganda. By the time he began to hear about futurism he was teaching a course on Musical Acoustics at the Pressman Conservatory in Rostov-na-Donu city and mingling with high-ranking officials. Shortly after the October Revolution he proposed to the Commissar of Public Enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky, a new project: to burn all the pianos in the USSR.
This did not come to fruition, but needless to say, Avraamov had his eye on a new future for Soviet music. During this time, he revolted against twelve-tone scales and focussed on the harmoniums of noise sources similar to modern stereo-sound. In the process, he devised new genres of music to match the growing urban environment of the world.
In the process, he accurately predicted synthesised sounds, amplified vocals, and many other techniques that underpin modern music. As he wrote in the 1916 article, Upcoming Science of Music and the New Era in the History of Music (given that music was largely acoustic and almost entirely separate from science at this time, that title alone is prescient enough): “The timbre is the soul of a musical sound. To build abstract harmonic schemes and then ‘orchestrate’ them is not creative any more; in this way it is possible to reach a full decomposition of the process of musical creation down to the sequence of compositional exercises: to invent a sequence of tones, to incorporate any rhythm, to harmonize the melody obtained and, finally, to start its colouring, using an historically readymade palette.”
He continued to predict the soundboard approach of electronic music, writing: “And what if today it was already possible to transform the sustained chord of the flute timbre during ten seconds (absolutely imperceptibly for acoustical analysis) into the powerful tutti of brass winds, and then in three seconds to fade it imperceptibly into the quiet and clear timbre of the clarinet?”
And finally, he even hazarded a guest that the invention of (what would become) a microphone would allow Billie Eillish’s hushed whisper to reach thousands above an orchestra when he wrote: “And what about the wonderful timbres of vowels of human speech? Where are they in modern instrumental music? In Berlioz’s Mourning March? In Scriabin’s Prometheus? Limited with a modest range of voices of the chorus? And what if I need a scale-like passage on a timbre, ‘o-o-h’ upwards, up to the highest audible pitches? And not for the sake of a whim, but according to a clear creative necessity?”
The point of this approach was to do away with stuffy old concert halls and the fixed divide between classical and folk. He was thinking about Pet Sounds half a century before the fact. He just needed a way to exhibit it all. And he chose the grandest scale possible. He would use this new music theory to remind the people that they had the power to create their own future and even construct history in a city-wide concert he would call the Symphony of Sirens.
Avraamov wrote: “Music has, among all the arts, the highest power of social organisation. 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.” Now the concert hall walls would not only dissolve and see orchestra join the march and flood out on the streets, but the streets would dictate the song to boot in a marriage of classical, folk, and the revolving world at large. Unlike the beauty of the Victory of Samothrace, music would now not stand in isolation.
And so, after carefully constructing his wall of sound and how it would reverberate. The 36-year-old stepped out onto the precipice, raised two red flags aloft, and thrust them through the air; conducting an undefined musical volley that forecast the very future of modern music.
Then why is this concert forgotten in time? Well, his propogandist past hamstrung the show. He merged politics into proceedings to such an extent that the whole thing felt like a sham. His magnificent concert seemed to be like trading one dogmatic rule for another. The voice of the proletariat might have rang out in Baku, but it wasn’t their words or story and the machines that they were singing with symbolised a dangerous futurist portent. It’s one thing to predict the future, but it’s another to think about what the right thing is to do with it.
Cannons cued fresh waves of music, as planes rattled the percussive din of machine gun fire into the sky. Dock sirens wailed with the next blast and a choir of thousands hailed hurrah as hydroplanes whizzed westward through the hum of industrial whistles. And then old folk tunes broke through the manic proceedings, a city awash in the ecstasy of one final crescendo of everything at once.
Now, Young Fathers might be able to venture back into the folk depths of West African rhythms and pair that with the modulating hum of a synthesised sound somewhere between an oboe and a bassoon while rapping about the streets of Scotland but that was impossible before Avraamov, and for a good while after to boot. But in his wild eccentricity, he somehow saw it. He saw industrial music too, and heavy metal, the grandeur of a Glastonbury, the postmodernism of Tom Waits, and everything in between.
But his dreams were too lofty and the dark side of futurism a little too apparent for his utopian ideals to catch on. So, Avraamov’s world was quashed under Stalin. He died in poverty. If futurism was about “the beauty of speed”, then it would seem that Avraamov simply grabbed music by the tie and sprinted, when he should’ve really walked it by the hand.