Vladimir Ussachevsky

A pioneering force in the emergence of electronic music across the United States, composer Vladimir Ussachevsky entered the world on November 3, 1911, in Hailar, Manchuria. He relocated to the U.S. in 1930, completed his undergraduate studies at Pomona College, and pursued further training at the Eastman School of Music. During that period he produced his earliest substantial compositions, among them Theme and Variations from 1935 and Jubilee Cantata from 1938, along with additional scores intended for piano, voice, chorus, and orchestra. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1939 he accepted a teaching position at Columbia University in 1947; it was around then that his initial experiments with electronic sound began, leading shortly afterward to his purchase of an Ampex tape recorder. In 1952 he and Otto Luening staged the first public presentation of tape music anywhere in the U.S., an event that featured the premiere of Ussachevsky’s landmark piece of musique concrète, Sonic Contours. Additional important works soon appeared, including Poem of Cycles and Bells in 1954 and Piece for Tape Recorder in 1956. Four years later the pair obtained a Rockefeller Foundation grant that enabled them to establish the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, America’s inaugural facility devoted to electro-acoustic composition. Equipped with four analog tape studios and the large-scale RCA Mark II Synthesizer, the center served as an incubator for numerous experimental pieces, many of them authored by Ussachevsky himself. He passed away on January 4, 1990.