Arseny Mikhailovich Avraamov (Russian:Арсений Михайлович Авраамов) (1884,Novocherkassk, Russian Empire - 1944, Moscow, USSR) was an avant-gardeRussiancomposer and music theorist.

Arseny Avraamov
Arseny Avraamov (ca. 1920)
Background information
Born	1884 Modern dayNovoshakhtinsk
Died	1944 Moscow
Genres	Avant-garde,Experimental music

He studied at themusic school of theMoscow Philharmonic Society, with private composition lessons fromSergey Taneyev. An avowed Communist, he refused to fight inWorld War I, and fled the country to work, among other things, as a circus artist. Returning in 1917, he was appointed Culture Minister for thePeople's Commissariat for Education.^[1] Allegedly, one of his first acts was to askVladimir Lenin if he could burn all the pianos in Russia.

On 7 November 1922 - the five-year anniversary of theOctober Revolution - he conducted the inaugural performance ofSymphony of Sirens (Гудковая симфония,Simfoniya gudkov), for which he is best remembered. Performed in Baku, with Avraamov conducting from a rooftop by waving two red flags, the piece involved navy ship sirens and whistles, bus and car horns, factory sirens, cannons, the foghorns of the entire Soviet flotilla in the Caspian Sea, artillery guns, machine guns, hydroplanes and renderings ofInternationale, Warszawianka andMarseillaise by a mass band and choir. The performance also featured the magistral – an instrument invented by Avraamov which consisted of 50 steam whistles attached to pipes, which could be operated independently like the keys of a piano.^[1] Symphony of Sirens was attempted just once more, a year later in Moscow, though at a much-reduced scale.

His other notable achievements were the invention ofgraphic-sonic art, produced by drawing directly onto the optical sound track of film, and an "Ultrachromatic" 48-tone microtonal system, presented in his thesis, "The Universal System of Tones," in Berlin, Frankfurt, and Stuttgart in 1927. His microtonal system predated the creation of the Petrograd Society forquarter-tone music in 1923, byGeorgii Rimskii-Korsakov [ru], also contemporary toJulián Carrillo'sSonido 13. Avraamov was also the sound designer for the first Soviet sound film,Abram Room'sThe Plan for Great Works (1930).^[2] Avraamov was friends withLeon Theremin and the pair were part of a team representing the USSR at the 1927 International Exhibition of Music in the Life of Nations held inFrankfurt am Main,Germany.

Following the death of Lenin and the appointment of Stalin as leader of the USSR, Avraamov lost his influence. He died in poverty and obscurity and it was only in 1990s that his work began to be rediscovered and reappraised.

Due to his work with graphical sound, he is considered one of the progenitors of electronic music.^[1]

• Edmunds, Neil, ed. Soviet Music and Society Under Lenin and Stalin. London: Routledge Curzon, 2004.
• Lobanova, Marina. “Avraamov, Arseny Mikhaylovich.” Grove Music Online ed. L Macy (Accessed 10 June 2008),http://www.grovemusic.comArchived 2008-05-16 at theWayback Machine.
• Sitsky, Larry. Music of the Repressed Russian Avant-Garde, 1900-1929. London: Greenwood Press, 1994.