Russian composer Arseny Avraamov (1884) began his career as a music critic
under the pseudonym of Ars. In 1912 he was arrested for anti-czarist propaganda.
He escaped from prison and moved to Norway where he worked as a sailor and then
as a clown and acrobat in a travelling circus.
He finally returned to St Petersburg in 1913. Between
1914 and 1916 he wrote several articles about his theory of microtonal "ultrachromatic" music and built instruments to perform it
After the communist revolution he was placed in charge of several art and culture projects while teaching at a conservatory and writing in a newspaper of
Rostov-na-Donu city.
His articles "Upcoming Science of Music and the New Era in the History of Music" (1916) and "Production-Reproduction" proposed new ways to make sound.
In 1922 he moved to Baku.
In 1919 he staged the first
"Simfoniya Gudkov/ Symphony of Factory Sirens"
at Nizhny Novgorov (1919), later in Rostov (1921), Baku (1922) and Moscow (1923).
The most complex of them was the one in Baku.
Avraamov waved red flags (in Moscow replaced by flaming torches) from the top of a tower in Baku to conduct the "Simfoniya Gudkov/ Symphony of Factory Sirens" for brass band, a massive choir, a "magistral" (a home-made instrument consisting of 50 steam whistles attached to pipes) and the city itself (ships, cannons, locomotives, soldiers, warplanes, factory sirens, foghorns, etc).
He kept writing about new forms of music but was basically homeless.
In 1929 he began to compose music for sound films, starting with Abram Room's
Piatiletka - Plan Velikih Rabot/ The Plan of Great Works (1929).
In 1930 he began making music out of drawings.
In 1930 he also founded the Multzvuk Group (later renamed Syntonfilm Laboratory) to produce his microtonal "ultrachromatic" music.
(The whole production of "ornamental sound" was destroyed by his own sons).
In 1935 Avraamov, Boris Krasin and Alexei Ogolevets founded the Autonomous Research Section (ANTES) in Moscow to promote electronic instruments and graphical notations, but the following year ANTES shut down after the
Pravda article "Confusion instead of music" that signaled government opposition against the avantgarde.
Avraamov moved to the Caucasus and became an ethnographer.
He died in Moscow in 1944, virtually penniless, father of ten children.
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