Russian Avant-Garde and Contemporary Music

Long before Virtual Reality, Russian artists were experimenting with immersive environments that united sound, light, movement, and space. In this public talk, composer Oleg Troyanovsky will introduce the visionary ideas of the Russian Avant-Garde and trace their influence into today’s digital culture.

The journey will begin with Alexander Scriabin’s Prometheus, which projects color alongside music, and continue through the rhythmic revolution of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, where choreography recast music as a physical event.

Under the pressure of Soviet “socialist realism,” cinema became a secret laboratory for radical music. Troyanovsky will explore how legendary duos — Prokofiev and Eisenstein, and Artemyev and Tarkovsky — transformed film scores into “sonic architecture” rather than mere background music. The talk will highlight how Alfred Schnittke used the screen to mix musical styles from across history, and how these innovations led to Moscow Conceptualism, shifting the focus from sensory experiences to art as a system of signs and logic.

Finally, Troyanovsky will present his own projects — Protomusic, Periodic Table, Selenus, and others — demonstrating how he continues the Russian avant-garde tradition by using algorithmic systems to translate data, visual art, and literature into musical forms.

Oleg Troyanovsky is a composer and media artist based in New York City. His work combines orchestral composition, electronic sound design, and interactive audio systems. He composes for film and virtual reality projects, creates generative and spatial music installations, and produces large-scale orchestral recordings. His orchestral work includes a recording with the London Symphony Orchestra at Abbey Road Studios for the HOPE / Unknown Story project (2026).
In recent years, he has focused on interactive installations and code-based composition.

• Tap Code Songs (Amherst College) is an interactive installation that translates Pr*son tap code into musical structure.
• Inner Landscape, created for a municipal exhibition in Compiègne, France, was installed in a 12th-century church and uses the composer’s bio-data as the structural basis of the music.
• Periodic Table (2019) is a sonification of chemical elements, developed for an interactive VR reconstruction of Dmitri Mendeleev’s study as part of a UNESCO initiative marking the 150th anniversary of the Periodic Table.
• Selenus is a project of personalized piano works in which a name and date of birth are encoded into the music.

Troyanovsky received the Prix Italia Grand Prix (2015) for the project Encrypted in Music and the Prix Europa Special Prize (2015) for Radio Symphony: Musical Observatory. In 2020, he was selected as one of six winners (from approximately 11,000 entrants) in the Westworld Scoring Competition, judged by J.J. Abrams and Jonathan Nolan.
Refreshments will be served. This in-person event is open to the public.
Organizers: Fletcher Russia and Eurasia Program, the Russian Program at the Tufts University Department of International Literary and Cultural Studies, and the Russian European Cultural Club.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Olga Troitskaia