Recorded Sound in Live Performance The 1920s in Berlin saw the first serious consideration of the phonograph as an instrument of live performance. Stefan Wolpe, a student of Busoni is reported to have played somewhere between eight and twelve phonographs simultaneously at a festival. Stefan Wolpe said: "Only when you have painted yourself into a corner does the ceiling become a possible exit." A few years later, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy advocated for the use of the phonograph as a compositional tool. This along with other experiments including drawing by hand on optical sound film were a result of the conversation taking place between musicians from the Novembergruppe, The Berlin Hochschule for Music, and the Bauhaus, examining the use of recorded sound as a creative musical tool with inherent mass distributability. In Italy, where Futurism was born, Ottorino Respighi (pictured above) incorporated a disc recording of nightingales to be played with an orchestra in his 24 Pina di Roma—the first composition that required recorded sound and the phonograph as an instrument. When one is walking through the woods, the song of birds provides an ethereal musical environment—without any recognizable source—the sounds seem to inhabit their own existence in the surrounding air. The use of bird song by Respighi mirrored the disembodied characterization of music set forth by Feruccio Busoni who saw music as 'sonorous air'.