[#195] SEKRET MACHINE MUSIC IV: Soviet Photosynths, Rockefeller Foundation Music, and the Cultural Cold War (Patreon)

In the fourth installment of Sekret Machine Music, Dimitri and Khalid explore early electronic music innovations on both sides of the Cold War during the 1950s and early 60s, including:

Electronic music as another front in the Cultural Cold War, Dimitri Shostakovich getting cancelled by Pravda for doing sicko bourgeois formalism in his Lady Macbeth Opera, Shostakovich’s connections to neo-Pagan counterrevolutionary suslord Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Soviet experiments in “drawn sound” throughout the 1930s-40s, the weird history of Yevgeny Murzin’s mysterious Soviet ANS synthesizer, its Theosophist namesake Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin, Scriabin’s unfinished apocalyptic gesamtkunstwerk masterpiece “Mysterium”, Eduard Artemyev’s groundbreaking ANS scores for Andrei Tarkovsky’s films, and Roger Corman hiring Francis Ford Coppola to splice ANS sci-fi scores into Americanized B-movies in the 60s…

The rise of “foundation music” in post-war America, a gushing pipe of Rockefeller Foundation funding in a musical desert, how Sputnik triggered an existential panic/scientific inferiority complex in American institutions, heavy foundation support for atonal “serial tyranny” in university music departments, Milton Babbitt’s deranged “Who Cares If You Listen?” essay from 1958 where he calls for “complete elimination of the public and social aspects of musical composition”, and the depth of Rockefeller Foundation support for the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, along with America’s first heckin’ DIY music space, the San Francisco Tape Music Center…