Luigi Russolo, Futurist

by Luciano Chessa

  Both Zanovello and Maffina underline how “new” this interest in the occult was, which Russolo, according to them, developed ex novo at the beginning of the 1930s. The most recent scholarship echoes this opinion. In MART’s catalog, for example, Lombardi writes of the 1929 performances with the noise harmonium: “These last activities [i.e., the 1929 noise-harmonium performances] preceded Russolo’s change of direction toward spiritualism and a metaphysical path, which he made without ever returning to the strong material physicality of the noise of his ululatori, ronzatori, scoppiatori, crepitatori”; in this same catalog Franco Tagliapietra writes: “Russolo’s work toward the end of his Parisian years is little known: he developed rather different interests from painting and music, and soon after he moved away from Paris.”10

  Of course these frequentations were nothing new: the merest glance at Russolo’s Autoritratto con teschi of 1908 (fig. 1), his first documented oil painting, shows how untenable this interpretation is and that in fact his interest in the occult arts was already evident in his earliest works.11

  Maffina in 1978 wrote of the “complex personality of Russolo and his various interests in painting, music and the occult arts, among which it seems impossible to find any links.”12 If Maffina was unable to find a link among Russolo’s eclectic interests, it can only have been because he never seriously considered the spiritual and occult aspect of Russolo’s research. Yet they constitute the constant in his evolution.

  In analyzing Russolo’s writings and works what strikes us above all is the peculiar continuity and coherence of his concepts, and how they migrate from painting to music to philosophy.13 Since the occult is an inquiry that often embraces synesthesia, a critical acceptance of Russolo’s continual interest in the occult reconciles the seeming conflicts among the various activities—and their related expressive sensory fields—that he undertook.14 Moreover, his theosophical explorations reconcile his apparently irreconcilable interests in science/technology and spirituality/occult. These interests characterized not only Russolo’s research but also the research carried out by other futurists; both sets of interests find common ground in theosophical thought.

  FIGURE I. Luigi Russolo, Autoritratto con teschi (1908). Milan, Museo del Novecento e Case Museo. Copyright Comune di Milano; all rights reserved.

  To grasp the continuity of Russolo’s spiritual studies and the coherence of his thought one must patiently compare Russolo’s early writings with those of his mature period; analyze the cultural context in which he operated, influenced as he was throughout his futurist years by French symbolism; and read the stormy reviews of the intonarumori concerts, or the war testimony describing Russolo at the front. Only then does it become obvious that Russolo’s interests did not change direction, and that he never truly reoriented his aesthetics.

  If it is true that Russolo’s last phase was a coherent development of, rather than a radical deviation from, his early principles, this premise offers the key to better understanding Russolo’s futurist years and seeing their importance from a new critical perspective.

  The two principal contributions of my book are a reconsideration of Russolo’s musical career in the light of his occultist interests and an alternative reading of the art of noises, which he and his contemporaries understood to be an ambitious, if occult, experiment. Russolo’s passion for the occult arts was decisive both for his theoretical elaborations and, even more important, in his practical realization of this theory in the whole intonarumori ordeal, which, when analyzed through the prism of the occult, presents a new and previously hidden interpretive angle.

  Whereas Barclay Brown considered the intonarumori to be the forerunner of the synthesizer and therefore concentrated exclusively upon the instrument’s engineering aspects, I focus on what for Russolo was the intonarumori’s occult meaning.15 I base this avenue of investigation also on Russolo’s persistent admiration for the alchemical implications and metaphysical aims of the work of Leonardo da Vinci, especially da Vinci’s mechanical instruments, which—I argue—were the most important model for Russolo’s intonarumori.

  How is it that the connections between Russolo’s art of noises and the occult have until now been underestimated, given that he himself believed firmly and coherently in their correlation all of his life? The answer to this question may provide some epistemological insight into the field of musicology in the twentieth century.

  One reason why this type of investigation has never been undertaken is certainly methodological. Until recently, musicological research dealing with the twentieth century has labored under an abundance of musical sources, which fostered preoccupations with score analysis. But in a case such as Russolo’s, where the sources are almost entirely lacking (none of the intonarumori escaped the bombs of World War II, and a fragment of seven bars is all that remains of Russolo’s scores), the scientific process of reconstructing history must rely on a very different type of primary evidence—paintings, novels, poetry, letters.

  In studying Russolo it is necessary to use an approach similar to that of the medievalist whose eye has been trained by the scarcity of sources. No one would find it strange if, to gain insight into the modalities of listening to music in thirteenth-century France, it were suggested to read, say, the elusive Roman de la rose; similarly, in the case of Russolo, we should not ignore any element useful for integrating and reconstructing the mosaic of his musical career, regardless of how elusive or poetical it may be.

  A second reason for the lack of critical attention to Russolo’s occult work is ideological. Interest in the occult has been ignored by scholars whose modernist approach to musicology accepts and rewards only contributions that can be considered progressive according to a narrow, selective, and fundamentally ideological idea of progress in art. Most likely this judgment is also based on a fear of the supposed connection between irrational occult theories and fascism.16

  Russolo’s documented involvement with fascism has until now been erased from Russolo scholarship; his participation in the Duce-endorsed futurist exhibit at Turin’s Quadriennale in May 1927 has been thoroughly suppressed, as has his involvement with the exhibit at Milan’s Pesaro Gallery in October 1929. His fascist connection is further covered up with the designation “antifascist,” which Giovanni Lista first applied to him in 1975. Lista supported this designation with a number of disputable post–World War II testimonies, and he claimed that in 1927 Russolo voluntarily went into exile in Paris to protest fascism (fig. 2).17

  What led Russolo to Paris were professional opportunities, not politics. In fact, his permanent return to Italy in 1933, as well as some of his subsequent writings, signal first acceptance of and then allegiance to the fascist regime. Yet the fable of his antifascism runs through all Russolo scholarship—it is still maintained in Tagliapietra (2007) and Lista (2009)—with no convincing evidence to support it.

  This book focuses on the 1913 formulation of the art of noises. Since fascism at that time was not even a word in the dictionary, this book cannot be the place for a detailed discussion of the connection between Russolo and fascism. The occult was part of Russolo’s set of interests from early on, and fascism—if only for chronological reasons—could not have been; therefore, though it cannot be argued that the two were not connected, the connection only becomes relevant and critically useful in analyzing futurist works produced after the foundation of fascism.18

  What modernist ideology tried to dismiss or cover up we can now see with more clarity, thanks both to the evolution of hermeneutical strategies and to a more advantageous historical perspective. Since Russolo’s occult interests were not a sign of late blooming but had been present from early on (and since not all such interests end up in fascism), they cannot be read or dismissed as aesthetically and philosophically regressive.19 Through careful analysis of Russolo’s occult interests I was able to perceive the continuity of his research activities, and that in turn gave me access to the occult intention of the art of noises.

  F
IGURE 2. Fillìa, title page of Arte fascista, Edizione Sindacati Artistici Torino, December 1927. Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  Unveiling associations with the occult within Russolo’s futurist poetics reinforces the connections between his most important aesthetical ideas and their migration in the spiritually charged works of Varèse, Schaeffer, and Cage. But my work aspires above all to change the perception of Russolo’s musical activities, from that of a rational scientist devoted to positivist thought to that of a multifaceted personality in whom the drive to keep up with the latest scientific trends coexisted with a deeply felt spiritual interest and the aversion to positivism and materialism that he shared with the futurist movement.

  With my research, a new portrait of Russolo emerges—a more unified and, I hope, richer one. In this portrait the occultist is as evident, and is accorded as much attention, as the scientist. My portrait should give a new interpretive perspective to studies of Luigi Russolo without conflicting with the common perception of him as a talented inventor. As he himself wrote, “to enrich means to add, not to substitute or abolish.”20

  PART ONE

  Luigi Russolo from the Formative Years to 1913

  CHAPTER 1

  Futurism as a Metaphysical Science

  It is surprising how little the common perception of futurism has changed since 1967, when Maurizio Calvesi complained about the “reductive general idea of Italian futurism as a simple exaltation of the machine and superficial reproduction of movement.”1 Although the futurists did not always agree among themselves on a definition of the movement, they certainly would not have shared a view that reduces futurism to merely materialistic terms.2 If a similarly reductive attitude can already be found in Varèse as early as 1917, the reduction of futurism to a materialistic movement within post–World War II art criticism was likely determined, as noted in the introduction, by a need to downplay the uneasy relationship between futurism and fascism.3

  Yet futurism was a movement animated by contradictory ideas, constantly oscillating between science and art, the rational and the irrational, future and past, mechanical and spiritual. Indeed, it may well have been these very tensions and frictions that gave futurism its dynamic force.

  Defining the futurist movement and analyzing its aesthetics is not an easy task. To the casual observer the futurists seem to present a united front, unified by the charismatic personality of Marinetti, but analysis shows them to have been highly diverse intellectual personalities, each with slightly different opinions and conceptions of life and art and sometimes in open and violent opposition to one another. They may have found themselves (for reasons of convenience, if nothing else, and perhaps sometimes opportunism) under one ideological roof, but individually they maintained autonomous physiognomies and attitudes and peculiarities of their own. It seems, then, impossible to hope to find coherence inside the different poetic positions of the futurists, let alone to formulate an organic presentation with which they would have been satisfied.

  Marinetti’s work and personality succeeded in maintaining a certain order, at least in the beginning. It is well documented that Marinetti initially subsidized all the initiatives of the movement (including publications and exhibitions), and, like a good impresario, he reserved the right to supervise the work of the other artists of the group, to the point that all the first futurist manifestos unquestionably ran the gauntlet of Marinetti’s censorship; this explains their similar tone.4 But in the privacy of living-room discussions or personal correspondence—or anywhere outside Marinetti’s public control—the futurists’ aesthetic visions diverged synchronically and diachronically; they were in continual growth and in a restless state of becoming, changing along with the shifting alliances within the movement.

  Critically the most lucid figure among them was probably Umberto Boccioni. Perhaps owing to a predisposition of spirit, and despite the brevity of his career, which almost did not leave him time to conclude a cycle of thought, Boccioni was one of the very few futurists to produce a volume that presented his poetics systematically.5

  The other exception was Luigi Russolo. Although he was not as socially exuberant as Boccioni was, his thought was characterized by a surprising coherence of themes—many so extraordinarily close to those of his friend Boccioni as to suggest a sort of intersecting pollination between the two. Russolo was to repeat these early themes, unchanged in their substance, for the rest of his life; being spiritual in character, they corresponded well with futurism’s occult side.

  To summarize all the instances that show connections between futurism and esoteric preoccupations at various levels—ranging from spirituality to interest in and practice of the occult arts, and also including black and red magic and spiritualism—would be an ambitious undertaking. Here I shall simply create a backdrop against which to project the fruit of research on Russolo’s interest in the occult and my reinterpretation of his sound-related activities in the context of this interest.

  I am not the first to mention the influence of the occult arts on the futurist movement. Sporadic references to this influence can be found in volumes, catalogs, and essays on futurism and the visual arts edited by Calvesi and Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco. Until a few years ago the only contributing monographs available were a brief article by Germano Celant titled “Futurismo esoterico,” published in Il Verri in 1970, and Calvesi’s very brief article “L’écriture médiumnique comme source de l’automatisme futuriste et surréaliste,” published in Europe in 1975, in which Calvesi shows connections between mediumistic phenomena and the poetics of the automatic writing adopted first by Marinetti and then by the Surrealists. To these should certainly be added Calvesi’s above-mentioned 1967 classic Il futurismo: La fusione della vita nell’arte, in which occult and spiritualist themes, however eccentric, occasionally color the overall discussion.

  Renewed interest in the topic began first with the extensive catalog of a 1995 Frankfurt exhibition titled Okkultismus und Avantgarde, which devoted much space to the futurists; this was followed by Flavia Matitti’s writing on Balla and theosophy, as well as by the handsome volume by Simona Cigliana (Futurismo esoterico), which takes its title from Celant’s essay and is the most complete contribution to the topic to date. In contrast to the earlier sources cited, some of which are limited to a list of facts, Cigliana’s book offers a convincing in-depth analysis of the futurists’ occult frequentations, albeit primarily limited to the field of literature.

  The futurists’ interest in the occult can be attributed to their full immersion in the culture of their period, principally inspired by French symbolism, which was in turn a reaction to Comte’s mid-nineteenth-century positivism and absolute materialism. In Italy, critiques of positivism and materialism also attacked idealism, and not just in rational and dialectic Hegelian formulations but also in idealism’s mainstream Italian dissemination through the writings of the philosopher Benedetto Croce.

  It has been maintained that interest in the occult arts and metapsychics can be attributed to the futurists’ attraction to the then current understanding of science. There were those who, considering the future of scientific research, maintained that science should include among its fields of inquiry the study of paranormal phenomena and confer legitimacy upon it, since this was the natural direction toward which science was already tending. This view may be true, but it offers only a partial picture of futurism, and it bears the further defect of again putting science and technology at the center of the futurist poetic meditation, as if they were the end of this meditation instead of, as we will see, the means.

  Already at this stage, however, it is clear that these occult interests were poles apart from an aesthetic conception preoccupied exclusively with the “simple exaltation of the machine and exterior reproduction of movement.” The futurists’ interest in science was not always exclusive or absolute, and it was not always blind idolatry. Calvesi addresses this point when he writes, “Boccioni did not
want a scientific aesthetics, that is, definable into scientific rules, but only an aesthetics that took the acquisitions of science into account: which is very different.”6 For Marinetti the situation was entirely similar: “Art assimilates science intuitively, analogically, by parallelism and also by benefiting from science’s technical discoveries, but never by a substitution of methodologies.”7 For the futurists, science was above all a means; it was not the end of their aesthetic vision.

  The present and following chapters consider the movement’s interest in the occult—alongside its interest in science and technology and its greatly underexplored interest in altered states of consciousness—as a means to achieve out-of-body experiences. Such experiences, in turn, would permit the futurists to observe reality from a hyperreal point of view, as well as to recreate reality through a new, spiritual mode of artistic creation. Subsequent chapters add Russolo’s musical activity to those expressions of futurism that are indebted to the occult tradition.

  SCIENCE AND THE OCCULT AT THE TURN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

  Interest in the occult would seem to contradict the attention the futurists gave to the latest discoveries of the science and technology of the period.8 But from the middle of the nineteenth century on, interest in the occult was increasingly shared by scientists and occultists alike, generating such terms as “scientific occultism,” which further muddied the waters.9 Increasingly spreading an image of the universe as an organism animated by mysterious and supernatural forces, new scientific discoveries made between the second half of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth showed that idealism, positivism, and materialism gave too restricted a vision of natural phenomena and the cosmos.10