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book: City Symphonies
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City Symphonies

Sound and the Composition of Urban Modernity, 1913–1931
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2024

About this book

Cinema scholars categorize city symphony films of the 1920s and early 1930s as a subgenre of the silent film. Defined in visual terms, the city symphony organizes the visible elements of urban experience according to musical principles such as rhythm and counterpoint.

In City Symphonies Daniel Schwartz explores the unheard sonic dimensions of these ostensibly silent films. The book turns its ear to the city symphony as an audible phenomenon, one that encompasses a multitude of works beyond the cinema, such as musical compositions, mass spectacles, radio experiments, and even paintings. What these works have in common is their treatment of the city as a medium for sound. The city is neither background nor content; rather, it is the material through which avant-garde works express themselves. In resonating through the city, these multimedia pieces perform experiments that undermine the borders between sight and sound.

Applying an interdisciplinary approach, City Symphonies expands our understanding of the genre, breaking out of the confines of the cinema and onto the street.

Author / Editor information

Contributor: Daniel P. Schwartz Daniel P. Schwartz is assistant professor of Russian and German cinemas at McGill University.

Reviews

"Schwartz takes the city symphony out of a merely cinematic context and traces the movement of this newly defined concept over roughly two decades. Conceptually very interesting." German Studies Review --- “Well-written, engaging, and informative, this book offers an exciting new prism through which to study the historical avant-garde. The book makes eye-opening connections across media and cultures to trace the development of the city symphony as a particularly modernist, intermedial art form. Schwartz establishes a kind of genealogy of the genre, from its beginnings in music, to its transfer into mass spectacle, film, and literature, and finally its cinematic metamorphosis into a more globalized vision of sonic space and spatial unity.” Julia Vaingurt, University of Illinois Chicago and author of Wonderlands of the Avant-Garde: Technology and the Arts in Russia of the 1920s

Topics

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    Frontmatter

    i
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    Contents

    v
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    Figures

    vii
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    Acknowledgments

    ix
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    Introduction: City Symphonies: Sound and the Composition of Urban Modernity, 1913–1931

    1
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    1 In the Concert Hall: Luigi Russolo’s The Art of Noises and The Awakening of a City

    26
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    2 On the Street: The Sound and Silence of Arseny Avraamov’s Symphony of Sirens in Baku (1922) and Moscow (1923)

    59
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    3 On the Screen: Sounding the Inaudible in the City Symphonies of Walter Ruttmann and Dziga Vertov

    96
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    4 On the Air: German Experimental Radio and the Radio City Symphony

    131
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    5 Around the World: Sight and Sound in the Global Symphonies of Vertov and Ruttmann

    162
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    Coda: Listening to City Symphonies

    187
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    Notes

    191
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    Index

    217
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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
April 24, 2024
eBook ISBN:
9780228021421
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
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https://doi.org/10.1515/9780228021421
eBook ISBN: 9780228021421
Audience(s) for this book
For an expert adult audience, including professional development and academic research
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