Symphony of Sirens music module

4. Symphony of machines

Now consider a somewhat younger avant-garde composer named Alexander Mossolov (1900-1973). Though not obsessed with public spectacle in the manner of Avraamov, he very much subscribed to the machinist tropes of constructivist art, and strove to apply them to concert-hall music in the 1920s. Listen to this movement from his ballet Steel (1927), composed for the tenth anniversary of the revolution. Entitled Factory, Symphony of Machines, it celebrated the rhythms of Soviet industrialization. 

  

(Remember that repetitive rhythm as a reference point for building a theme and variations is called "ostinato.") Mossolov called for a "metal sheet" as an instrument, in order to invoke the clangor of the factory and to create a "barbaric style." If you think he succeeded too well, try to take the longer view, and remember Stravinsky's own "primitivist" devices in The Rite of Spring. The Symphony of Machines enjoyed a worldwide audience in its day, probably due to its perceived "Soviet" distinctiveness in the modernist genre. Yet after 1927 Mossolov did not fare well at the hands of the Association of Proletarian Musicians, who called his music "naturalistic" and "decadent." After spending six years in the GULAG, he subsequently devoted himself largely to research on folk music.

In a similar vein, listen to the constructivist composition by Julius Meytuss (1903-1997) of the building of the Dnieprostroi dam (1930). Does his musical "language" invoke an appropriate mental image?