Courtesy of Library of Congress

Courtesy of rcatheremin.com

Courtesy of rcatheremin.com

Courtesy of rcatheremin.com

Electronic Avant-GardeJoseph Schillinger was unacknowledged and eventually unwelcomed by the mainstream classical music establishment. While his musical achieve-ments in Russia were well-regarded and some of his peers considered him a master composer equal to Beethoven, Schillinger failed to succeed in academic circles primarily because of his unconventional terminology and methods. He was also prone to ridicule the academic establishment and his attachment to the commercial side of music, especially Tin Pan Alley and Hollywood, didn’t help his popularity.

When Schillinger first came to New York he collaborated with his friend and fellow Russian inventor, Leon Theremin. He would lecture at Leon Theremin’s studio, also a controversial figure. In 1929 Joseph Schillinger, Henry Cowell, Joseph Yasser, Otto Kinkeldey, and Charles Seeger found-ed the New York Musicological Society which later became the American Musicological Society and the American Society for Comparative Musi-cology.

“Theremin collaborated with the magnificent madman Joseph Schillinger, who sought to automate the entire process of composing music, and believed he had come up with mathematical laws of art. He would do tricks like take the day’s stock prices and convert them into a hit song. Gershwin and Glenn Miller, among others, were fascinated by his system.” - Unknown

Between 1928 and 1931 Theremin and Schillinger studied musico-scien-tific problems and constructed some of the first electronic musical instru-ments, such as the Theremin, the Rhythmicon, and other music synthe-sizers. Another collaborator was American avant-garde composer and musical theorist Henry Cowell. The Rhythmicon was publicly premiered in January of 1932 by Cowell and Joseph Schillinger at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Two pieces were written for the Rhyth-micon: Rhythmicana by Henry Cowell and the now lost Music for Violin and Rhythmicon. The Rhythmicon is considered the world’s first drum machine, predating the first commercially produced rhythm machine by almost 30 years. Robert Moog experimented with Theremins while he was a student at Cornell and established Moog Electronics to manufacture and market new devices, which would later be known as moog synthesizers.