Documenting the available recordings of Ussachevsky and Luening’s 1952 concert

Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening performed a concert of new electronic music on 28 Oct 1952 at the Museum of Modern Art. From Paul Griffiths’ Modern Music and After:

The Russian-born Vladimir Ussachevsky (b. 1911), who taught at Columbia University, gave a demonstration of the new medium’s potential in 1952, and he was soon joined in his endeavours by Otto Luening (b. 1900), who had studied with Busoni. They presented the first concert of electronic music in America, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on 28 October 1952: representative of the pieces then heard are Ussachevsky’s Sonic Contours and Luening’s Fantasy in Space, based on the sounds of piano and flute respectively. Out of their efforts grew the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, which was formally founded in 1960.

Paul Griffiths, Modern Music and After

There currently are two copies of the actual-and-real vinyl at Discogs. One for around $85 and the other $140.

The original recording from 1955
  1. A1 Sonic Contours – Ussachevsky
  2. A2 Fantasy In Space – Luening – “resampled flute recordings that were manipulated on magnetic tape” (according to the Forced Exposure website below)
  3. B1 Incantation – Luening / Ussachevsky
  4. B2 Invention – Luening
  5. B3 Low Speed – Luening

An affordable vinyl recording was re-released in 2013 by Cacophonic:

The 2013 re-release (note that Poem in Cycles and Bells has been added)
  1. A1 Sonic Contours
  2. A2 Fantasy In Space
  3. A3 Incantation
  4. A4 Invention In Twelve Notes
  5. A5 Low Speed
  6. B1 Poem In Cycles And Bells (~14:00) – for tape recorder and orchestra, recorded in 1956 (according to the Forced Exposure website below). It’s taken from a 1957 LP of the same name and packaged with this re-release.

A slightly more expensive copy is being sold at Forced Exposure (though listed as a 2016 release), and that site has some interesting notes on the recording (possibly liner notes):

[T]his privately pressed 1955 10″ was released on a one-off label owned by businessman Gene Bruck to document a custom-made performance at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1952.

For the YouTube recordings below, I marked down times when the track changed to get durations however, the tracks are different from those listed on the album covers that are displayed in the video. I’ve double-checked my markings so the users that uploaded may have just used whatever images they had available.

This recording on YouTube, though it uses the 2013 cover, is possibly the original 1955 recording since it is only 14 minutes long and does not contain Poem in Cycles and Bells:

  1. A1 Sonic Contours (@0:00) (4:59)
  2. A2 Fantasy In Space (@4:59) (1:57)
  3. B1 Incantation (@6:56) (1:40)
  4. B2 Invention (@8:36) (2:42)
  5. B3 Low Speed (@11:18) (2:39). Note that this is an abbreviated version of the recording as can be seen by the 3:46 running time below and in other recordings on YouTube.

The recording is of a 1968 release (also affordable), with the 1955 tracks ordered differently plus three additional tracks:

  1. A1 Sonic Contours (@0:00) (7:20)
  2. A2 Low Speed (@7:20) (3:46)
  3. A3 Fantasy in Space (@11:06) (2:54)
  4. A4 Incantation (@14:00) (2:36)
  5. A5 Invention In Twelve Notes (@16:36) (3:42)
  6. A6 Moonflight (@20:18) (3:00)
  7. B1 Lyric Scene, For Flute And Strings (@23:18) (6:09) – Luening – acoustic
  8. B2 Legend, For Oboe And Strings (@29:27) (10:46) – Luening – acoustic