• Doors: 19:30
• Start time: 20:00
• Entrance: free

Joseph Schillinger and the Rhythmicon: Towards a New Hearing
Lecture performance by Andrey Smirnov
Curated by https://rhythmusundprojektion.com, FU Berlin ‬‬

Rhythm is a medium of change; it constitutes a transition: from noise to composition, from dance to trance. The interconnection of bodily, social, and industrial rhythms produces new relations between technology and environment, between the individual and the collective psyche.

In the late 1920s the Russian-born American mathematician, music theorist, composer, and teacher Joseph Schillinger developed a unique mathematical system of music composition, which he taught to George Gershwin, Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller, among others.

In his lecture performance, Andrey Smirnov will talk about the Schillinger's theory of rhythm and demonstrate the Rhythmicon – the first optoelectronic rhythm machine, built in 1931 by the pioneering inventor of electronic instruments Léon Theremin. Parting from the assumption that music arises from rhythm, and rhythm is a vital ingredient of life, Schillinger considered music as being equally a product of nature. He relied on the numerical functions that since prehistory have regulated our lives, even unconsciously, using graphs to translate rhythmic pulses into number patterns.

The lecture will explore the interrelations between historical and contemporary music theory and practice as well as those between the new musical devices and the possibilities of a new mode of hearing.

Andrey Smirnov is the founder of the Theremin Center, researcher and senior lecturer at the Centre for Electroacoustic Music at Moscow State Conservatory, lecturer at the Rodchenko School for Modern Photography and Multimedia. He has conducted numerous workshops and master classes in the U.S., Europe and Russia and participated in various festivals and conferences. His collection of the historical documents and early electronic musical instruments has been combined with extensive research into the history of music technology with broad experience in composition, interactive performance and curatorial activities. He is the author of the book 'Sound In Z: Experiments In Sound and Electronic Music in Early 20th Century Russia' (Walther Koenig & Sound and Music, London, 2013).

Rhythm and Projection. Thinking Possibility in the Soviet Avant-Garde is a research project at the Peter Szondi-Institute of Comparative Literature at the Free University, Berlin. It focuses on the Soviet artistic avant-garde of the 1910s and 1920s, analyzing “rhythm” and “projection” in its provisional, open-ended mode of thinking and acting – a mode that took the shape of drafts, plans, notations and projects. The research fellows are Ekaterina Tewes, Elena Vogman, and Georg Witte.