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City Symphonies 1913-1931: Sound, Politics, and the Avant-Garde

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City Symphonies 1913-1931: Sound, Politics, and the Avant-Garde CITY SYMPHONIES 1913-1931: SOUND, POLITICS, AND THE AVANT-GARDE by Daniel Schwartz A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland September 2016 © 2016 Daniel Schwartz All Rights Reserved Abstract The aim of this dissertation is to give an account of the audial techniques and practices that constitute the city symphony as a sounding together — a syn-phonia — of the heterogeneous and oftentimes conflicting spaces of urban environments. I claim that these audial practices are essential for understanding how city symphonic works seek to compose the city as a political community. In arguing for this thesis, I explore four city symphonies that I consider paradigmatic examples of the genre due to their local and global aspirations for structuring society. These are Arseny Avraamov’s Symphony of Sirens (1922), a mass spectacle that utilized the factory and military districts of the city of Baku in Azerbaijan (Chapter One); Bertolt Brecht’s Lindbergh’s Flight (1929), a radio play that sought to compose a global polis of listeners as performers (Chapter Two); and Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin, Symphony of a Big City (1927), as well as Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), two films that constructed montage cities with contrasting political aims (Chapter Three). Through these works I explore themes related to the structuring of the polis as a musical community, the regulation of the polis by means of sonic phenomena such as noise, the theoretical and practical role of material sound technologies in the construction and maintenance of composed urban environments, the nature of the city symphony as an ideological apparatus, and the role of failure in the city symphony’s aesthetic and political conception. In doing so, I hope to add depth to existing studies of the city in literature and film that conceive of city symphonic works primarily in visual or textual terms as a means of helping the modern spectator navigate the shocks of urban experience. By paying attention to the audial aspect of city symphonies, I hope to show how these works also sought to foster as well as regulate a utopian conception of community as manageable metropolis. Advisors: Prof. Anne Eakin Moss; Prof. Leonardo Lisi ii Intended to be blank iii Acknowledgments This dissertation would not have been possible without the love and support of my parents, Emilia and David. I am greatly indebted to Prof. Anne Eakin Moss for countless hours of discussion during which we covered enough topics for ten dissertations. Not only her thoughts but also her upbeat attitude made for a fruitful, stimulating, and — dare I say — fun writing process. I would also like to thank Prof. Leonardo Lisi for some fundamental ideas that shaped this project in its final stages. Though he is quick to deny expertise in cinema and media studies, his insights into structural similarities between works in this study helped pull it together as a whole. I am especially grateful to Prof. Meredith Ward who was an invaluable source of information on everything related to sound. It is hard to conceive what this project might have looked like without her guidance. I would also like to thank Prof. Andrea Krauss for her course on the avant-garde, which exposed me to a number of theoretical approaches that greatly deepened my appreciation for framing and montage. Much of the early research for this project was done with the help of a fellowship from the Center for Advanced Media Studies, and thanks go to Bernadette Wegenstein who both ran the center and provided guidance to the fellowship’s recipients. No dissertation in the Humanities Center could be completed without the help of Marva Philip; I thank her for her patience and support throughout. Lastly, this dissertation would not have been possible without the ideas and encouragement of my friends and colleagues at the Humanities Center — Benjamin Stein, Samantha Carmel, and Ben Gillespie. iv Intended to be blank v Contents Introduction: 1913……………………………………………………………………………..1 I. Baku 1922: The Symphony of Sirens and the Symphonics of Urban, Industrial, and Inter- Ethnic Space……………………………………………………………………...39 II. Of Misuc and Music: The Gathered and the Total in Bertolt Brecht’s Lindbergh’s Flight ………………………………………………………………………………..99 III. Sounding the Inaudible: Subsumed Forms of Sound in the City Symphony Films of Dziga Vertov and Walter Ruttmann……………………………………………..145 Conclusion: 1931…………………………………………………………………………….195 Appendix……………………………………………………………………………………..207 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………….215 Curriculum Vitae……………………………………………………………………………..227 vi Intended to be blank vii Introduction: 1913 The primary focus of this study is to develop an account of the audial techniques and practices that constitute the city symphony as a sounding together — a syn-phonia — of the heterogeneous and oftentimes conflicting spaces of urban environments. The term ‘city symphony’ has thus far been used primarily in a descriptive manner, applying to a number of projects that focus on the city as text — a map to be read or interpreted — or as image — a fragmentary field of visual information.1 These projects include novels such as Andrei Bely’s Petersburg (1913), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), and Alexander Döblin’s Berlin, Alexanderplatz (1929), as well as silent films such as Alberto Cavalcanti’s Nothing But Time, Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin, Symphony of a Big City, and Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera. Following the urban and critical theory of figures like Georg Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer, and Walter Benjamin, studies of these projects have tended to focus on how they organized the sights and shocks that assaulted inhabitants of early 20th century cities. These studies often present the city inhabitant as a flâneur — a mobile spectator of urban thrills whose detached gaze reaches its apotheosis in the cinematic apparatus. Likewise, they tend to conceive of montage as reflecting the fragmentary nature of urban experience — as Erlebnis rather than Erfahrung, to use Benjamin’s famous opposition.2 By contrast, through an exploration of forgotten “acoustic” city symphonies such as Arseny Avraamov’s Symphony of Sirens, as well as a re-examination of established ones such as Ruttmann’s and Vertov’s, this study argues that city symphonies across genres and disciplines were concerned with a specific set of issues related to sound and the construction of political 1. This division is mirrored in studies of the city generally. For treatments of the city as text see: Julie A. Buckler, Mapping St. Petersburg: Imperial Text and City Shape (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2005); Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (MA: Blackwell Press, 1997). For a treatment of the city as image see: James Donald, Imagining the Modern City (London: The Athlone Press, 1999); Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkley: University of California Press, 1998). 2. On the death of Erfahrung see, for instance, Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, 1968), 83. 1 communities that oftentimes blurred the lines between citizen, listener, and performer. This is not to say that visual analyses of city symphonies are wrong or misguided, but rather that they reflect only one side of the city symphony as a multimedia genre that is both audial and visual. This study seeks to retrieve the audible aspect — the soundtrack, as it were — of the city symphony. Through an equal emphasis on the terms ‘city’ and ‘symphony,’ this dissertation seeks to locate the city symphony within a nexus of interrelated practices that aimed to compose the polis into a musical work. These practices conceived of sound as a means of social and political organization. More specifically, they focused on audible phenomena characteristic of urban environments such as noise, as well as on new sound recording technologies, in order to expand the symphony out into the city. The heightened noise of urban environments became the basis of the city symphony’s assault on traditional modes of listening and bourgeois culture, particularly insofar as noise represented the activity of subaltern groups and classes. Through noise the everyday practices of these groups were musicalized, thereby expanding the scope of so-called “musical sound.” At the same time, city symphonies also used noise as an instrument of control, wielding it as a threat of violence that their musical structures could later subjugate. With regard to its use of new recording technologies, the city symphony developed the mechanical and theoretical possibilities afforded by radio, phonograph, and film. These stressed the material quality of sound as a recordable and inscribable frequency, as well as space as photographable, divisible, and rearrangeable. For the city symphonies in this study, material sound and space were more than a means to broadcast their compositions to a city-wide and potentially global audience; they were also the basis of utopian visions and schemes of scientific management that sought to control movement, behavior, and even thought. In exploring these uses of sound and space, I argue that the city symphony transgresses the borders between concert hall and public 2 sphere. Just as it brings the sounds of the city into music and film, it also transforms the city into its own orchestra. In attempting to compose the polis, however, the city symphony was not always successful. This raises a key issue that is not emphasized enough in discussions of the modernist avant-garde — namely, failure. Failure to achieve their intended goals in certain respects is a key aspect of the city symphonies in this study, particularly insofar as the sounds and spaces they sought to compose resisted their conception of the ideal polis. Spaces fraught with histories of ethnic tension and religious strife could not easily be incorporated into a harmonious musical whole.
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