Irina Ustvolskaya is a russian woman in her mid-twenties, recently arrived in New York as one of the first envoys sent by the fledgling Soviet Union in a wider strategy of propagation of communist ideals via cultural exchange.
Born as the only child to a poor family of peasants turned factory workers, she started helping her parents from a young age — indeed, she is quick to brag that her mother gave birth to her in the assembly line and that her first toy was a rattler filled with broken cogs.
No more than a few years later, in 1905, she witnessed her first revolution, sitting on her father’s shoulders and brandishing a wrench that she used to bang on an empty food can. They sang as they marched and they sang as they were trampled by the Tsar’s forces and Irina sang as her mother disappeared under a pile of rubble.
Afterwards, with only slightly improved working conditions, she continued helping her father at the factory, learning how to operate and repair heavy machinery years before she had learnt to read. In the little free time she had, she crafted songs of iron, steel and explosions that she considered the hymns that would hail a new era. The bolsheviks and, later, the Communist Party, were quick to embrace hers as one of the many kinds of revolutionary manifestations of the culture of the proletariat.
When the 1917 came, Irina was officially a member of the Party. Setting her music for five years, she helped the Red Army with whatever mechanical needs they had and, at times, even took part in direct confrontations.
Finally the fires of war began to be appeased. Having climbed the hierarchy of the Party with notorious ruthlessness, Irina once again found time to dedicate herself to a music that had become even more violent and explosive as it simmered in the furnaces of revolution. Her pieces became ever more extreme: she saw the sound of bubbling molten metal, mechanical saws, hammers and drills as a bourgeois composer saw a violin, a piano and a flute.
It was with great honour and fervour that she received her assignment of showing the terrible beauty of the proletariat to the world. Her first stop was to be in the United States, where a decadent bourgeois, Anthony Carmichael, had expressed interest in the avant-garde of soviet cultural production.
