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Joseph Schillinger
 "Music
plus electricity equals the
sound of the 20th
century.1"
- Joseph Schillinger, 1918
Another project Leon Theremin was involved in was the
mechanical realisation of the ideas of the composer Joseph Schillinger.
Schillinger (1891 - 1943) left
Russia in 1928, and settled in New York, where he taught music, mathematics, art history, and his own rhythmic theories at
the New School for Social Research (NY University), and Columbia University Teacher's College.
In the
1920s and 30s, Schillinger devised a system of composition that reduced the elements of rhythm, melody, and harmony to
'geometric phase relationships', and in his theoretical writings he catalogued each conceivable permutation.
Eventually, he expanded this idea to orchestration, emotion in music, theatre,design, and the moving
image.
It was Schillinger's experiments with complex rhythms that led him to Leon Theremin. These were
realised on an instrument termed the 'Rhythmicon', which was constructed by Theremin to Henry Cowell's
specifications.
This system of Schillinger's was taught to his private pupils, who included Tommy
Dorsey, Vernon Duke, George Gershwin, Benny Goodman, Oscar Levant, Eubie Blake, John Lewis, Gerry Mulligan, and Glenn
Miller.
Despite Schillinger's grand ambitions, it is perhaps ironic that he doesn't employ the ideas
in his own music, rather only in some classroom exercises and theoretical writings. We know that he collaborated with Mary
Ellen Bute on an unfinished animation project.
His works for the theremin are detailed
below.
Works for Theremin
A Method for Theremin
(lost)
Airphonic Suite Number One, opus 21, for theremin and orchestra
1929
Melody, 1929 for theremin and piano
Mouvement Électrique et Pathétique,
1932, for theremin and piano
Bury, Bury Me, Wind, opus 23, for violin, theremin, and piano
1930
A copy of the First Airphonic Suite by Schillinger is available in the Fleischer Music Collection
at the Free Library of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.
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1 From Dr. Mel
Gordon's chapter "Songs From the Museum of the Future Russian Sound Creation (1910-1930)", published in
Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde. Perhaps sourced from a 1920s German article on
Soviet experimental music, the origin remains unclear.
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