More information about composer Arthur Lourié can be found on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Louri%C3%A9

A few important points are missing, but I will come back to them later. I discovered Lourié about ten years ago. I was looking in the Deutsche Grammophon catalogue and I discovered a CD with his music, performed by Gidon Kremer. I was a bit surprised that such a major label and such a famous violinist would record such unknown music. When I was in Amsterdam a few weeks later, I saw the CD in a record store and I decided to buy it. I was very surprised by the great quality of the music and I decided to buy more of Lourié's music on disc. I discovered that this was far from easy (and unfortunately, it still is).

I hope I will find more time in the future to investigate Lourié and his music. There are only a few little books and texts around, most of them in German (the Hindemith Year Book of 1979 is an excellent source, the pictures I used for our quiz came from that book) but still I think Lourié is not as obscure like, say, Nikolai Obukhov. There was even a film made about Lourié by Dutch television, but I've never seen it. Now that Roslavets is becoming more and more famous, I hope that the same will happen with Lourié. This beautiful and interesting music definitely deserves a larger audience.

The piece I put up the internet was a fragment from the orchestral suite The Blackamoor of Peter the Great (mentioned on Wikipedia). Here's another fragment from it:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/vrn56m

I will post more music later on. Lourié wrote so many different pieces that a few fragments don't represent the character of his total output.

 

I don't think Lourié used microtones in his First String Quartet, autoharp. There's an excellent recording of all three of his Quartets by the Utrecht String Quartet on ASV. The First is a long and rather difficult piece to listen to, the Second is a more neoclassical work (he orchestrated it later and called it A Little Chamber Music) and the Third Quartet is a Suite of four movements. Here's the first movement:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/d5cbtp

The Italian pianist Daniele Lombardi recorded the Syntheses and the Formes en l'air on Nuova Era, but I don't think this disc is still available. Here is the first piece of the Syntheses, played by Lombardi:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/r2rtxk

I've also put up the first piece of the Formes en l'air:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/dkruy4

The funny thing is that Lourié also composed totally different music around the same time. Here's an example, the First Mazurka, played by Vladimir Skanavi:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/ibotpt

Sorry for my late reply. I will put up more music by Lourié later.

Hope to listen to all this on a better computer than mine.
The quartet with microtones was apparently written in 1910 and the 1st quartet in 1915.
Oh - another source says 1921 for the 1st quartet. How many did he write ?

There is some work on Lourié in Detlef Gojowy's book on Russian music (in German):

Die Musik in Russland : (von 1800 bis zur Oktoberrevolution 1917) : Entwicklungen, Wertungen, Übersichten

That's all the useful information I've found on him. Would love to hear more, very interested in Formes en L'air!

The 'first' quartet (i.e. not no.1) is probably lost. But we know that Lourie wrote a piece employing microtones around 1912 or so, since the ms of one was reproduced in a futurist book around that time. That other piece was a prelude for piano, which I imagine was not readily performable in Russia at that time. So his claim that this quartet used quarter tones is believable. In those early years Lourie also wrote a couple of pieces for female voice with string trio and string quartet, so was one of the first to use this combination (I'm not sure if he knew of Schönberg's Second Quartet, but it is quite possible due to the cosmopolitan atmosphere of pre-WWI St Petersburg). Some other Lourie pieces of that time are also lost; we only know about them due to publisher's announcements. I hope this sheds a bit of light!

Gojowy's book is called Artur Lourie and Russian Futurism (in German, of course) but does not really touch on the music a great deal (there are almost no musical examples). His earlier book on Russian music of that era is not an easy read, regrettably. The book by Sitsky (The Forgotten Russian Avant Garde, or something of that type) is, on the other hand, a bit too easy to read, and does not have a particularly penetrating tone, but is useful for worklists (which are not bad, but he lists pieces twice when they were published in different countries with different names, for instance) and basic data, rather than analytical comment or historical insight.