Introduction:
Years ago, I overheard a classical music broadcast in which a Russian work, "The Iron Foundry" was played. Although it appeared to me to be a collection and assembly of noises rather than sounding like a piece of music, I remembered the title in case I wanted to use it in one of my future presentations.
To find an original performance of "Zavod" as the piece is called in russian, was not easy at all! With the help of responses on questions I put in News-groups and the help of a local music store, I finally found the right CD:
Decca production, CD number 436 640-2, BA 925.
As I don't want to have any trouble with copyrights or so, I recorded "Zavod" in a "low quality" version, just to show it as an example to you.
If you are interested to listen to the original version, I recommend the above mentioned CD.
Contents of CD:
Alexander Mosolov:
1-Zavod-Iron Foundry
Part of the text of the booklet provided with the original CD: Mosolov.
The turbulent 1920s showed many faces of musical modernism. In addition to Neoclassicism and the new techniques of the Second Viennese School, many composers cultivated a strain of highly dissonant, rhythmically dynamic music, stemming to some extent from the pre-war example of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps, with which they strove to give expressions to the new industrial, urbanized machine-age.
A typical phenomenon of those times was the music of Alexander Mosolov. After serving in the Red Army during the civil wa, Mosolov studied in Moscow with Gliere and Miaskovsky. While still a student he composed profically: many pieces used 'barbaric' rhytms to celebrate the new urban culture and reflect the dynamic energy of the new political order. He soon joined the Association for Contemporary Music, set up in the first years of the Soviet Union under the older radicals Lourie and Roslavets, which encouraged experimentation and embraced the most advanced music from Western Europe, recognizing strong anti-bourgeois elements in the international avant-garde.
Though soon overshadowed by the young Shostakovich, Mosolov was briefly the first international celebrity among Soviet composers, on the strength of one work-the short orchestral piece Zavod('Factory', or 'Iron Foundry'), which began life as an episode in jis ballet Stal('Steel'), intended as a glorification of the new Soviet programme of industrialization. The pounding, onomatopoeic machine-rhytms of Zavod, and Mosolov's use of a metal sheet to simulate the sounds of clashing iron and steel, earned him notoriety while perhaps obscuring the real range of his musical gifts. But in 1934 the Association was dissolved by political fiat; Mosolov's works were condemned as 'naturalistic'.
Though he continued to compose, he was forced to adopt amarkedly more conservative style, much influenced by Russian and Oriental folksongs, on which he became a noted authority in his later years.
Some other statements made by experts and found on the Internet:
Alexander Mosolov (1900-1973)
The Iron Foundry, Op. 19 (1928) The
Iron Foundry is Mosolov's rip-roaring depiction of a Russian factory in
full swing. The piece is a great example of how instrumental timbre and
orchestral texture can be manipulated to paint a realistic "sound-portrait" of
technology in action.
Alexandr Mosolov
Born in Kiev in 1900, Mosolov received his earliest musical instruction
from his mother, an opera singer. His musical education was disrupted by a
brief military career with the Red Army, and resumed at the Moscow
Conservatory, where he studied piano with Grigorij Prokofiev and
composition with Nikolaj Mjaskovskij. In 1925 he joined the
Western-oriented Association for Contemporary Music and promptly became
its director of chamber music.
Mosolov's compositional output in the 1920s was prolific - orchestral
works, a symphony, two operas, numerous pieces of chamber music, as well
as the sonatas and nocturnes for piano. In different ways these pieces
were attempts to create, in Paul Griffiths' words, "appropriate music for
a workers' state of new hope and determination". The composers affiliated
with the Constructivist movement were influenced by Italian Futurism,
offshoots of which also found expression in Paris in the 20s. Critics of
the day bracketed Mosolov's factory ballet Steel with Antheil's Ballet
Mécanique or Honneger's tribute to the railway, Pacific 231, and variously
lauded or damned its attempts to bring the industrial soundscape into the
concert hall. Unlike their Western "counterparts", however, Mosolov and
his comrades defended their aesthetic stance as one of allegiance to the
urban proletariat. The workers were only temporarily persuaded by this
line, and Mosolov's celebrity was short-lived. By the 1930s, denounced as
decadent and counter-revolutionary by the Russian Union Of Proletarian
Musicians, he was forced to modify - that is, simplify - his musical
language. Even after his death in 1973, official condemnation of his early
work was not tempered and as late as 1985 the Soviet Composers Union
refused to grant permission for performances of his piano concerto in East
Germany.
Download or listen to the Intro-part of Mosolov's "Iron Foundry" (file size:30k MP3 )
Part of the text of the booklet provided with the original CD: