(b Porhov, Pskov province, Russia, April 23, 1891; d Leningrad, USSR, Jan 5, 1951). Russian inventor of pioneering photoelectric composition machines. In 1908 he finished college in Pskov and entered the Institute of Civil Engineers in St Petersburg, which he left to pursue a career as a freelance musician. He was a founding member (with Arseny Avraamov and Sergei Dianin) in the summer of 1917 of the Leonardo da Vinci Society in Petrograd, whose aims were to investigate and improve music scientifically. At the same time Sholpo, inspired by the ideas of Avraamov, wrote a science fiction essay titled ‘The Enemy of Music’ in which he described a sound machine named the ‘Mechanical Orchestra’ capable of synthesizing any sound and producing music according to a special graphic score without a performer. It prefigured the ANS synthesizer, built 40 years later in Moscow by Evgeny Murzin.
From 1918 to 1922...
