Ebook: The Schillinger System of Musical Composition

Joseph Schillinger was a Russian-born composer and teacher, active in New York in the 1930s. The unprecedented migration of European knowledge and culture that swept from East to West during the first decades of the 20th Century included figures such as Prokofiev and Rachmaninov, great composers who were the product of the renowned Russian system of music education. Schillinger came from this background, dedicated to creating truly professional musicians, having been a student of the St Petersburg Imperial Conservatory of Music. Unlike his more famous contemporaries, Schillinger was a natural teacher and communicated his musical knowledge in the form of a precise written theory, using mathematical expressions to describe art, architecture, design and (most insistently, and with most detail and success) music.
In New York, Schillinger flourished, becoming famous as the advisor to many of America’s leading popular musicians and concert music composers. These number, inter alia, George Gershwin, Benny Goodman, Glen Miller, Nathan Laval, Oscar Levant, Tommy Dorsey and Henry Cowell. Gershwin spent four years studying with Schillinger. During this period, he composed Porgy and Bess and consulted Schillinger on matters concerning the opera, particularly its orchestration. In the field of electronic music, Schillinger collaborated with Leon Theremin, the inventor of an early electronic musical instrument, the Theremin, which had a huge impact on commercial music, most famously in the 1960’s song Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys.
Schillinger accredited a small group of students as qualified teachers of the System and after his death, one of them, Lawrence Berk, founded a music school in Boston to continue the dissemination of the System. Schillinger House opened in 1945 and later became the Berklee College of Music where the System survived in the curriculum until the 1960's.