How a generation of Russian avant-gardists tried to break music free from its twelve-note cage — and paid the price
Most musicians spend their lives working within a system so familiar it feels like gravity: twelve notes per octave, laid out in the pattern you see on any piano keyboard. This system — called 12-tone equal temperament — divides the octave into twelve equal steps. It’s so deeply embedded in Western music that questioning it can feel almost absurd.
But music doesn’t have to work this way. The notes on a piano keyboard are not the only notes that exist. There is an infinite landscape of pitches between them — what we call microtones: pitches that fall between the cracks of the standard keyboard. If you’ve ever heard a blues singer “bend” a note somewhere between a major and minor third, or listened to the wavering quality of a sitar, you’ve heard microtones at work.
A remarkable group of composers based in Russia and the Soviet Union spent much of the twentieth century trying to bring that infinite landscape into formal composition. They built new instruments, founded secret societies, developed elaborate theoretical systems — and for the most part, history has almost entirely forgotten them. Political suppression, the physical difficulty of performing their music, and the relentless march of musical fashion combined to bury their work for decades.
This is their story.
The Seed: Nikolai Kulbin and “Free Music”
The story begins before the Soviet era entirely, with a figure who was not primarily a composer at all. Nikolai Kulbin (1868–1917) was an army doctor, painter, and passionate advocate for the Russian Futurist movement. In 1908 he delivered a lecture in St. Petersburg titled “Free Music,” later published as a theoretical treatise, in which he made a radical argument: the twelve-note scale was an artificial prison. Real music, he said, should be free to use any pitch at all — including the infinitely subtle gradations that lie between the piano keys.
Kulbin never composed much himself, but his writings lit a fuse. Among his direct or indirect followers was a young firebrand composer named Arseny Avraamov, who would take Kulbin’s ideas and run further with them than almost anyone else in history.
Arseny Avraamov and the 48-Tone Chaos Musician
Arseny Avraamov (1886–1944) is probably the most gloriously unhinged figure in this whole story, and that’s saying something. He was, at various points, a circus artist, a music theorist, a film sound pioneer, and a conductor who once directed a symphony performed entirely by factory sirens, foghorns, artillery guns, and the entire Soviet flotilla in the Caspian Sea.
That last work — the Simfoniya Gudkov (“Symphony of Sirens”), performed on 7 November 1922 in Baku to mark the fifth anniversary of the October Revolution — is the piece for which he is best remembered today. Its score coordinated navy ship whistles, bus horns, factory sirens, cannons, machine guns, seaplanes, and a mass choir, conducted by a team of assistants using flags and pistols. It was conducted by Avraamov himself, reportedly wielding two flaming torches from a rooftop. Whether this image is entirely accurate or partly legendary, it captures the man perfectly.
But the Symphony of Sirens was more than spectacle. Avraamov had a serious and deeply developed theoretical obsession: he believed that 12-tone equal temperament was a historically accidental compromise that severed music from the natural world of acoustic overtones. The solution, he argued, was a radical expansion. He developed what he called the “Ultrachromatic” system — a 48-tone equal division of the octave, nicknamed the Welttonsystem (“World Tone System”), which he presented in his thesis “The Universal System of Tones” in Berlin, Frankfurt, and Stuttgart in 1927.
Avraamov’s tuning divided the octave into 48 equal parts rather than the standard 12, giving each step a size of 25 cents (a quarter of a standard semitone). His goal was to achieve something almost mystical: to reconcile equal temperament with the harmonic series — that sequence of natural overtones that every vibrating string and air column produces. He envisioned future instruments not merely as a way to reach new harmonies, but as a means of realising the additive synthesis that nature itself uses to build timbre.
He even designed a mobile steam organ built from locomotive whistles specially tuned to his ultrachromatic scale, controlled by an electrified keyboard that triggered valves from the locomotive cab. Whether this instrument was actually built and used in the Symphony of Sirens performances remains disputed, but the ambition was characteristic.
Avraamov’s microtonal thinking predated the better-known Petrograd Society for Quarter-Tone Music by several years. He died in Moscow in 1944, largely forgotten, and his manuscripts remained in Soviet archives for decades.
Georgy Rimsky-Korsakov and the Quarter-Tone Circle
Meanwhile, in Petrograd, a very different kind of microtonal activism was taking root — more systematic, more academic, and ultimately also more doomed.
Georgy Rimsky-Korsakov (1901–1965) was the grandson of the famous Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, the great orchestrator of the Russian nationalist tradition. The elder Rimsky-Korsakov would probably have been appalled. Georgy founded the “Circle of Quarter-Tone Music” at the Petrograd Conservatoire in 1923 — the same year his father’s teacher’s music was being played in concert halls across Europe as a symbol of the safe, canonical past.
Quarter-tone music — working with 24-tone equal temperament rather than the standard 12 — is perhaps the most natural entry point into microtonal thinking for musicians trained in Western tradition. The quarter tone is exactly half of a standard semitone (50 cents). It sounds strange at first — slightly “out of tune” in the way that makes inexperienced listeners uncomfortable — but it opens up a new world of intervals, including what are called neutral intervals: notes halfway between a minor and major third, or between a major and minor second, that have their own distinctive, plaintive character.
Georgy threw himself into this world with remarkable energy. He developed his own theoretical basis for the quarter-tone system, published in an article in 1925. He maintained an intensive correspondence with the three leading quarter-tone composers working in Europe at the time: Alois Hába in Prague, Ivan Wyschnegradsky in Paris, and Jörg Mager in Germany. He organized concerts and performances at the Leningrad Conservatoire, bringing this genuinely radical music before audiences used to Beethoven and Tchaikovsky.
The Circle attracted a number of young composers and included, at least tangentially, the early Dmitri Shostakovich, who was then a student at the Leningrad Conservatoire. Whether Shostakovich was a true believer or merely a curious fellow traveller in those early years is unclear, but his presence indicates how seriously the quarter-tone experiment was taken in those circles.
The Circle was transformed into a formal seminar in 1927, then gradually declined. By 1929, it had collapsed entirely — partly from the natural fading of enthusiasm among former students who had moved on, and partly from the gathering political storm that would make any such “formalist” musical experiment dangerous.
Georgy Rimsky-Korsakov continued to compose and teach at the Leningrad Conservatoire until 1962, occasionally attempting revivals of interest in quarter-tone music. In the 1950s he tried to relaunch the Circle at the Leningrad Philharmonic Society, programming his own works alongside those of Hába and Wyschnegradsky alongside Mozart, Schubert, and Rachmaninoff — an act of remarkable stubbornness in the cultural climate of the time. These attempts were, according to musicologist Lidia Ader, “utterly ignored.”
Ivan Wyschnegradsky: The One Who Got Away
Of all the figures in this story, Ivan Wyschnegradsky (1893–1979) has received the most attention from posterity — probably because he left Russia early and did most of his work in Paris, away from Soviet reach. But he began his journey in St. Petersburg, and his connection to Russian musical culture remained deep throughout his life.
In November 1916, Wyschnegradsky had what he later described as a spiritual vision: he saw — or felt — music as a continuous sonic field, an infinite spectrum of pitch rather than a collection of discrete steps. The standard semitone, he realized, was just an arbitrary increment on a ruler that could be divided as finely as desired. He called this revelation his ultrachromatic awakening.
His early microtonal work was performed on two standard pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart — one at standard pitch, one tuned 50 cents higher — so that together they could produce all 24 notes of 24-tone equal temperament. This became his standard setup for years, and he developed a genuine compositional language for it: lush, expressionist harmonies that moved through the expanded pitch space with an organic logic.
A primary motivation for leaving Russia in 1920 was his desire to have proper instruments built. He had designed a quarter-tone keyboard with three manuals that could serve a single player, and he needed engineers capable of realizing it. The Pleyel firm built him a pneumatic quarter-tone piano in 1921, though its inconsistent tone disappointed him. In 1929, a Förster upright quarter-tone piano was finally delivered to his Paris apartment, where he composed on it for the rest of his life.
Wyschnegradsky’s music didn’t stop at quarter tones. He also composed in sixth-tones (36-tone equal temperament) and twelfth-tones (72-tone equal temperament). He wrote theoretical works articulating his concept of “pansonority” — the idea that all possible pitches in a continuous spectrum constituted a kind of musical ideal, with each tuning system representing a different degree of approximation to that ideal. In 1953 he developed what he called “non-octavian space,” treating major sevenths or minor ninths as if they were octaves, effectively dissolving the fundamental organizing principle of Western harmony.
Though living in Paris, Wyschnegradsky’s influence on Soviet composers during the 1920s was direct: he maintained a steady correspondence with Georgy Rimsky-Korsakov, who organized performances of his works on programs alongside other young Soviet microtonalists.
He spent much of his life in poverty, his works rarely performed. His magnum opus, La Journée de l’Existence for narrator, orchestra, and chorus — a work he had been revising since 1916 — was finally premiered publicly in Paris in 1978, a year before his death, when he was 85 years old.
The Iron Curtain Falls on Microtones
The late 1920s and 1930s saw the systematic dismantling of musical experimentation in the Soviet Union. As Stalin consolidated power, the doctrine of Socialist Realism was imposed on all the arts: music was expected to be “realistic,” meaning accessible to the proletariat, ideologically uplifting, and firmly rooted in the melodic and harmonic conventions of the nineteenth century. Anything that smacked of “formalism” — that is, any music that prioritized abstract formal or sonic experimentation over direct emotional communication with workers — was politically suspect.
Nikolai Roslavets (1881–1944) illustrates the fate of this generation especially painfully. Roslavets had been one of the most adventurous composers in Russia, developing what he called a “New System of Tone Organization” based on “synthetic chords” that anticipated Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique while being developed entirely independently. His engagement with microtonality was less systematic than Wyschnegradsky’s or Avraamov’s but his harmonic thinking pointed in related directions, and he was a vocal champion of radical tuning experimentation in the early Soviet years.
From 1930 onward, Roslavets’s music was officially suppressed. He spent his final years in obscurity, his name expunged from Soviet musical dictionaries. He died in Moscow in 1944. His name did not reappear in a Soviet musical dictionary until 1978 — and then in a negative context. The full rediscovery of his work had to wait until the Soviet archives opened after the USSR’s collapse in 1991.
The Thaw: Underground Microtonalists of the 1960s
Stalin died in 1953. The period of relative cultural relaxation that followed — known as the Thaw — created a cautious, underground opening for avant-garde experimentation. A new generation of Soviet composers began quietly circulating photocopied scores of Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Boulez, and Stockhausen. The music they encountered had been developing for forty years while Soviet composers were forbidden from even knowing it existed.
Andrei Volkonsky (1933–2008) became the first and most visible member of this underground. Born in Geneva, he had returned to the Soviet Union after the war. His piano suite Musica Stricta (1957) introduced serial twelve-tone technique to Soviet music — a technique that had been the central innovation of European composition since the 1920s but which was essentially unknown inside the USSR. It was, in the political logic of the time, an act of courage tantamount to protest.
Volkonsky organized around him a group that came to include Edison Denisov, Sofia Gubaidulina, Alfred Schnittke, and Arvo Pärt — now the most famous names of late Soviet classical music. According to musicologist Lidia Ader, microtonal music in this period stood somewhat apart from the main thrust of this avant-garde revival. The 1960s composers were mostly preoccupied with catching up to Western serialism, which felt thrillingly forbidden. Microtonality was, in their world, more of a coloristic tool than a systematic philosophical commitment — used in isolated passages for dramatic effect or to evoke the natural pitch inflections of folk music.
Volkonsky himself was expelled from the USSR Composers’ Union after applying for an exit visa in the early 1970s. He emigrated in 1973, having already been described as a “stranger among his own” within the avant-garde circle he had founded. His music remains little performed.
Sofia Gubaidulina: Microtones as Spiritual Territory
Of all the composers who emerged from this 1960s underground, Sofia Gubaidulina (1931–2025) made microtonal sonority most central to her mature work — though always in service of something far beyond technical experimentation.
Gubaidulina was born in Chistopol, in the Tatar Republic, to a Tatar father and a mother of Polish-Jewish descent. She grew up in a culture where music was saturated with the pitch inflections of Tatar folk tradition, and this non-Western musical heritage seems to have made the idea of “in-between” notes feel natural to her from the beginning.
When Shostakovich — who was her de facto mentor — told her to “continue on your own incorrect path,” he was recognizing both her avant-garde leanings and her deeply spiritual approach to composition. Her music was repeatedly criticized by Soviet authorities, and she had difficulty securing performances of her work inside the USSR. Her international breakthrough only came in the 1980s when violinist Gidon Kremer championed her violin concerto Offertorium (1980) and brought it before Western audiences.
Her compositional language is built on what she called the “innovative use of microtonality and chromaticism” — specifically, the friction and resolution between slightly mistuned pitches that creates the impression of something reaching toward a sound it cannot quite achieve. She employed quarter tones, extended instrumental techniques, and instruments from Russian, Caucasian, and Central Asian folk traditions that naturally produce microtonal inflections. Structurally, her work is organized around the Fibonacci series and the Golden Ratio, and her deepest subject matter is always the tension between the material and the divine.
Gubaidulina moved to Germany in 1992, after the USSR’s collapse. She continued composing into her nineties, completing works for the world’s major orchestras and festivals. She died in March 2025.
The Machine That Draws Music: The ANS Synthesizer
No account of Soviet microtonal music would be complete without the ANS synthesizer — one of the strangest and most beautiful instruments ever built.
Yevgeny Murzin (1914–1970) was not a composer but a military engineer and inventor, who became obsessed with Alexander Scriabin’s theories of music and light. Beginning his project around 1938, Murzin spent nearly twenty years quietly building — as a hobby, largely without institutional support, and at considerable personal risk in Stalinist Russia — a photoelectronic synthesizer that could produce music from drawings.
The ANS (named after Scriabin’s initials — Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin) operates by projecting light through hand-scratched patterns on glass disks and plates coated with opaque mastic. The instrument contains five rotating glass disks, each etched with 144 spectral tracks representing pure sine-wave tones across the audible spectrum. A composer “writes” a score by scraping away the mastic on a glass plate — the vertical axis represents pitch, the horizontal axis represents time. When the plate is scanned by the optical system, the scratched patterns generate sound directly.
This means that the ANS does not recognize the piano keyboard or the concept of discrete semitones at all. Its vertical pitch axis is continuous. It produces 720 discrete pitches per octave — that is, it works in 720-tone equal temperament, giving pitch resolution of less than 2 cents per step. For practical purposes, this is effectively a continuous pitch spectrum: the composer can place a note anywhere in the sonic field, with microtonal precision limited only by the physical accuracy of their scratch marks on the glass.
Murzin finally established a proper laboratory for the instrument in 1958, gathering engineers and musicians to complete its design. The ANS was housed above the Scriabin Museum in central Moscow, and its existence gradually became known among the Soviet avant-garde. Alfred Schnittke, Edison Denisov, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Edward Artemyev all used it in experimental works. Artemyev’s music for Andrei Tarkovsky’s films Solaris (1972), The Mirror (1975), and Stalker (1979) — now recognized as masterworks of electronic film scoring — was created partly on the ANS, giving those otherworldly soundscapes their distinctive quality of continuous pitch motion.
Only two ANS instruments were ever built. The surviving model is now housed at the Glinka Museum of Musical Culturein Moscow. A freely available software simulation, Virtual ANS, allows anyone with a computer to experience the instrument’s logic.
Why Were They Forgotten?
The suppression of this tradition had multiple causes, and understanding them helps explain why the history of twentieth-century music generally taught in Western conservatories has such a glaring gap.
First, political repression was decisive in the Soviet case. The doctrine of Socialist Realism made formal experimentation ideologically dangerous from the late 1920s onward. Composers who pursued microtonal or other avant-garde approaches risked having their music banned, their names erased from reference books, and in extreme cases, personal persecution. The work either went underground or ceased to exist.
Second, the instrument problem plagued microtonalists everywhere, not just in the USSR. Performing music in 24-tone equal temperament requires either specially built instruments or multiple standard instruments tuned apart — which is expensive, logistically difficult, and demands extended rehearsal time. Performers trained in standard tuning must essentially re-learn their instruments. This friction has limited performances of microtonal music across all cultures.
Third, historical accident isolated Soviet composers from the West and vice versa. The research published by Lidia Ader, the most thorough scholar of this tradition, did not appear until 2009 (on the 1920s) and 2013 (on the 1960s). Soviet archives were largely inaccessible to Western musicologists until after 1991.
Fourth, the dominant narratives of twentieth-century music history — which tend to center the Austro-German tradition (Schoenberg, Webern, Boulez) and the American tradition (Cage, Partch, Reich) — left little room for a parallel Russian story even after the archives opened.
What They Gave Us
The composers and theorists in this article gave the world several things that remain genuinely valuable.
Avraamov’s Welttonsystem and his insistence on integrating the harmonic series with equal temperament anticipated the concerns of later spectral composers by fifty years. His hand-drawn film soundtracks — creating sound by drawing waveforms directly onto film stock — are a direct ancestor of modern computer music.
Wyschnegradsky’s theoretical writings on continuous pitch space and “pansonority” remain among the most serious attempts to think philosophically about what microtonal music is for, as opposed to merely being technically possible. His concept of non-octave-repeating scales was decades ahead of mainstream music theory.
Georgy Rimsky-Korsakov’s Circle created the first institutional framework for quarter-tone composition and pedagogy in the world, predating or paralleling similar developments in Prague and elsewhere.
The ANS synthesizer anticipated the entire logic of spectral and granular synthesis as it would develop in computer music studios from the 1970s onward.
And Gubaidulina — still living and composing until her death in 2025 — demonstrated that microtonal resources could be integrated into music of profound emotional and spiritual depth, far from the merely academic or experimental.
Where to Start Listening
If this article has made you curious, here are some entry points:
Wyschnegradsky: His Étude sur le carré magique sonore and the monumental La Journée de l’Existence are available on specialist labels. Some recordings of his two-piano works are findable on streaming platforms.
Avraamov: Reconstructions and recordings of the Symphony of Sirens appear on the compilation Baku: Symphony of Sirens — Sound Experiments in the Russian Avant-Garde (Theremin Center, Moscow).
ANS Synthesizer: Artemyev’s soundtracks for Solaris and Stalker are widely available. The Virtual ANS software is free and cross-platform.
Gubaidulina:Offertorium (violin concerto, 1980), recorded by Gidon Kremer, is the canonical starting point. Her string quartet works also frequently use microtonal inflection.
The standard twelve-note keyboard feels inevitable until you learn that it wasn’t. For a brief, brilliant period in early Soviet Russia, a group of composers and theorists looked at that row of white and black keys and asked: what are we missing? The answers they came up with were not always practical, or even fully realised. But they were asking the right question — and they paid for asking it. The least we can do is listen.
Primary sources for this article include Lidia Ader’s “Microtonal Storm and Stress: Georgy Rimsky-Korsakov and Quarter-Tone Music in 1920s Soviet Russia” (Tempo, Cambridge, 2009), Ader’s “Microtonal Russia: 1950–1970s Myths and Realities” (New Sound, 2013), and the research compiled at 120years.net. Wikipedia articles on Wyschnegradsky, Avraamov, Murzin, and Gubaidulina were cross-referenced against these academic sources.
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