Steiner’s position changed over time—he eventually came to condemn mediums, states of trance, and spiritualism—but the positions Steiner disseminated in Milan in 1912 were crucial to the evolution of Russolo’s ideas.26 In fact, less than three months after Steiner’s lectures, on February 21, 1913, Russolo published the first manifesto on the art of noises.
Communication with spirits was also one of the preoccupations of Emanuel Swedenborg, whose name Buzzi associated with that of Russolo. As is evident in at least two passages written almost thirty years apart, Russolo believed in the possibility of communicating with the dead.
On August 22, 1916, five days after the death of Boccioni, Russolo wrote a letter from the front to the art critic Margherita Sarfatti in which he confessed being prostrated at the sudden and tragic death of his friend. Russolo railed against “this complicated, beastly, boring life which has taken from me even meditation, and which has taken from me also the time again to take with Him [Boccioni] our strolls in the divinely terrible paths of art! Yes, because I still speak with Him: his spirit, his genius is not dead. He is still alive, he is still with us!”27 The lapidary claim that “I speak with him” (io parlo con lui) at the center of the letter is more profound than it might seem at first glance, given the vehemence of the rhythmic prose Russolo adopted. Yet his claim cannot be taken merely as a literary device.
Almost thirty years later, the opening of Russolo’s 1944 eulogy at Marinetti’s funeral resounds like a pagan prayer turned toward the dead, filled with the formulaic rhetoric one would expect from a medium at the beginning of a séance to conjure up a spirit: “I speak to you, O Marinetti, I speak to you still because if we are here reunited around the coffin that holds your mortal remains, very surely your thought is in the air here around us. Your spirit, that inexhaustible living fount of energies, of courage, of force that you infused upon all of us, your young friends of those days, and which you have continued to spread to the youths that followed and the youths of today.”28
Here again Russolo is speaking to a recently deceased friend’s spirit, which, he is convinced, is floating in the surrounding air; according to what Steiner had declared in his 1912 Milan lectures, this is possible only because the friends gathered around the corpse have all directed their thoughts toward the spirit of the deceased.
PREACHING TO THE MASSES
The art of noises was an experiment born in Russolo’s laboratory on via Stoppani out of the creative excitement of, in Marinetti’s words, “ecstatic and vibrating afternoons” devoted to occult preoccupations. In La grande Milano, where Marinetti recalled the 1914 Primo gran concerto futurista per intonarumori at Teatro Dal Verme in Milan, he considered Russolo’s intonarumori to be capable “of organizing spiritually and imaginatively our acoustic vibrations.”29 Various testimonies from the time indicate that Russolo considered the art of noises with a kind of reverence half way (as was the theosophical custom) between the reverence reserved for a precise scientific experiment and that generated by an occult, spiritual ritual.
Russolo, too, referred to his studies in terms that were at once scientific and devotional. He recorded the work of those “ecstatic and vibrating afternoons” in via Stoppani with exaltation: “The joy of each successful accomplishment alternated with the anxiety of ever new experiments, and with the delusions of assumptions that proved false, or difficulties not overcome. But we had the certain, absolute, and unshakeable faith that made us patiently persist, courageously beginning our studies and labors anew each time that it was necessary.”30 He would return to the reference to “faith.”
After Russolo introduced the prototype of the intonarumori to a completely unprepared audience at the Teatro Storchi of Modena on June 2, 1913, the next day’s Gazzetta dell’Emilia quoted him verbatim. About the scoppiatore (combuster), he had said: “My futurist comrades have encouraged me with enthusiasm and with faith for the practical result already obtained, and they will encourage me even more for the result that soon we will obtain.”31
The article went on to describe the presentation of the intonarumori, which apparently followed a protocol such as that of a solemn religious service.32 According to Russolo’s script, the climax of the evening program, the entrance onstage of the intonarumori, was supposed to be heralded by a detailed lecture given by Russolo. However, the public found his lecture pedantic and boring, and he was interrupted frequently by jeers and shouting. The public shouted, “Out with the instrument, we want to see the instrument!” But, like an inspired prophet, and sustained by his “unshakeable faith,” Russolo continued to preach to the hostile crowd; he prepared them for the revelation with a laconic, sibylline prediction: “It will come.” The instrument finally materialized, an occult epiphany:
Russolo concluded his oration and together with his collaborator Piatti exited to prepare the unveiling of the mysterious contraption that would give the Modenese public a divine [. . .] impression of the new futurist orchestra.
After a time, Russolo and Piatti returned. With ceremony, almost as if they had in their hands something sacred, mystical, superhuman, or supernatural, they carried a large object. [. . .]
Russolo and Piatti tested the instrument twice.
In a hieratic pose, moving and agitating God knows which handle, they produce a noise, first weak and muffled, then stronger, higher, more clamorous.
In describing the end of the evening, the article makes one more reference to faith: “Marinetti, Russolo, Pratella, and Piatti saluted their comrades in faith and retired to their rooms.”
Though likely ironic, the terms used in the article to describe the event are still pregnant with references to a religious, possibly pagan, service, and at the same time the writer chose to depict a rigorous alchemical-scientific experiment—Mondrian later called Russolo a “biologist.” The experiment is described as having been carried out by an officiant-magician-scientist and his faithful altar-boy-apprentice-assistant with self-satisfied, pompous hieraticity, all participants observing a rigorous etiquette in the presence of a congregation of both faithful and skeptical members. The combination of science and metaphysics is typical of theosophical undertakings.
THE INTONARUMORI ON TRIAL
The first public concert of the intonarumori took place on April 21, 1914, at the Teatro Dal Verme. Among the press coverage, one negative review by the Catholic deputy and music critic for L’Italia, Agostino Cameroni, so incensed Russolo that he slapped the critic in public.33 When Cameroni thereupon brought a charge of assault against the artist, Russolo believed that his artistic reputation was at stake and that he would have to defend both himself and his work.
The account of the trial as reported in the newspaper L’Italia on October 10, 1914, shows that even Russolo’s detractors took a scientific-metaphysical view of him. Describing the appearance in the witness box of the impulsive, hot-blooded futurist, the press described him as “pallid, slight, something like the figures painted in Pisa’s Monumental Cemetery.”34
According to that newspaper article, Russolo in his deposition, proclaimed the “worth of his intonarumori, which he described as the fruit of studies and untiring work, and based on scientific and mathematical laws.” Cameroni had questioned the “artistic quality” of the intonarumori, claiming that the art of noises was a regression of music to the “imitation of natural noises.” This was one of the main objections of Russolo’s detractors and a frontal attack on the spirituality of his operation. Cameroni’s position touched a raw nerve in Russolo, to whom the intonarumori were not merely machines designed to produce superficial imitations of noises but means for forcing and forging noise into a spiritual form. His intonarumori produced noise (the raw material) but also intoned it enharmonically, thereby spiritualizing it.
Among the witnesses of both the prosecution and the defense, some perceived the intonarumori in spiritual terms. Not surprisingly, Marinetti, the principal witness for the defense, warned in his deposition that “to understand the intonaru
mori one needs . . . religion.” More surprising, however, was the testimony of the commendator Amann, a witness for the prosecution, who maintained that “the intonarumori could and can produce enthusiasm only among the initiates.” Precisely because it came from an unbiased place, Amann’s choice or words is revelatory. In its etymological derivation, enthusiasm indicates possession, the possession of the body of an initiate by a divine entity during a ritual ceremony.
In the trial, Marinetti and Amann represented two ideologically opposed positions, yet their perception of the intonarumori was fundamentally similar. Russolo’s occult persuasions had penetrated the enemy’s encampment to become the platform for the discussion.
PART TWO
The Art of Noises and the Occult
CHAPTER 7
Intonarumori Unveiled
THREE LEVELS
Russolo considered the intonarumori to be more than simply musical instruments. But what then does that make the special compositions Russolo wrote for the intonarumori, which he first called reti di rumori (networks of noises) and then spirali di rumori (spirals of noises)? And what is the real significance of Risveglio di una città (Awakening of a city), the most famous of these spirali?1
Like most futurists, Russolo was moved by a cosmogonic ambition. Françoise Escal is the only musicologist to have touched upon this aspect of Russolo’s activities. In a brief 1975 article, Escal claims that in the development of the art of noises Russolo’s aural frame of reference first shifted from Nature to the Real; Escal understood the Real to be the meeting place of noises from nature and those produced, directly or indirectly as a result of human industry, by machines. When Russolo first turned his attention to the noises of the Real (Nature plus Man), he did not limit himself to merely imitating or representing reality. Escal explained that
in effect, art is not the re-production, re-presentation, of life, and the art of noises especially is not an inventory, a collection of noises of the exterior world, of the real. [. . .]
To an aesthetics of representation, Russolo opposes an aesthetics of creation. Futurist music “will obtain the most complex and new sonic emotions not through a succession of noises imitative of life, but rather through a fantastic combination of these varied tones”: in between the noises and the art of noises there is the mediation of the artist as full, inspired subject.2
Unfortunately, Escal, instead of elaborating on his own brilliant intuition, reverted to framing Russolo’s aesthetics of creation as a mere regurgitation of romanticism, concluding that “Russolo remains a prisoner of the traditional (i.e., romantic) conception of the author as a superior being elected to deliver his message to ordinary mortals.”3
In 1975 the critical climate was not sufficiently mature, and the debate on exchanges among the disciplines of the artistic avant-garde, science, and occultism had yet to begin. Whereas Lista (who in that same year edited a second French edition of The Art of Noises) considered the messianic side of Russolo’s thought, which is concerned with the spiritual, metaphysical, and irrational, to be regressive and reactionary, Escal on the other hand dismissed Russolo’s thought as conservative. Escal believed that Russolo’s occult was a cumbersome and obsolete debt from nineteenth-century romanticism; he interpreted Russolo’s approach to be a way of playing with the worn-out metaphor of artistic creation rather than actually engaging in the act of Creation, and therefore considered it unworthy of further investigation.
Within the occultist ferment at the turn of the century among theosophy, science, and spiritism, and as used in séances and materializations, the term creation assumed greater significance than it had ever held for the romantic generation. The creation of life as intended by the occultists lay within the field of black magic, since the ability to give life, like that of taking it away, is a divine prerogative and therefore outside the human sphere. Alchemy is the most important of the occult disciplines dealing with creation, and creation was one of its most ambitious goals. Creation never occurred out of nothingness; it was always an artificious operation of transformation, obtained through an infusion of energy.4
For Russolo, the intonarumori was an alchemical experiment in the creation of life, which futurists believed was the only process capable of producing an art that could truly be called “spiritual.” In Russolo’s experiment, raw matter (in the form of pure noise) is transformed by means of a mechanical instrument (the intonarumori) functioning as an alchemical crucible or vas, through a cunning process with a mechanical side (enharmonic transformation) and a spiritual one (infusion of energy).5 At another level, the noises produced by an orchestra of intonarumori (a chaotic, complementary multiplicity that can be read within the alchemical opposites of salt and sulfur, i.e., masculine and feminine) are transfigured through the catalyst (in alchemy the catalyst would be mercury) of futurist simultaneity and dynamism into a synthesis fusing these opposites into unity.
FIGURE 19. The Three-Level Process.
This process is articulated at three levels. In the first level, noise becomes spiritual as a result of the intonarumori being tuned and endowed with enharmonic (i.e., microtonal) possibilities. In the second level, an orchestra of intonarumori produces a spiral of noises that re-creates the world first as a simultaneous chaos and then as a unity. In the third level, the artist-creator-medium who spearheaded the process can communicate with the spirits, who, against the soundtrack of spiritual music, are now able to materialize (fig. 19).
Thus the artist-creator, in the act of producing noise, conjures up the spirits of the dead so that they excite his states of mind to project themselves as thought-forms onto the “bodies” constituting his own aura.6 The states of mind produced in the artist-creator by the spirits that he himself has conjured up influence him in the process of creation, so that the possessed artist works as if taking dictation. This is precisely the process that Russolo stages in La musica; through the intonarumori he transformed raw matter (noise), creating from it what the futurists considered the only true art: new spiritual life.
Creation must occur through a transfer of vital energy.7 The energy necessary for transformation is achieved with the help of the psychic powers of the spirits conjured by the artist-creator. In his essay “Raggio,” Ardengo Soffici offered a synthesis of this process: “A privileged organism, a center of extra powerful vital force, can in a certain moment and under certain circumstances attract and concentrate within itself its distant parts, the peripheral waves of its energies, making them concrete.”8
The intonarumori is not an instrument that produces noises by imitation: the noise that the intonarumori produces at the beginning of the transformation process is only raw matter awaiting elevation by the artist-creator, who has to struggle against its materiality. Boccioni, recounting the function of the intonarumori to Giovanni Papini, wrote, “Intonarumori (the word itself tells you) does not mean noise pure and simple, i.e., raw reality, but intoned noise, therefore lyrical elaboration of new noise realities, which are acoustically the essence of modern life.”9
While crusading against materialism, and in line with his interventionist political position before World War I, Russolo described his struggle in militaristic terms, maintaining that noises must be “dominated, enslaved, mastered completely, conquered, and constrained to become elements of art. (This is the continual battle of the artist against matter).”10
Russolo understood the intonarumori to be a means with multiple functions; these instruments can thus be illustrated by the three-level outline. At the first level, the intonarumori is a means to produce noise, making it available as primal matter to be transformed; but it can also enable the channeling of the spiritual energy gathered by the artist-creator, infusing its energy into the noise matter and transforming it by elevating it into something spiritual: into art that has the gift of being alive. Marinetti had this function in mind when he claimed the intonarumori’s ability to “organize spiritually and fantastically our acoustic vibrations (organizzare spiritualmente
e immaginosamente le nostre vibrazioni acustiche).”11
At a second level, an entire orchestra of intonarumori, conducted by the inspired artist taking spiritual dictation, holds the cosmogonic ambition of re-creating the world (by substitution, not imitation) through the spiritualization and synthesis of the manifold and complementary into essential unity.
At a third level, the intonarumori is a “portal to the beyond”: during the process of creation, as the artist-creator is delivered to a more elevated plane of consciousness, he can communicate with the spirits of the dead that he has conjured up, spirits that fluctuate in that same plane awaiting for reincarnation.12
Throughout this three-level process, the spirits produce thought-forms—and, above all, sound-forms—through the mediation of the artist-initiate. These forms in their turn emit vibrations that influence the aura of every individual present in their field of action; under certain circumstances these forms can also materialize into bodies.13
FIRST LEVEL: THE SINGLE INTONARUMORI
How does spiritualization of noise matter take place? Russolo effectively described this process of transformation in The Art of Noises:
Noise must become a prime element to mold into the work of art. That is, it has to lose its character of accidentality and become an element sufficiently abstract to achieve the necessary transformation of any natural prime element into every abstract element of art.
Luigi Russolo, Futurist Page 17