Who knew? Anticipating by roughly fifty years the city-wide performance pieces of my friend, Philadelphia composer Robert Moran, was this work by Azerbaijani composer Arseny Avraamov.
Moran gained notoriety in the late 1960s and early ‘70s through a series of events incorporating, respectively, the cities of San Francisco (“39 Minutes for 39 Autos”), Bethlehem, PA (“Hallelujah”), and Graz, Austria (“Pachelbel Promenade”). These involved tens of thousands of performers.
With “39 minutes for 39 Autos,” Moran enlisted skyscrapers, airplanes, radio stations, musicians, dancers, and yes, automobiles, to create a one-of-a-kind, purely-of-the-moment spectacular of light and sound. Sooner or later, such a thing was bound to occur to a composer living in San Francisco in 1969.
Avraamov, on the other hand, had his own motivation. He was celebrating the fifth anniversary of the October Revolution.
Thanks to Debbie Smith for bringing to my attention this article about Avraamov and the centenary of his “Symphony of Sirens.”
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20221103-arseny-avraamov-the-man-who-conducted-a-city
On a related note, and wholly by coincidence, on November 20, I’ll be observing the centenary of Azerbaijani composer Fikret Amirov on “The Lost Chord” on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org!
An atmospheric recreation of Avraamov’s “Symphony of Sirens”
Sadly, to my knowledge, no such document exists of Moran’s city pieces, so we’ll just have to settle for his roughly contemporaneous “Lunchbag Opera”