american city
(for string quartet and electronics)

american city
(for string quartet and electronics)
for Mivos Quartet (Commissioned by the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University)

In July 1931, Ibragim Akhmetzyanov and his family arrived in Magnitogorsk, Russia, traveling in a wooden boxcar with his wife and eight children. What greeted them was a stark, desolate landscape. In the middle of the harsh, windswept steppe stood a collection of tents and makeshift barracks, this was the base of “Magnetic Mountain,” a massive landform so rich in iron ore that compasses malfunctioned and birds avoided flying overhead.

Between the mountain and the shallow Ural River, workers began constructing the Stalin Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Complex, one of the largest steel plants in the world. This enormous industrial project, part of the Soviet Union’s first Five-Year Plan, ironically relied on expertise from a capitalist rival. In 1930, the American firm Arthur McKee & Co. was hired to design the plant and train Soviet engineers. Modeled after the U.S. Steel plant in Gary, Indiana, Magnitogorsk became known as “the American City.”

American City explores the industrial vision behind cities like Magnitogorsk, where urban design and human life were integrated into large-scale production systems. It also examines the fates of industrial cities like Magnitogorsk and Gary, Indiana. Through dense, interconnected musical textures, the work reflects the mechanized nature of industrial life, highlighting themes of uniformity, control, inequality, and decay.

Excerpts presented in summary of Alec Luhn, “In Magnitogorsk,” published in The Guardian.