ITT we share communist avant-garde and discuss its meaning.
I will begin by submitting Arseny Avraamov and his Symphony Of Factory Sirens, composed for the fifth anniversary of the October Revolution and performed only twice, in Baku and Moscow. The composition marshaled the sounds of an entire city as its instruments, and thousands of people were required to successfully perform it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kq_7w9RHvpQHuman beings assign meaning and symbolic value to sounds by the process of conscious interpretation. The sound of a police siren can be rendered in physical terms by tone, pitch, and volume; terms that do not represent meaning. Yet, the sound has a distinct meaning for humans who have lived in societies with a motorized police force. This is because humans have interpreted the sound by associating its physical characteristics with its social context. The sounds of every society are meaningful in this sense.
Bourgeois society has been the dominant class society since the 19th century. The unique characteristic of bourgeois society is its compulsion to constantly revolutionize itself, to generate ideology and to constantly expand production. This compulsion created modern industry, organized on the basis of commodity production and exchange. The ideological component of bourgeois production is called ‘capitalism’ . Capitalism is a social form and therefore a conscious experience, and sound is an important part of conscious experience. The sounds of bourgeois society take a distinct meaning that is evident to the individuals that live in it. All class societies utilize a mode of production that is socially antagonistic. The antagonism between classes is manifested in struggles for dominance between social classes in class societies. These struggles develop into social revolutions that overthrow existing relations of production, and substituting them with new relations.
The social revolution generated by the antagonisms of bourgeois society will produce a classless society, the communist society. The meaning of the sounds of capitalist society will be transformed according to their change in material and social context. Avraamov created a musical composition
representing that transformation, using as instruments the industry of bourgeois society. By arranging these elements: factory sirens, steam engines, the engines of vehicles, artillery, foghorns, and entire rifle divisions, Avraamov demonstrated the totality of the communist victory over capitalist society as a result of the October Revolution.
During a social revolution, individuals become agents of social change, and can consciously participate in the transformation of society. Avraamov was one of these individuals, who served as the Commissioner of Arts of the Republic for two years. The siren in the symphony of sirens, which previously represented the beginning and end of each workday in anarchic capitalist production, was turned into a instrument to be rearranged at will by the composer. The ability of the composer to manipulate the sounds of instruments at will reflects the communist reorganization of society that began in October 1917. Avraamov’s Symphony Of Factory Sirens is an interpretation of a communist revolution that the composer himself experienced and participated in. As a fragment of an emerging communist society, it should be an object of interest for all communists.