Meanwhile, Luigi Russolo Was Making A Lot Of Noise

In 1909, The Futurist movement in art was taking, um, non-shape. Writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, founder/promoter (eventually Fascist) of this Futurist concept was probably insane though there were people around him that used his concepts experimentally. Marinetti - in my mind - is like "The Black Hand" from "Godfather II".  Remember?  Don Fanucci?  Like an Italian blowhard, cruising on his charisma and intimidation but...like Gertrude Stein said:  "There is no there, there".

Marinetti was not an artist.  He was a "conceptualist".  His manifesto was too aggressive. The idea itself was aggressive:  abandon everything.  Nouns, painting, thinking, limits, music!  Break from the past! Art, politics,  all of it removed from thinking which is totally exciting but like in a "kool-aid" way.

Italians like to everything big, you know. Grand gestures and big thinking are just in the genes.  . The Futurist painting style was deliberately abstract and fast and were it human it would have certainly had balls and a sinister mustache.  Maybe a rap sheet and a wife with a black eye.  Being masculine in form I think the whole deal leaned toward misogyny.   You can read more about it.  Not here but somewhere I am sure.

Here is Giacomo Balla's "Abstract Speed and Sound". 

I think it looks stupid..  It never took off.  Why would it?  It's like your frustrated gay art teacher from 8th grade did it. 

But I'm just killing time here, I couldn't care less about Giacomo Balla, architecture style, who started what or what they didn't believe in or whether nouns and adjectives should be "freed" from the sentence sentence (yeah!).

It is painter and composer Luigi Russolo and his 1913 manifesto "The Art of Noises" that really put a pin in this movement and had he not been there and had he not done what he did...I wouldn't even be writing this and you wouldn't care.  The assumption being that you do.

He - I feel - indeed used the concepts for freeing music from its confines of instruments, traditional structure and expectation by experimenting with noise, power driven instrumentation and vocalizations.  Here.  Listen.

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If you want to kick someone in the shin over Yoko Ono, this is your guy.

Russolo's invention - the intonarumori - is used in the piece above, Macchina Tipografica.  It created an engine-like sound whose pitch could be altered - something altogether new.  You know... he debuted this thing in 1913 or 1914 - I can not recall but it was a small elite audience and though I can not find the documentation on this now, Igor Stravinsky was one of the elite who was "intrigued by this invention" .  That quote seems right.  Stravinsky referred to himself as not a composer of music but an inventor of music.  It would be a hardcore compliment, no?  Stravinsky would recall it as humorous later.  I believe him either way.

Because of the intonarumori, Russolo is considered the first theorist in electronic music. It is alleged that none of these original machines survived World War I and only reproductions exist today. Even if its not true, it makes the story cool.  But you know, there is always a "bones of King Richard under a Walmart"  or an unknown Coltrane recording in a barrel of monkeys, I don't know I'm just saying stuff here.  

Russolo was a ground breaker.  He emerged from Futurism with something that actually substantiated the whole thing: breaking from the confines of music with noise. And all noise is musical.

The Futurist movement was crushed as a whole, far too forward in its thinking in the small areas; too radical and totally suspect in the big ones.

But it splintered under the weight of that crush and, as if throwing seeds into the universe to grow at a later time, we would see and hear the Futurists of 1910 in all sorts of places. In the future.

Yours for nothing,
Fatova

(originally posted in the future)
(and in 2009)