Schillinger – Part 1

INTRODUCTION

Joseph Schillinger (1895 – 1943) was arguably one of the most remarkable figures in the first half of the twentieth-century. As a young man, his interests ranged far and wide and encompassed many fields of learning from philosophy, literature and Slavic mythology, languages, mathematics, physics, electrical engineering, music, fine arts, dance and design. After graduating the St Petersburg Conservatory in 1918, where he studied composition and conducting under Nikolay Tcherepnin, he entered the newly formed USSR’s music academic world and quickly rose through its ranks to become an acknowledged authority on ‘modern music’ as well as administrator and musical consultant to the Soviet’s leading opera and ballet companies. He also organized and ran Russia’s first jazz orchestra in 1927.

As early as 1918, he published a paper about electricity and its potential applications in the development of a whole world of new musical instruments. In 1922, publication of a collection of his poetry in which he envisioned an artist in the future whose senses were fused anticipated art forms of today such as inter-media and virtual realities. Schillinger’s expertise in both music and electrical engineering enabled him to collaborate with Leon Theremin and bring the invention of the Thereminvox to fruition. Again with Theremin, he invented the Rhythmicon (a fore-runner of the electronic drum machine) as well as the world’s first electronic music synthesizer for the RCA-Victor Company. Schillinger’s name exists alongside that of Leon Theremin on the US Patents for these inventions.

Several years before he emigrated to the US, Schillinger made pioneering ethno-musicological field recordings of a number of Georgian tribes. After emigrating to the US in 1928, Schillinger (along with Charles Seeger, Henry Cowell and others) founded the New York Musicology Society.

Once in the US, Schillinger quickly established himself as a composition teacher of renown. His teaching methods were based on a system of his own invention (published posthumously as The Schillinger System of Composition) and attracted many of the most famous Broadway, radio, film and jazz composers of the 1930s. George Gershwin turned to Schillinger at a time when he believed he’d reached the peak of his creativity. During the four years Gershwin spent studying with Schillinger, he composed some of his finest works such as the Cuban Overture, Porgy and Bess, and I’ve Got Rhythm (Variations).

During the 1930s, Schillinger pioneered developments in the synchronization of music to film. His underlying belief of music and the arts as a scientific phenomenon ultimately led to the (posthumous) publication of his second major work, The Mathematical Basis of the Arts. At the time of its publication in 1947, various reviewers in academic journals cited the work as “the most systematic and exhaustive treatment of the subject ever written” and “a major landmark in the history of aesthetics”.1

In the years immediately following Schillinger’s premature death in 1943, aside from his two major books being published as well as several of his compositions from the early 1920s, Schillinger House was established in Boston to teach his ’system’. This later underwent a name change and is still known as the Berklee School of Music.

Despite all these successes in life, Schillinger’s name faded from memory to the point where it currently exists as a mere footnote to twentieth century music and arts history. It is outside the scope of this paper to scrutinize every one of Schillinger’s accomplishments and so it will focus on his major work on composition – The Schillinger System of Composition.

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1 Myhill, John, (1950), The Mathematical Basis of the Arts (Review), Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol.11, No.1 (Sep. 1950), pp. 109 – 113.