Ussachevsky, Vladimir (EN)

Ussachevsky Vladimir Alexeevich, *3 November (21 October) 1911 Hailar (Manchuria, now China), †4 January 1990 New York, American composer of Russian origin. In 1930, he emigrated with part of his family to the United States. In 1935, he obtained a bachelor’s degree from Pomona College in California, then studied composition at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester under the supervision of B. Rogers and H. Hanson. He obtained a master’s degree in 1936 and a doctorate in 1939. During World War II, he did military service in the Office of Strategic Services and the Department of State, then settled permanently in New York and took a job at Columbia University – he became the head of the electronics studio. In 1967, he also began working at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, where he worked on sound synthesis using a computer. An extremely important meeting in Ussachevsky’s biography was with O. Luening, whom he met at the Eastman School of Music during his doctoral studies. Both were interested in the possibilities of the tape recorder as a tool for modifying sound and its interaction with traditional instruments (including the human voice and the orchestra), although even before magnetic tape recording was invented, Ussachevsky had experimented with the electronic medium in 1951 (what Ch. Wuorinen and C. Rahkonen considered the first such experiments in America). They created their first pieces separately, and over time combined the independently created sections into compositions signed with the surnames of both artists. In May 1952, the first electronic music concert in America took place, at which Ussachevsky and Luening presented their compositions, but it was not until their next concert at the Museum of Modern Art in October of that year, under the patronage of L. Stokowski, that it caused a wide response in the music community. The programme included, among others, Ussachevsky’s Sonic Contours for electronically modified piano and Ussachevsky and Luening’s joint composition A Poem in Cycles and Bells for orchestra and tape – one of the first pieces in the world to combine live orchestral sounds with electronic sounds. In 1958, Ussachevsky and Luening founded The Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Centre in New York (now Columbia University Computer Music Centre) – the first professional electronic music studio in the United States. Ussachevsky became its director. He attracted other avant-garde American composers to the studio to collaborate with, such as M. Babbitt, R. Sessions, E. Carter, M. Davidovsky (director of CPEMC since 1980), and also lesser-known artists such as B. Arel, Ch. Wourinen and M. Toyama. The studio was used by E. Varèse, who produced the final version of the tape for his Desèrts there. J. Cage was also interested in the development of the studio, but he chose to work in his own studio. It was not so much composition, but concert activity and cooperation with major record companies that brought Ussachevsky fame and recognition. In 1970–80 he was a composer-in-residence at the University of Utah several times and from 1980, he gave lectures and readings there. In 1973, he became a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He gave lectures and seminars in both Americas and Europe. In 1980, he retired but continued his musical and pedagogical activities.

Ussachevsky was one of the pioneers of electroacoustic music. His works were in various styles until the 1950s, and the composer himself did not value them too highly. He believed that his real work began with Sonic Contours (1952), i.e. with his beginning to work with tape recorders. In his “tape music” he used his own earlier instrumental works, sometimes Luening’s works, as well as special recordings of acoustic effects. The tape recorder operations consisted of transposing the material down an octave or two octaves (rarely up) and blurring everything with feedback and artificial reverberation. This gave the works a horror character and a kind of unusualness. The processed material was superimposed on the original version, often edited from rearranged sections; in some works, only the processed material was used. During live concerts, e.g. with an orchestra, tape operations were performed in real-time, on a semi-improvisational basis, and played back from the loudspeakers together with the sound of the orchestra.

Literature: C. Whittenberg, Ussachevsky’s Film Music, “American Composers Alliance Bulletin” 1963 no. 11 (1); J. Paulson, The History, Current Status and Possible Future of Electronic Music as Exemplified in the Works of Vladimir Ussachevsky, doctoral thesis, University of Utah 1976; E. Schwartz, Electronic music. A thirty-year retrospective, “Music educators journal” 1978 no. 64 (7), pp. 36–41; O. Luening, Electronic Music, in: The Odyssey of An American Composer, New York 1980; R. Moog, The Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. Thirty Years of Exploration in Sound, “Contemporary Keyboard” V, 1981; Vladimir Ussachevsky, commemorative book on the occasion of the 75^th anniversary of the birth, Salt Lake City 1987; M.L. Mecham, The choral music of Vladimir Ussachevsky, “Choral Journal” 1988 no. 29 (1); R. Hartsock, C. Rahkonen, Vladimir Ussachevsky. A Bio-Bibliography, New York 2000; Th. Holmes, Electronic and Experimental Music. Pioneers in Technology and Composition, 2^nd ed., New York 2002; C. Rahkonen, Vladimir Ussachevsky (1911–1990), in: Music of the twentieth-century avant-garde: A biocritical sourcebook, ed. L. Sitsky, Westport 2002, pp. 525–529; R. Beaudoin, Counterpoint and quotation in Ussachevsky’s Wireless fantasy, “Organised sound. An international journal of music technology” 2007 no. 12 (2), pp. 143–151.