Balla, who considered the universe to be a perfectly ordered harmony, was at the opposite pole. Through analyzing the structure of the cosmos and extracting, adopting, and applying abstract forms, Balla sought to imitate the harmony of the macrocosmic order in the microcosm of objects of art, patiently reconstructing a second, artificial universe by means of artworks that would be samples and models of this same perfect harmony, and populating that harmony one model at a time.26
Balla’s painting is unquestionably closer to the pictorial meditations of Kandinsky or Delaunay than to the titanic force of Boccioni’s fusion. Balla paints not action but contemplation, and patient, objective analysis. Nor does Balla aspire to create cosmic unity but rather to reconstruct models, details, and examples, all pointing to the same universal harmony.
The series Compenetrazioni iridescenti (1912–14) is perhaps the purest example of this aesthetic position. In this and other works—from Fallimento (1902) to Un mio istante del 4 aprile 1928 ore 10 più due minuti (1928)—Balla is just as concerned with time and motion as Boccioni is. Yet space and time are not, as in Boccioni, continuities; rather, they are segmented sections of places and instants. A single instant of time can be sliced and used as an example representing all. Such an instant of time is no longer psychological time, but rather objective time, in which, as in Kant, all the instants are homogeneous points and objectively identical. In these works, time stops, while action, the subjective—and Boccionian—synthesis, gives way to meditation and objective analysis.
The positions are complementary, but the pictorial results are opposites. Balla’s paintings resound as deeply rational and objective, glorifying a universe ordered within itself. Boccioni paints a world of irrational multiplicity that requires a subject to reorder it and comprehend its essential unity.
Proof of this contrast can be seen in Boccioni’s and Balla’s divergent ways of representing dynamism. In Balla’s canvases from 1912, movement is an optical superimposition of discontinuous instants in time and space, evidently derived from frame-based image scanning of action. Boccioni’s canvases from the same period depict movement as a continuous (i.e., indivisible/infinitely divisible) optical-mnemonic synthesis, which takes into consideration not the phenomenon of motion as divided into various phases but the remembrance of it, and the memory and the associations of the subject perceiving it as space-time continuity.
Russolo, like Boccioni, promoted an idea of art as subjective synthesis, creation of the world in all its dynamic and simultaneous chaos, and able to reach a point of fusion in which the space-time complex becomes synthesized into unity.27 He continued to consider this aesthetic principle valid even years after the first manifestos and theoretical writings of the futurist painters from the years 1910–12.
On December 15, 1919, Russolo was the first of three to sign a memo (the other two signatorees were Achille Funi and Marinetti) inviting all futurist painters to submit written positions about a division of the “avant-garde and futurist painting” into “four aesthetic currents or trends of pictorial sensitivity.”28 These positions were to be gathered into a manifesto (which, according to Soffici, was never published). In the memo, plastic dynamism is described as the “dynamic synthesis of the universe as forces + simultaneity of time-space + synthesis of form color. Lyricism and modernolatry of the subject.”29 In 1919 Russolo still held the positions he had sided with years earlier. Yet by 1919 he had internalized them to the point of maintaining, orthodoxically, Boccioni’s very terminology; given that these guidelines were so central for him, they undoubtedly informed his musical research as well.30
SECOND LEVEL: SYNTHESIS
Once the pictorial synthesis of simultaneity and dynamism was defined as an optical-mnemonic “subjective synthesis,” the dynamic and simultaneous synthesis offered by the art of noises could be defined as an “acoustic-mnemonic subjective synthesis,” a synthesis of what one remembers and what one hears. Decontextualized slivers of reality meet in Boccioni’s “fresco” in a nebula that adds them to memories and perceptions in a complex, congenital, spiritual unity elaborated by the inspired artist; similarly, the art of noises decontextualized noise (untied it, that is, from the “causes that produce it”).31
If the first level of the occult-spiritual operation of the art of noises was the transformation carried out by the intonarumori, whose function was to create a spiritual reality by transfiguring noise, synthesis can be viewed as the second level: as in congenital complementarism, the system is symmetrical. The two levels of this spiritual operation save the art of noises from the charge of being a mere imitation of the noises of the world and a senseless cacophony.
At the first level, through enharmonic intonation, noise became dissociated from the causes that produced it and thus spiritualized. In the second level, which corresponds to the first, the noises produced by the orchestra of intonarumori were superimposed simultaneously and dynamically in seeking to create an autonomous, abstract, spiritual synthesis of multiplicity into unity, chaos into cosmos.32 Despite Varèse’s criticism, the noises in this process were only primal matter—a means, not an end.33 In Russolo’s works, the composer does not abdicate his role; on the contrary, the composer’s role is demiurgically expanded.
The following—much misunderstood—passage from The Art of Noises acquires new meaning once one understands the spiritual and cosmogonic categories of simultaneity of states of mind (or congenital complementarism) and dynamism:
Let us cross a large modern capital with our ears more sensitive than our eyes and we will take pleasure in distinguishing the eddying of water, air, or gas in metal pipes, the muttering of motors that breathe and pulse with an indisputable animality, the throbbing of valves, bustle of pistons, shrieks of mechanical saws, starting of trams on the tracks, cracking of whips, flapping of awnings and flags. We will enjoy ourselves by orchestrating together in our imagination the din of rolling shop shutters, slamming of doors, buzzing and foot-stepping of crowds, and the varied hubbub of train stations, iron works, thread mills, printing shops, electrical plants, and subways.
Nor should the newest noises of modern war be forgotten.34
The sublime here is achieved through the bombardment of stimuli (acoustic, obviously, and no longer optical), which Russolo seeks to re-create even in his writing style.
To actuate this effect of bombardment, a simultaneous and synchronic superimposition, Russolo envisioned an ideal orchestra composed almost entirely of intonarumori (the sole exceptions were a few percussion instruments: “two timpani, a sistrum, and a xylophone” as Russolo writes in The Art of Noises), because the intonarumori were the only instruments capable of re-creating a spiritual multiplicity that would have had nothing to do with the stylization of reality through imitation offered by means of a traditional orchestra.35
A mixed orchestra of traditional instruments and intonarumori, like the one Pratella used for his Aviatore Dro, or those used in the 1921 Paris concerts, did not interest Russolo. In The Art of Noises he wrote: “I aim and I will always aim to complete and enlarge an orchestra composed entirely and uniquely of intonarumori. The more than satisfactory results obtained so far are the best incentives to proceed in this direction, so I am even more convinced that the orchestra of intonarumori is and must remain a separate project from the project of a mixed orchestra, but complete in itself.”36
The term orchestrating indicates that Russolo dreamed of a dynamic fusion of noises. This can be presumed from the fragment of the score of Risveglio di una città, in which what matters are not the single events—single pitches and articulations—but rather the synchronic crux of events in unquiet movement. For this reason it makes no sense to try to analyze the piece by transcribing the lines and reducing them to melodies, or transcribing the vertical events and reducing them to chord progressions; this has been done, but Russolo did not conceive his scores in these terms.37
The dynamic element, already present in enharmonic intonation—which Russolo ca
lled dynamic continuity—here returns as simultaneity, the effect of the mutual clash of sound events, regardless of horizontality and verticality.38 Simultaneity is an acoustic re-creation of experiencing the world as multiplicity and unity, exactly as in the topological dialectic of the spiral, which projects reality outward and at the same time converges reality in its central point of fusion.
With his spirali di rumori, Russolo actuated the simultaneity of space and time that leads to an acoustic-mnemonic synthesis with which he could re-create the world acoustically—first as chaos, then as unity. The Art of Noises closes with a promise of ascetic unity, the “lyrical and artistic coordination of the noisy chaos of life” to which Russolo gave the hedonistic name “new acoustic voluptuousness.”39 This ascetic unity would be achieved by letting “vibrate the senses and [. . .] the brain [. . .] with the unexpected, the mysterious, the unknown.”40
A mesmerizing impression of this synthesis and fusion was reported in a review of the first concerts of intonarumori. The conclusion of the performance of Risveglio di una città on the August 11, 1913, press concert was described by the anonymous correspondent of the Pall Mall Gazette on November 18, 1913, as follows: “Finally, all the noises of the street and factory merged into a gigantic roar, and the music ceased. I awoke as though from a dream.”41
UNITY
Subjective acoustic-mnemonic synthesis—reaching from multiplicity to unity—can be traced to two sources. Immediately detectable is the one found in Ferruccio Busoni’s “Il regno della musica” (The kingdom of music) of March 3, 1910, the epilogue to his “Abbozzo di una nuova estetica della musica” (Outline of a new aesthetics of music).42 In the final section of this epilogue, perhaps the most extraordinarily messianic and visionary moment in his writings, Busoni trumpeted:
Everything resounds [. . .] and all the beats are a single thing, a whole. [. . .]
And now the sound is heard! Innumerable are its voices; compared to them the whisper of harps is a din, the blare of a thousand trombones a chirping.
All, all the melodies heard before and unheard, all of them none excluded resound together at the same time, they transport you, linger upon you, brush against you [. . .] they themselves are the souls of millions of beings of millions of epochs. Bring one of these melodies close to your eye, and you will see how it is connected with others, combined with all the rhythms, colored by all the colors, accompanied by all the harmonies, down to the bottom of every depth, up to the arch of every vault of the heavens.
Now you all understand how planets and hearts together unites into one, and never and nowhere could there be an end, nowhere could there be a boundary. Now you all understand that, in the spirit of the being, the infinite lives complete and undivided; that every thing is at the same time infinitely large and infinitely small; and that light, sound, motion, energy are identical, and that each of them in itself, and all joined together, are life.43
Many of the occultist themes in Russolo’s thought are present in Busoni’s text: synesthesia, correspondence, the principle of energy, space-time continuity, dynamism, subjective synthesis, unity. It is not known whether Busoni and Russolo had a personal relationship: even if they did, it would not have equaled that between Busoni and Boccioni. But Russolo must have known of Busoni’s text.
Apart from his affinity for the occult and spiritual, Busoni also had an interest in the division of the tone into microintervals—something that Russolo carried to its extreme logical conclusion—and the two shared a great curiosity for new instruments capable of exploiting this division. Busoni greatly admired Thaddeus Cahill’s new instrument, the Telharmonium, with its microintervallic intonation, which Busoni thought supernatural because of its ability to generate “miraculously [. . .] a scientifically perfect sound that never decays, invisible, produced without effort and tireless.”44 On the other hand, Russolo’s focus is not on the instruments as such but on the “modes of existence” that the instruments can generate. Russolo’s interest in microtonality is expressed through the spiritual, metaphysical, constructive surge that led him to build the orchestra of intonarumori.
The simultaneous-dynamic fusion of sound that Russolo sought to achieve with the orchestra of intonarumori had in all probability yet another source: Leadbeater’s The Hidden Side of Things (1913), in which Leadbeater collected, as he said in the introductory note, writings that had appeared article form from 1901 on. The book opens with the explanation of the term occultism, of which Leadbeater records its Latin etymology (occultus = hidden), intended here as the science that proposes to unveil the hidden side of reality. In line with theosophical teachings, Leadbeater emphasized that the deepest knowledge of reality is never intentionally hidden, and that “nothing is or can be hidden from us except by our own limitations.”45
The fundamental idea of the book is that in the course of existence human beings are constantly influenced by unknown forces. We receive waves from various sources, and they modify the aura surrounding our bodies. We ourselves can be sources of this energy, and we can therefore influence ourselves, and those near to us. The external sources that influence us are many (Leadbeater includes the planets, the sun, nature, spirits of nature, beings we do not see, etc.). Because the understanding of the modalities through which these sources can influence us is of great importance, Leadbeater dedicated a chapter to each.
The chapter dedicated to sound, where Leadbeater expanded the section on sound-forms from the final pages of Thought-forms, shows how through sound-forms sound can condition the aura of every individual to be found within their radius. Russolo had this chapter in mind during the time he developed the art of noises, as is clear from chapter 4 of The Art of Noises, where he follows Leadbeater’s taxonomy of sounds.
In the first paragraph of Leadbeater’s chapter “Sound, Color and Form,” he presents the theories that underlie La musica: sound irradiates both colors and forms. After a few paragraphs that deal with sound-forms produced by more traditional musical compositions (“Religious music,” “Song,” “Military music”), Leadbeater reviews the forms produced by sounds of natural phenomena such as thunder, rain, the rustling of the wind in the leaves, the cries of wild animals (“Sounds of nature”), cries of domestic animals, and of various tones of the human voice, from laughter to whistles (“Domestic life”).46
A similar taxonomy can be found in the paragraphs “Noises of Nature” and “Noises of Language” in Russolo’s The Art of Noises.47 Similarities between the two texts exist even in the choice of examples. Both Leadbeater and Russolo cite thunder as their first example of noise in sound, and nature, and various other examples are presented with impressive correspondence between the texts (the rustling of leaves and rain, and even the noise of the backwash of waves). A Pan-ic sense of harmony in nature, which Russolo likely derived from Gabriele D’Annunzio, animates both works.48
The Pan-ic element recurred in compositions for intonarumori, often in the form of rain, as in Nuccio Fiorda’s Processione sotto la pioggia (Procession in the rain) for mixed orchestra, played in the Paris concerts of 1921, and Rain (La pioggia) by Antonio Russolo.49 Aside from a direct acoustic reference to certain intonarumori and certain registers that the noise-harmonium produced, the recurrence of rain in the titles is also connected to the animist-pantheistic soul that animated futurism, and was probably another symbolist remnant, already observable in other movements in Italian culture in the early years of the twentieth century.50
In the emblematically titled Rain in the Anti-D’Annunzian Pine Forest (Pioggia nel pineto antidannunziana), a work by Buzzi published in L’Italia futurista on July 25, 1916, these themes intertwine (fig. 21). Although masked by D’Annunzian parody, this tavola parolibera evokes (by different means, of course) a Pan-ic atmosphere similar to that found in D’Annunzio’s original—something that brings spontaneously to mind the sapid phrase by Alberto Savino, “scratch a futurist and you’ll find a D’Annunzian.”51
Despite the scarcity of scores fo
r the intonarumori, until now the hint at staff notation that appears in the right margin of Pioggia nel pineto antidannunziana has gone unnoticed. It is the accompaniment of Buzzi’s icastic poem with an “intonarumori ensemble (batteria intonarumori)” composed of “crepitatori + gorgogliatori + ululatori.”52 This brief score, halfway between graphic notation and a typographic caprice, has every right to be included among the very rare cases of writing for intonarumori that has survived.
FIGURE 21. Paolo Buzzi, Pioggia nel pineto antidannunziana, a tavola parolibera reproduced in L’Italia futurista (July 25, 1916).
But let us return to Leadbeater. The final paragraph of the chapter on sound is entirely dedicated to what for him are noises, that is, principally the sound of machines. Noises, like sounds, can produce sound-forms that influence us. Many noises have a negative effect on man, because of their negative influx onto the aura. But not all noises are malevolent; some produce sound-forms with the power to positively influence our aura.
Among the noises that project benevolent sound-forms, Leadbeater mentions that of a train in motion. Russolo likewise lists the noise of the train among the mechanical noises, but this is hardly surprising—train references were commonplace in Russolo’s historical-cultural context. More significant is that Leadbeater’s laconically detached survey of noises of weapons of war (cannons, rifles, and pistols) and the sound-forms they produce, re-echoes distinctly in the chilling and much more developed—but no less detached—paragraph on i rumori della guerra (the noises of war) in The Art of Noises.53
FIGURE 22. Luigi Russolo, Impressione di bombardamento shrapnels e granate (1926). Portogruaro, Collezione del Comune di Portogruaro.
In his stunning 1926 canvas Impressioni di bombardamento shrapnels e granate Russolo actually painted these noises of the war with shapes that are rather close to Leadbeater’s description of the sound-forms generated by warfare noises (fig. 22). Russolo’s portrayal of such explosions as violent, red-pointed shapes and his portrayal of their echoes in the crisp air as white-pointed shapes resemble dart-like shapes found in some of the plates in Thought-forms.54
Luigi Russolo, Futurist Page 20