Сoncert marks the 100-year anniversary of the 1917 revolution, and will present an array of musical experiments dating from the avant-garde epoch – the pieces of music that mark the post-revolution period and the industrialization era, and were set to revolutionize sound.

The listeners will find themselves in the epicenter of a 1920s sound lab – the musicians will be located under, over and near the audience, on all the floors of the central foyer of the New Tretyakov Gallery. Echoing and ‘rivaling’ ensembles, led by two conductors, will perform landmark opuses, sometimes full of fury and ruthless rhythms, that reflect the spirit of the industrialization and the first five-year industrial plan of the Soviets.

In the excerpts from ballets with telltale titles like The Bolt (by Shostakovich), in the short futuristic piece Rails (by Deshevov), the composers recreate the movements of factory mechanisms using musical means – in a very naturalistic way (a famous excerpt from Mosolov’s ballet is titled Factory. Music of the Machines). The lyrical culmination point of the concert will be the piece with a solo of the first electric instrument from the 1920s – theremin, played using the performer’s hands moving near its electromagnetic field. The first in the 21st century in Moscow and the most large-scale ever in the Russian capital, the performance of the celebrated rhythmic score Workers Union by Louis Andriessen will be the strong final point of the evening.

The event’s guests will have a chance not only to hear the sound portrait of the era, but also to see its visual imprint, visiting a large-scale thematic exhibition at the New Tretyakov Gallery, ‘Someone 1917’. The exhibition showcases the most significant paintings and sculptures – by Kandinsky, Malevich, Rodchenko, Serebryakova, Petrov-Vodkin, etc. – dating back to the year of the revolution. The exhibition presents works from the collections of leading Russian museums, the Tate gallery and the Centre Pompidou, and will allow the visitors to fully immerse in the atmosphere of the watershed era, experienced by its contemporaries as a new stage in the world history.

The Revolution in Sound concert marks the beginning of the collaboration between Studio for New Music ensemble and Sound up.

In the context of this conference, interaction between the musician and the score is envisaged as document activation. To address this link, a special performance of Soviet composer Nikolai Roslavets’ Chamber Symphony No. 2 by New Music Studio is the second and final intervention.

Roslavets, childhood friend of Kazimir Malevich, is considered one of Russian and early Soviet music’s greatest innovators, introducing a new system of sound organization. From the early 1930s, Roslavets was subject to sustained criticism by the Russian Association of Proletarian Composers and Proletkult, meaning that the symphony was not played during the composer’s lifetime or at any time in the twentieth century. The score was discovered in the archives of the Glinka Music Culture Museum in the 1990s. New Music Studio is a leading Russian contemporary music ensemble, which has premiered in Russia over a thousand pieces by some of the key Russian, European, and US composers.