ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
My second example, the ‘Hooter Symphonies’, is one of the most mindboggling
cultural gestures of the post- revolutionary period. Not only did this
musical endeavour seek to facilitate mass participation, it also reinvented the
entire concept of instrumentation by harnessing the sirens and industrial noise
of the modern city into a new understanding of what constituted an orchestra.
Conceived as a new and truly proletarian music, the Hooter Symphonies
aimed to turn the whole city into an auditorium for an orchestra of new industrial
noise, conducted from a rooftop by a man carrying large flags; they
embraced ‘all the noises of the mechanical age, the rhythm of the machine, the
din of the great city and the factory, the whirring of the driving belts, the clattering
of motors, and the shrill notes of motor horns’. 86 The Hooter Symphonies
were initiated by the music theorist Arsenii Avraamov (1886– 1944), a reformist
who in 1920 had asked the Commissariat of Enlightenment to confiscate
and demolish all pianos as a necessary first step in destroying bourgeois music
and the twelve- tone scale. After experiments with factory whistle symphonies
in St Petersburg (1918) and Nizhnyi Novgorod (1919), Avraamov oversaw a
spectacular noise symphony to celebrate the anniversary of the Revolution in
the Baku harbour on 7 November 1922. The event used sirens and whistles
from navy ships and steamers, as well as dockside shunting engines, a ‘choir’
of bus and car horns, and a machine- gun battery. The aim was to evoke the
struggle and victory of 1917, and involved versions of ‘The Internationale’
and ‘The Marseillaise’ with a 200- piece band and choir, and a large portable
organ of steam- controlled whistles on the deck of a torpedo boat. With characteristic
scepticism, Fülöp- Miller notes that the results of such experiments
were unhappy, to say the least:
on the one hand, the capacity of modulation in the instruments used was
not very great, and, on the other hand, the ‘compositions’ performed
were much too complicated. Although the ‘conductors’, posted on high
towers, regulated by waving flags the intervention of the various sirens
and steam- whistles, which were at considerable distances from each
other, it proved impossible to attain a uniform, acoustic impression. The
distortions were so great that the public could not even recognise the
well- known and familiar ‘Internationale’. 87
The (un)recognisability of a tune seems to be a minor quibble in the face of the
searing impression that remains of these efforts today, both visually and
conceptually: a barely visible man forlornly stands on a factory roof, a tiny
speck in the face of an invisible (but one imagines overwhelming) industrial
cacophony swirling around him. The futility of this proposition and his impotent
centrality stands as the poignant inverse of the conductorless orchestra.
Here, the lack of a new repertoire really doesn’t matter, because the proposition
and its outcome exceed all existing categories: Avraamov’s Hooter
Symphonies are perhaps more visionary than any other Russian cultural
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