The 1922 ‘Symphony of Sirens’ in Baku, Azerbaijan

Abstract

In 1922, a ‘Symphony of Sirens’ was performed by the sounds and movements of human crowds, machine guns, cannons, factory sirens, airplanes, hydroplanes, trains, battleships and a steam-whistle machine across the spaces of Baku, Azerbaijan. Conceived well beyond the conventions of revolutionary festivals, the Symphony manifested 1920s avant-garde aspirations for a radical unity of the arts, technology and urban space. Furthermore, the location of the Symphony was notable: Baku was a city on the edge of the former Russian empire, and Azerbaijan had only two years prior been incorporated as a Soviet Socialist Republic. Connecting with several core tenets of the Soviet socialist and avant-garde movements, the 1922 ‘Symphony of Sirens’ can be interpreted as an avant-garde expansion of Soviet internationalism. The ways in which the Azerbaijani metropolis activated this bricolage of art, space and politics is significant, not least because the spectacle condensed a wide range of practices and ideas from Taylorism, proletarian politics, the artistic avant-garde and Azerbaijani culture. The spectacle's composition and location also had an outward impact, manifesting a geographical imagination that shaped the region's cultural and political identity and extended the possibilities of design practice.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the JUD editors and anonymous reviewers, as well as Eve Blau, Chris Earney, Maria Gough and Olga Touloumi for their comments on previous versions of this paper.

Notes

1. Note that after 14 February 1918, Russia switched from the Julian Calendar to the Gregorian Calendar. Therefore, the ‘October Revolution’ is celebrated on 7 November, which refers to 25 October in the Julian Calendar.

2. The Gorn instructions and essay were translated to English in 1992 by Mel Gordon (Kahn & Whitehead, eds., 1992, pp. 245–252).

3. Avraamov's Khodohzhnik I Zritel (Artist and Viewer) essay was translated by Alexander Kan & Kersten Glandien (Alarcón, 2008, 70–71).

4. Population estimates were extrapolated from the Russian census of 1913 and Soviet census of 1926. Baku census data were compiled from Semenov-Tian-Shansky, 1928; Harris, 1945; Alstadt, 1986.

5. For detailed discussions of these two pre-Soviet (liturgical and imperial) celebration typologies, see: McDowell, September 1974; Wortmann, 1995; Frolova-Walker, 1998, 2007. For comparison to Bolshevist festivals, see von Geldern, 1993, p. 16.