Yahoo Tuning Groups Ultimate Backup tuning ANS synthesizer

The following article is a reprint from the periodical 20th Century
Music... so this is only for "educational" purposes. It describes
the
ANS Synthesizer... the only synthesizer available in the Soviet Union
during the period 1960-1975. It was named after Alexander
Nikolayevich Scriabin and was housed in the Scriabin Museum.

At first I was just going to post extracts from this article -- the
synthesizer is in 72-tET (!!), but the article is so interesting, I
decided to post all of it... so if it is a little long, please
"scroll
through."

Particularly interesting, though, is the way the Soviet authorities
tried to suppress electronic music...

This article is an interview conducted by my friend Anton Rovner, who
is soon to join this list.

An Interview with Composer Stanislav Kreichi about the ANS
synthesizer, the Electronic Music Studio at the Scriabin Museum in
Moscow (1960-1975), and his own Musical Activities
ANTON ROVNER

ROVNER: How did your musical activities begin and how did your
interest in electronic music awaken?

KREICHI: In my family everybody played the piano. When I was a child,
I studied the violin and pla-yed in a student orchestra. It was
already at that time that I started to compose music and to
orchestrate. After school I entered the Radio Transmission Department
at the Institute of Communication. One day as I was reading an issue
of the journal Techology and Youth, I came across an an article
titled "A Composer Draws Music." This article described a very
interesting musical instrument, caled the ANS, on which you could
"draw" a piece
of music, after which the drawing could be heard as sound. I was so
much interested in the idea that I imediately contacted the inventor
of this machine - the article inclu-ded a contact address. I was able
to find him at the Scriabin Museum in Moscow. There, on the second
floor of the museum, in a small hall, stood a working and sounding
experimental sample of the instru-ment and Evgeny Alexandrovich
Murzin, the inventor of the instrument, gave lectures about acoustics
and music and presented small concerts featuring short musical
fragments, composed on the instru-ment. The fragments were
writtenmostly by two composers, who at that time were regularly
working with the ANS, Andrei Volkonsky and Nikolai Nikolsky. These
short musical pieces demonstrated the diverse and contrasting timbral
possibilities of this new instrument. I made the acquaintance with
Mur-zin and expressed my fascination with the instrument and my
willingness to assist him in the work of perfecting the synthesizer.
Murzin found a position for me at the Institute for Applied
Mechanics,
where he was the director of a laboratory, which developed a working
experimental sample of this ma-chine. He established forme a work
regime, which gave allowance for an extraordinary possibility - half
of each week I worked in the laboratory as a technician and soldered
various parts of the instrument while the other half I spent in the
Scriabin Museum, where I experimented with the synthesis of sound at
the instrument. At that time I had written several pieces for the
instrument, a selection of which was published on an LP record,
issued
by the Melodiya record company, which featured some of the first
recordings of Russian electronic compositions, composed on the ANS
synthesizer. The name of the in-strument is derived from the initials
of Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin, to whose memory Murzin de-dicated
his invention. The director of the Scriabin Museum at that time,
Tatiana Grigorievna Shaborki-na, established a haven for the
electronic music specialists, who created such a wonderful
instrument,
since she believed their work carried to a great degree the spirit of
Scriabin and his musical and philoso-phical innovation.
Thus, in the Scriabin Museum, under the solicitous patronage
of its director, a small electronic studio was created. Soon after
that two young composers, who had just finished their studies at
Mos-cow Conservatory, appeared in the studio; they were Eduard
Artemiev and Alexander Nemtin. We quickly became friends and soon
after that they became my teachers and mentors in my attempts to
compose music. Artemiev, subsequently, became a well-known composer
of
electronic music and film music. Nemtin, on the other hand, was soon
to start working on a huge project - the completion of Scriabin's
mystical composition Prefatory Action for orchestra, chorus, solo
piano and color organ, the idea of which was thought of by Scriabin,
who did not live to compose it, past a few sketches. Nemtin
successfully completed his project in 1996 after 26 years of intense
work and it was recently performed in numerous European and American
cities. Alexander Nemtin played a very important role in my mu-sical
development. He taught me virtually the full Conservatory course,
comprising all the musical and theoretical subjects, taught at the
composition department. I regularly visited him in Perlovka, a suburb
of Moscow, where he lived at that time, and he gave me private
lessons. He was a very strict and de-manding teacher and he gave me a
lot of homework assignments, especially in counterpoint and
com-position. His own compositions were very apealing to me,
especially his Piano Sonata N.1. I developed lifelong friendly
relations with Nemtin, which lasted until he passed away in February,
1999. Everything which he composed at that time, I helped him to
record at the studio, which was just voluntary help on my part, out
of
friendship. At that time composers had to show their compositions,
especially their or-chestral works, regularly at committees of the
Ministry of Culture and the Muzfond (State Musical Foundation). We
made recordings at the Scriabin Museum, which had very god recording
equipment for those days, and then, later, we spliced them together.
He wrote many experimental electronic com-positions for the ANS
synthesizer, among which I can mention, first of all, his Grand
Suite.
His short, lyrical composition Tears and his arrangement of Bach's
Chorale Prelude in C major, both for the ANS, were recorded on our
first LP record, featuring compositions for the ANS, which was
published by the Melodiya record company. We also successfully
collaborated to a great degree with Artemiev - we even had a joint
project, comissioned by a comittee of exhibitions. We had to write
music for a gra-phic film, which was supposed to be shown
simultaneously on several screens, called Into Outer Space. The
artist
Andrei Sokolov drew the sequences for this film. This was a
ten-minute
slide, which projected onto five screens simultaneously. Different
pictures, which were drawn in it, moved about by means of a certain
type of new technology, changed and transformed themselves into one
another. This was not a multiplicative cartoon type of movie, but a
different type - the type, which is now made, utili-zing several
slide
projectors at once: piling one slide on top of another and their
mutual transformation. We wrote the music for this film together with
Artemiev in collaboration, altogether about ten minutes of music and
it was presented in several Soviet exhibitions abroad, where the film
was shown - in Lon-don, Paris and Rio de Janeiro. The music was
written as a suite, consisting of several short movements, each one
corresponding to a scene of the film. The suite was presented on our
first LP record in a slight-ly shortened version.

ROVNER: Can you tell us something about Evgeny Murzin and the
circumstances of his invention of the ANS synthesizer? What motives
did he have, and how is the ANS constructed in purely technical terms?

KREICHI: Evgeny Alexandrovich Murzin came up with the idea of the ANS
for the first time in 1938. He was a big admirer of Scriabin and of
his music. He sensed that Scriabin felt constricted within the
twelve-tone equal-tempered scale and he frequently tried to free
himself from its shackles by many purely timbral-coloristic
instrumental means, such as by using an abundance of trills and
blending toge-ther various extremely contrasting instrumental
textures. This perception of Scriabin's music had inspi-red Murzin
with the idea of extending the intervallic system and presenting
musicians with a totally new type of instrument, which would give the
possibility of creating new sounds, extending by far the con-straints
of the twelve-tone equal-tempered tuning system. It is well known
that
before our times music existed in more natural types of tuning
systems, such as, for instance, the tuning system of just
intona-tion,
and that is still used in a variety of folk instruments, as well as
when strings tune in perfect fifths, not to mention chorus singing a
capella. The chief fault of the natural tuning systems was that they
did not allow easy modulation, as they did not possess enharmonic
relations between the sharps and flats - the ability to modulate
easily from key to key is one of the most important acquisitions of
the twelve-tone equal-tempered tuning system. Murzin's idea was to
find a way to enlarge the quantity of the oc-tave's components into
more than twelve parts, so that it would enable natural intervals to
be included as part of the instrument's musical language. This system
would include enharmonic relationships among the natural intervals,
at least certain ones, which are close to each other, as well as the
ability to modulate more freely within the framework of the natural
intervals. These were the thoughts that took hold of Murzin in 1938,
and he meticulously tried to find ways of inactivating these ideas
through tech-nical means. Here the recent invention of sound-track
movies inspied Murzin with additional ideas. In sounding movies,
sound
or music is endowed with a "visual" aspect by means of the soundtrack
on the film. This invention immediately gave rise to ideas that if we
can "see" sound on the screen, then simi-larly we could draw it
independently and, processing it through motion-picture equipment, we
could come up with a sound which was created by other means than
those of a musical instrument.
This way, the first ideas of graphical synthesis of sound appeared
together with the invention of sound-track movies. A predecessor of
Murzin in this field was the scientist Evgeny Alexandrovich Sholpo.
He
made experiments by drawing sound-waves manually on pieces of paper,
then photogra-phing them on film and then "sounding them out" by
passing them through sound eqipment, which created isolated sounds,
determined by the shapes of the drawn sound-waves. Following this, he
crea-ted a special type of machine, called the variaphone, with the
aid of which one could process the picture of the sound-wave onto a
movie screen almost automatically. The variaphone enabled Sholpo to
create sound-accompaniment to a number of movies in the 1930's. The
idea of visually designed sound was picked up by Murzin and this
became the basic idea for the creation of the synthesizer. However,
Mur-zin followed a different line of thinking than Sholpo. Instead of
drawing soundwaves each time, he de-cided to create a bank of
soundwaves, which were available in sufficient quantities. His
invention was a disc, similar in size and appearance to a
contemporary
CD, but made of photographic plate, with soundtracks printed on it,
similar to those existig on a movie screen. Each soundtrack was very
narrow in terms of width - one third of a millimeter. One disc
contained 124 sound tracks. Murzin pondered for a long time upon the
question of the number of sounds in to which he was to divide the
octave. He came up with 72, since that was a number which contained
in
itself the 12-note scale (the equal-tempe-red scale), the 24-note
scale (the quarter tone scale), as well as a number of other
important scales, con-sisting of numbers of tones by which the number
72 could easily be divided. He thought this very con-venient, so the
first
sound disc was created with 72 soundtracks and this remained the
number of soundtracks in all the sub-sequently created discs. As
Murzin continued to work on creating this new sound-machine, the next
step of his was to transform this disc into a musical instrument.
First he placed this disc into a special revolving equipment, passing
it through light, which already became modulated and, when touching
the photo-element, transformed itself into an electronic signal of
sound frequency, and, finally, as a result, into a sound-unit.
Nevertheless, the sound-unit, though being the most impor-tant
component of music, does not comprise it entirely. Sounds had to
change, to pass and transform into one another, to have different
rhythmic durations and different pitches, and only then one could
connect several of them at once and come up with at least a melody in
the first instance. This is why the next step was to create a
mechanism, which was later called the "score" (being, in all essence,
a score of a piece of music). This was a big glass rectangular-shaped
plate, covered with non-transparent mastic. If the glass plate was
placed in such a way as to shield the sound-disc from the light, then
the light was co-vered and no sound was heard. But as soon as one
would peel or scrub off a bit from the mastic and make a tiny rift or
stroke in the mastic, then a ray of light would penetrate though it
and one of the soundtracks would start to sound. If several such
rifts
or strokes would be made on one vertical plane. That would result in
a
sounding chord. If the strokes were placed one above the other in
such
a way as to compile the over-tone series in full or in part, then the
chord would transform itself into a well-blen-ded timbre.
As a result, five phonogram discs were made, which revolved in
different speeds. Each subse-quent disc revolved at a speed which was
four times quicker than the preceding disc. One disc contai-ned two
octaves of soundtracks written down on it. The subsequent disc
revolved four times as fast as the preceding one, so that the two
octaves were transposed two octaves above; the next one was
modu-lated
an additional two octaves higher, and so forth. In this manner, the
five discs covered the range of ten octaves from 20 Herz to 20,000
Herz, that is, they covered the entire range of sound, perceptible by
the human ear. The result was that this estabished bank of sounds
consisted of 720 pure sounds or sound-wave oscillations. The task of
acquiring pitch and timbre was successfully completed.
Now Murzin had to solve the problem of applying different durations
as
well as dynamics to the "score" of the instrument. First of all, the
instrument had to "read" the written strokes n the right time
succession, bringing in the dimension of time into the usage of the
instrument. He devised as the "reading eye" a narrow crack, through
which the modulating light, which would have already penetra-ted the
picture, would reach the photo-element. Of course one could read a
text in many different ways. One could skim through a written line
with ones eyes or one could take a different approach - move the line
of text and show it through the narrow "window," so that it could be
read, fragment after fragment (as in a running line of a displayed
advertisement text). It was this second approach that Murzin applied
to the ANS. The role of the small "window" was taken by the "reading
gap." With this kind of cons-truction, when the plate carrying the
strokes printed on the mastic moved, each of the drawn strokes would
sound at the precise time duration that it was exposed to the
"reading
gap," through which the light penetrated. This way the length of the
drawn stroke corresponded with the duration of the sound, and the
tempo was determined by the speed of the movement of the pate itself.
The plate, covered with the non-drying mastic, was called the "score"
by Murzin, as one could "draw" on it a number of simul-taneously
sounding melodies, chords and many other sound combinations.
Moreover,
each sound could either be a pure sound or it could contain any
number
of drawn overtones, which meant that the sounds on the score could be
created in different timbres. So that people working on the ANS would
not have to calculate each time the distances which the overtones
covered, but could always have them available in a form ready to be
used, another device was invented - what was called the coder. This
was a scale, written out as a piano keyboard, which was located at
the
left side of the score, as well as a mo-ving frame or carriage with
established cutters, which could be fixated near each
pitch-indicating
key and, moreover, could fixate smaller steps between each adjacent
key, determining microtones up to one sixth of a semitone. One could
combine together this compilation of cutters and by this means to
regu-late the make-up and the intensity of the sound of each
overtone.
One could interfere very virtuosically in the sound-structure of each
sound, alter it and create more variable types of timbres, unlike
most
syn-thesizers and electric organs, in which, for the most part, a
certain timbre is called in by pressing a but-ton, which then usually
remains unaltered during the course of a performance.
Here, when each sound was "notated" and one had the ability to alter
each sound by means of alterations of the "picture," it was possible
to "liven up" and "invigorate" the timbre of each sound. It was
already in this format that the preliminary working model of the ANS
was set up in the Scriabin Museum and the first group of musicians
and
composers had already gathered around it, who worked with
experimenting with creating new sounds by means of this instrument,
the greatest amount of effort of which was put in the quest of
various
timbres. First of all, the musicians wanted to find the means to
recreate the timbres that were already available on standard
orchestral instruments. This was the specialty of Eduard Artemiev. He
went as far as to compile a whole catalogue of timbres, created on
the
ANS, with examples of the sounds and their "drawings" - this was a
very interesting type of work. In addition there were also attempts
to
find new sounds and timbres that were not available on other
in-struments and which gave the ANS its unique qualities of being an
indispensable sound source in the sphere of musical instruments. As a
result of all this work with the ANS, a great amount of short pieces
for the instrument was written, a selection of which was published in
our first LP record, devoted to music for the ANS.

ROVNER: In what year was the ANS synthesizer created?

KREICHI: As far as I know, the working model of the ANS was already
available in 1958. It was inte-resting to note that Evgeny
Alexandrovich constructed it himself manualy over a long period of
time, during the times that he stayed in his summer house. He started
his work in 1938 when he conceived the idea of the instrument in his
mind, and after twenty years from then the active model was ready to
be used. This is not the instrument, which is presently located at my
studio at Moscow University, but its predecessor - a wooden model,
constructed by Murzin himself. As soon as it was made, it was
transported to the Scriabin Museum. Murzin went through a great
amount
of difficulties when con-structing it - it was definitely not that
easy to construct a new instrument on which you can provide sound
accompaniment to a movie. Moreover, a great amount of time was spent
on creating the matrix of the disc of the optical phonogram, since a
special kind of machine-tool had to be invented and built, on which
one could inscribe precisely inscribe the sound-tracks on the edge of
the disc. There the goal was to have the beginning of the first
circular period of sinewaves to combine precisely with the end of the
last period, so that there would not be any break in between them,
because the least bit of inaccura-cy in this circulation would create
a snap in the rhythm of the rotation of the phonogram circle. The
in-strument, which is located in my studio at Moscow State
University,
was the final result of Murzin's ex-perimental quest; its
manufacturing followed that of the preliminary working model and it
essentially comprised the Electronic Music Studio in Moscow. The
instrument was considered to be a qualified sample of industry. It
was
built in 1963, and there were many difficulties present in its
creation as well, since Murzin's laboratory was part of a crucially
important institute, which dealt with manufacturing of technical
devices and featured a lot of work connected with national defense.
This type of musical expe-rimental work was not considered of primary
importance and was continuously postponed and stret-ched out in time,
as a result of which the project was carried out very slowly, even
after all the plans for construction were ready and all the component
parts were gathered together to assemble into this indu-strial
sample.
Despite the fact that everything was all ready to go, it took a long
time to undertake the final assemblage and compilation of the
instrument. What finally gave a boost towards the completion of the
project was the Soviet Industrial Exhibition in Italy, which was
planned at the time. The Ministry of Radio Industry, under the
auspices of which the institute existed, was searching for such
exponents for this exhibition, which could be demonstrated with great
success. Demonstrating various types of measuring devices of general
usage was not very intriguing for most people. When they found out
that such an interesting machine was being created, on which it was
possible to draw music, the exhibition committee became very
enthusiastic about such an idea and held onto it. This served as such
a strong boost for our work that literally in a matter of months the
ANS synthesizer was finally assembled, completed and its entire
electronic mechanism was polished and perfected and it was finally
able to sound. In March, 1964, together with Murzin we went to the
exhibition to Italy and took the ANS synthesizer along with us.

ROVNER: When was the electronic music studio finally opened and which
ANS instrument was in use there at the time?

KREICHI: As I mentioned earlier, the preliminary working model stood
in the Scriabin Museum strar-ting from 1958 and composers started
working on it at around that time. I arrived in 1960, and later on
Nemtin and Artemiev appeared there too. The only two composers there
who worked there for the first two years was Andrei Volkonsky and
Nicolai Nikolsky. Schnittke, Denisov and Gubaidulina appeared there
much later, when the Electronic Music Studio was officially opened on
the first floor of the Scria-bin Museum. Before that, there was a
large residential apartment located on the first floor in which about
ten families lived. After we had returned from Italy, the laboratory
of the institute had already been dissolved, since it had
successfully
completed its task. In 1964, after we had returned, the ANS stood for
nearly a year at the VDNKh (Exposition of the Achievement of the
People's Production) in the Pavilion for Radio Technology. There it
was continued to be demonstrated to the public, and some of the
composers went there regularly to work with it, especially those who
were writing film music. Among them were such well-known names as
Andrei Eshpai and Gennady Gladkov. At the same time that the
synthesizer was dislayed at the Exposition of the Achievements of the
People's Production, Murzin carried out the task of creating and
establishing the Electronic Music Studio. He was able to ob-tain
permission from the government to open this studio as a branch of the
Ministry of Culture and un-der the patronage of the Melodiya record
company. The Moscow city authorities gave the first floor of the
mansion, where the Scriabin Museum was located, to the Electronic
Music Studio. It was a big treat to the museum as well, since they
now
had become the owners of the entire mansion, whereas, previ-ously,
its
ownership was limited to the second floor, where the Museum-Apartment
was located. Here two problems were solved simultaneously - a space
for the Studio had been found and the Museum was expanded. The
families inhabiting the apartment were also favored, since now they
were each given a separate apartment in other parts of Moscow. The
first floor of the mansion was cleared and immedi-ately rebuilt for
the purposes of the Studio. According to the project of a small group
of architects, the rooms of the studio work as well as a small
concert
hall were built, to present concerts of electronic mu-sic as well as
demonstrations of color-music. Experiments in color music were also
an
important part of the musical goals of the Studio, following
Scriabins
theories of synthesis of music and color, as well as his attempts to
create a color-organ. These experiments were worked upon a great deal
by Mark Se-myonovich Malkov, who was an engineer by profession.
Murzin
was the director of the Studio, though he was for the most part busy
the ANS synthesizer, which was already active. At that time he was
wri-ting a book on the reserves and resources of musical hearing.
Evgeny Alexandrovich had done an ex-tensive amount of research in the
field of audible perception of intervals of pitch and had made two
pre-sentations of his research in an international symposium in
Florence. He utilized the results of his long-time labor in the field
of this research by writing a book about seven-hundred pages long,
which there are now attempts being made to publish under the auspices
of Moscow Conservatory. Murzin wrote the book within the time span of
two years - between 1968 and 1970. He passed away in 1970, less than
four years after the Electronic Music Studio in Moscow was officially
opened.
(con't in part II)

ANS synthesizer

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