Background
Joseph was born Iosif Moiseyevich Schillinger on September 1, 1895 in Kharkov, Russia (present-day Ukraine), the only child of Moses and Anna (Gielgur) Schillinger. His father was a prosperous businessman of Jewish descent.
Joseph was born Iosif Moiseyevich Schillinger on September 1, 1895 in Kharkov, Russia (present-day Ukraine), the only child of Moses and Anna (Gielgur) Schillinger. His father was a prosperous businessman of Jewish descent.
Receiving his early education from tutors, Joseph displayed a strong interest in art and music and wrote his first composition at the age of ten. He began his formal education at the Classical College in St. Petersburg, where he studied mathematics, physics, and languages; he also developed an interest in philosophy.
In 1914 he entered the Imperial Conservatory of Music at St. Petersburg. He studied composition under Vasily Kalafati and Joseph Vitols, and conducting with Nicolai Cherepnin, obtaining a gold medal for composition, and graduated in 1918.
From 1918 to 1922 Schillinger taught at the State Academy of Music in Kharkov, becoming dean; he also conducted the student orchestra and, in 1920-21, the Ukraine Symphony. Thereafter, he lectured at various institutions in Leningrad.
Schillinger began his composing career in Leningrad, where he was associated with modernist circles. His works of this period include a symphonic suite, "March of the Orient" (1924), and a Sonata-Rhapsody (1925) for piano. His Symphonic Rhapsody (1927) won a competition for the best work composed during the first ten years of the Soviet regime. In that same year he took part in an ethnomusicological expedition sent to the Caucasus to record the folk music of some of the Georgian tribes.
In November 1928, at the invitation of the American Society for Cultural Relations with Russia, Schillinger came to the United States. Settling in New York City, he lectured on composition at the New School for Social Research (1932 - 33) and on "Rhythmic Design" in the fine arts department of Teachers College, Columbia University (1934 - 36); he became an American citizen in 1936.
Even before coming to the United States, Schillinger had been devoting much of his time to studying and elucidating principles of modern music. Under the influence of Alexander Scriabin, he began exploring alternatives to the tempered scale, which he regarded as insufficient. As early as 1918 he urged the construction of electric instruments to produce scientifically correct intervals.
In America, during the years 1928-31, he collaborated with Leo Theremin in the development of the electronic instrument bearing the latter's name and composed for it the "First Airphonic Suite, " first performed by the Cleveland Symphony on November 28, 1929.
Schillinger's radical theories found their most characteristic expression in his application of strict mathematical principles and formulae to musical composition. His method was fully developed in two posthumous books, The Schillinger System of Musical Composition (2 vols. , 1946) and The Mathematical Basis of the Arts (1948).
The "Schillinger system" attracted wide attention and evoked some skepticism. Several popular composers became his students, including the clarinetist Benny Goodman, the pianist Oscar Levant, and the band leader Glenn Miller, who wrote "Moonlight Serenade" as a Schillinger exercise. Schillinger's most famous student was George Gershwin, who found in the Schillinger system the technical orchestration techniques (as reflected partly in Porgy and Bess) that he needed to give disciplined form to his ever-flowing musical ideas.
Schillinger died of cancer at his home in New York City in his forty-eighth year.
Joseph Schillinger organized and directed the first "jazz" orchestra in Russia. He originated the Schillinger System of Musical Composition. In the United States he became famous as the advisor to many of America’s leading popular musicians and concert music composers including Earle Brown, Burt Bacharach, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller. Schillinger also published a new method of notating choreography. His famous works: "March of the Orient" (1924), a Sonata-Rhapsody (1925) for piano, "First Airphonic Suite" (1929).
(The most original and novel phase of Schillinger's approa...)
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Schillinger predicted that electronic instruments would eventually displace conventional ones, as part of the evolutionary process through which music would become completely abstracted from the obsolescent forms of the past.
His view on composition was that it should be freed from dependency on intuitive invention and "inspiration, " and that unplanned or unconscious mathematical patterns underlying much of the creative process ought to be made explicit and logically elaborated.
Schillinger's system of composition was founded on the concept of rhythm as a pattern from which stemmed the development of melody and harmony. A musical phrase of a given length, for example, could be developed by treating each element (rhythm, pitch, tonal interval) as an algebraic quantity and applying algebraic and geometric operations to yield permutations and combinations of these elements. The resulting new relationships could then be converted into musical terms. The same principles, he maintained, could be applied to the elements of painting and architecture.
Schillinger's first marriage, on May 22, 1930, to a Russian actress, Olga Mikhailovna Goldberg, ended in divorce; he was married for the second time, on November 12, 1938, in New York, to Frances Rosenfeld Singer, who survived him. There were no children.
