Luigi Russolo, Futurist

by Luciano Chessa

  The accessibility of folio 175r does not prove that Russolo borrowed from it. But the intonarumori employ a number of mechanical principles akin to those in this folio, including adjustable, telescoping sound boxes, resonating bodies tuned in different ratios, and coiled springs that vibrate against a membrane.

  Indeed, as a revealing passage in Al di là della materia makes clear, not only was Russolo familiar with Leonardo’s manuscripts, but he even admitted that “posterity has finally realized how many treasures of intuition and profound observation fill [Leonardo’s] manuscripts.”23 Russolo also mentions Leonardo in various other writings, including his last, “L’eterno e il transitorio dell’arte” (The eternal and the transitory in art) of January 1947.24 Like the Decadents before him, Russolo found a spiritual component in Leonardo’s work, and he wrote about the Mona Lisa as an example of art that transcends matter, space, time, and every other contingency—a work that aspires, successfully, to the eternal: “Is the Mona Lisa beautiful or ugly? Blonde or brunette? Fat or thin? We don’t know it, we don’t see it. Before her we become the smile, we are the smile, and by the essence of the sweet smile we are all invested and permeated, we are transfigured by it.”25

  FIGURE 23. Leonardo da Vinci, Codex Arundel 263, fol. 175r. Photo © The British Library Board.

  Writing similarly of The Last Supper as a symbol of the eternal in art, he concludes: “The work of art is pure spirit and lives outside even its own material body, eternally young even though its body, which is matter, is aged, blackened, cracked, as is happening to Leonardo’s The Last Supper. It becomes in its pictorial materiality a nebulous and evanescent breath without having lost anything of its supreme spiritual life.”26

  What really counts in a work of art is the idea, its spirituality, and not the painting, its materiality (wood, canvas, colors). Painting as object is a fetish that merely generates empty adoration.27 But if a supreme artist-creator infuses his spirit into the canvas or fresco, the spirit can remain in it even when the materiality of the work of art is compromised by the passage of time. In Leonardo, Russolo saw a creator who could inject spirit into matter.

  A meditation on the fight between spirit’s permanence and the passing of time rings nicely when it is penned to comment on the work of Leonardo, as he too wrote of time as the supreme enemy: “O Time, consumer of all things! O envious age! Thou dost destroy all things and devour all things, with the hard teeth of years, little by little in a slow death.”28

  Leonardo’s idea of time as a continuous and therefore infinitely divisible quantity is closer to Bergson’s (and thus Boccioni’s and Russolo’s) psychological time than to Kant’s notion of time as a series of equal discontinuous quantities, a pulse of homogeneous points on a time-line vector.29 Psychological time, Art time, is the time that creates miracles; it fashions youth from decrepitude, life from death.

  That is what wizards such as Leonardo are capable of, as Winternitz has observed about the impressive sketches for the Study of Madonna with Child and St. John, in which Leonardo succeeded in “turning the wheel of time in the opposite direction.”30 With a few simple strokes of vivid expressive force, Leonardo shows us the same figures at different ages: art can thus possess eternal youth, or at least an eternal spiritual youth.

  For the inattuale Russolo, as for Leonardo, the ambitious artifice of creation subverted the conventional notion of uni-versality (i.e., directionality) of time.31 Creation promises that spirit can triumph over directional time, and over matter, surviving even after the death of matter. Clearly, Russolo never ceased being a futurist. Indeed, this is the most moving aspect of futurism: that it is such a vibrant metaphor for eternal spiritual youth, reminding us of that fire.

  Further testimony to the connection between Russolo and Leonardo comes from an authoritative contemporaneous source. After Russolo’s death, Paolo Buzzi wrote a brief commemorative introduction to Zanovello’s biography. In this brief, four-page essay, intended above all to enumerate and celebrate Russolo’s achievements, Leonardo’s name appears twice; Buzzi reveals the profound similarities of thought process between the two artists, to the point that he involuntarily betrays Russolo’s borrowings from Leonardo: “Russolo, the polymath, concerned himself with another avenue of physics: the study of acoustic phenomena. For him the evolution of music, in parallel with the increase of machines developed to help humanity, led to the necessity of increasing the number of sounds and timbres available to composers so as to not avoid but rather seek for a compositional embracing of noise. In short, he resembled Leonardo in designing a new lyre for Ludovico il Moro.”32 Buzzi compares the curiosity of Russolo the researcher to that of Leonardo: “In later years he was an apostle of magnetism, and here again I cannot resist the comparison with Leonardo in terms of the multifacetedness of their speculative endeavor when it concerned the enigmas of Nature.”33

  In Ricordi e presagi, the tombeau that closes Zanovello’s biography, Buzzi invoked Leonardo’s spirit one last time, thus framing a book with references to Leonardo. The poems, suggestively, bemoans:

  And He is dead,

  Leonardine friend

  Of all the arts.34

  INTONARUMORI’S INSIDES35

  Traces of Leonardo’s projects are identifiable throughout Russolo’s instrument-building period, which extended from the scoppiatore (combuster) of 1913 to the nuovo istrumento musicale a corde of 1931. Russolo obtained three patents for the intonarumori: in March 1914, October 1921, and November 1921. The projects of 1914 (fig. 24) and November 1921 (fig. 25) concerned essentially the same type of string-based instrument, the only difference being the telescopic sound box added in the November 1921 patent.36 The patent of October 1921 is for an intonarumori that Barclay Brown, in his English edition of L’arte dei rumori, identifies as the sibilatore (whistler) (fig. 26).

  FIGURE 24. Luigi Russolo, drawing for the patent for Intonatore dei rumori, Reg. Gen. N. 142066, Reg. Att. 88, Vol. 430, deposited in Milan on March 30, 1914.

  The ululatore (howler), rombatore (rumbler), crepitatore (crackler), and stropicciatore (rubber) all are versions of the January 1914 patent. All the instruments in this group have a string attached to a chemically treated drumskin that Russolo called diaframma (diaphragm); the string is set to vibrate by a wheel acting as a continuous bow.

  As the name intonarumori suggests, noise is “tuned”; this is obtained both by the tension and length of the string and by the tension of the drumskin; in the model with the telescopic resonance box placed behind the membrane (patent of November 1921), the change of pitch is accompanied by a change in length of the resonance box, itself acting on the timbre as a resonance filter. Pitch changes are controlled mechanically by a lever, connected to a needle that, moving along a graduated scale, gave the performer reference points for enharmonic intonation. The lever moved continuously, not incrementally, thus affording the kind of uninterrupted microtonality previously referred to as enharmony. Since the lever moved continuously, rather than in spurts, the instrument effectively conquered the enharmonic space.

  FIGURE 25. Luigi Russolo, drawing for the patent for Descrizione della prima aggiunta al brevetto depositato l’8/10/1921, Reg. Gen. N. 205098, Reg. Att. N. 207, Vol. 598, deposited in Milan on November 14, 1921.

  The intensity, or volume, depended on the pressure of the wheel against the string. This pressure remained unchanged during a performance, though the speed at which the crank was turned, which affected timbre, would have affected the volume as well. The noise produced was dialed on drumskin, shaped or filtered by the sound box connected to it (the sound box was modeled after the Helmholtz resonators, see letter B in figs. 24 and 25), and amplified by a hornlike cone similar to those found in gramophones.

  Timbre—the crucial aspect—was determined by the type of wheel (smooth and resin-coated or notched), its material (metal or wood), the position of the wheel in relation to the movable bridge, the type of string, the degree of pressure and speed of the wheel on the string, a
nd, in the November 1921 model, the telescopic sound box acting as a moving harmonics filter (letter M in fig. 25).

  The patent does not describe the ronzatore (buzzer) or the gorgogliatore (gurgler). Though they retain structural similarities with the patented instrument—both have levers and strings attached to drumskins—they differ in that the agent of vibration is an electric device rather than a wheel; for this reason they use not a crank but a button interface.

  FIGURE 26. Luigi Russolo, drawing for the patent for Apparecchio acustico producente sotto l’azione di un rumore qualsiasi dei suoni la cui tonalità e il timbro sono definiti, Reg. Gen. N. 204171, Reg. Att. N. 207, Vol. 598, deposited in Milan on October 8, 1921.

  Based on photographic evidence—the single extant photograph of the internal mechanism of any of the intonarumori—it is clear that in the ronzatore the sound was produced by an electric bell mechanism whose ball-shaped metal beater, powered by an electric current, was driven to beat against a drumskin whose tension was adjustable by means of the string-and-lever device.37

  Once the ronzatore was understood, it was possible to reconstruct the gorgogliatore, whose sound was produced by an electric bell mechanism mounted this time so as to beat directly against a string connected to a drumskin with adjustable tension. A coiled spring mounted on the other side of the drumskin, acting as a spring reverb, gave the instrument its characteristic gurgling sound.

  For the intonarumori patented in October 1921—this may have been for a later version of the sibilatore—noise was tuned differently. The patent does not specify how the noise is generated, but based on how the sibilatore’s principal timbre is described in the Art of Noises, it can be assumed that the sound envelope was close to white noise.38 The performance of an envelope produced by a mechanical white-noise generator would have maximized a complex sound filtering system such as the one found in the patent.

  The patent shows how the noise, once generated, was tuned and processed. As in the other intonarumori, the vibrations are tuned by changing the tension of a skin membrane that Russolo here called diaframma vibratile (vibrating diaphragm), mounted on the resonance box. The tension of this diaphragm is controlled by a metal roll placed on a guide rail running through the radium, but slightly inclined in respect to the diaphragm: the roll slides across the back, increasing and decreasing its pressure on the diaphragm. An alternative solution, suggested in the patent but not shown in the drawings, controls the tension of the skin with a timpani pedal system.

  To filter the tuned noise’s timbre, Russolo hypothesized a system of risonatori sintonici (syntonic resonators) mounted directly on the resonance box and themselves moving along with the change in tension of the diaphragm and thus entering into a risonanza composita (composite resonance) with the vibrations of the diaphragm. These resonators, acting as filters, could be telescoping organ pipes or even strings tuned in various ratios. For the resonators to remain in resonance with the tuned noise as it glides “enharmonically” during performance, a scissorlike device follows the process by continuously varying their tuning according to the tension of the diaphragm.

  In the figure included in the patent, Russolo used as an example pipes tuned in harmonic ratios. The presence of pipes in this figure has generated some confusion. Brown believes that the pipes of the sibilatore were fed by bellows, even though the patent shows no need for bellows; bellows are mentioned in the Pall Mall Gazette of November 18, 1913, which covered the Casa Rossa press concert. This was the only occasion on which the press was allowed to examine the workings of one of the intonarumori.39

  Even assuming that this account is reliable, the presence of bellows in a 1913 instrument would not prove that bellows fed pipes in the 1921 patent. Calling the pipes risonatori sintonici, Russolo explained that their function was only to modify the timbre, or color, of the sound. The tuning of these pipes is relevant only insofar as it filters the timbre of the tuned, vibrating diaphragm. If strings were to be substituted for pipes, they were likely vibrating sympathetically with the primary medium, the diaphragm.

  The resonators were thus not responsible for the production of the sound; if they had been, the sibilatore, based on Russolo’s figure, would simply have produced glissandos of major triads—which doesn’t sound likely. On the contrary, the alleged bellows observed in one of the intonarumori of 1913 would not have had anything to do with the system of syntonic resonators: it would not explain, in fact, why Russolo would have had to wait almost eight years to patent an instrument using that principle.

  The scrosciatore (hisser) was not an independent intonarumori but rather an additional register that could be added to both the ronzatore and the sibilatore. When the register of the scrosciatore was added to either of these instruments, a series of strings or even springs were set by a lever to touch the membrane and vibrate against it, as a snare would, thus altering the timbre.

  Russolo continued these developments until the early 1930s, designing a number of additional original musical instruments for which he kept improving most of the mechanical principles he had first employed in the intonarumori. In 1921 Russolo began working on a harmoniumlike noise instrument, the rumorarmonio, of which he produced several versions. The third version of the rumorarmonio succeeded not only in combining most of the noises produced by the various intonarumori but also, like the intonarumori, in controlling these noises enharmonically through leverlike interfaces.

  In the 1930s Russolo shifted his research from noise-tuning devices to an instrument that exploited the longitudinal mode of vibration of strings. Patented in Paris in 1931 as a nuovo istrumento musicale a corde (new string instrument), this device—it was in all probability his last musical project—was an ingenious “string organ” in which a series of rotating friction belts, controlled by a keyboard, continually excited in longitudinal mode an equal number of steel coiled springs (fig. 27).

  FIGURE 27. Luigi Russolo, drawing for the patent for Instrument de musique, N.715.733, requested in Paris on April 20, 1931, deposited on September 29, 1931, and published on December 8, 1931. Archives of Institut National de la Proprieté Industrielle.

  Zanovello, inexplicably, called this instrument a piano enarmonico (enharmonic piano). Although this name is found in neither the patent nor any of the other writings in which Russolo refers to it—not surprisingly, since the instrument had no enharmonic properties—the “new string instrument” is erroneously called “piano enarmonico” in practically all subsequent secondary sources.40

  Zanovello suggested that Russolo had built a model with a range of one octave that was later almost completely destroyed.41 This is inaccurate; in fact, a model with eight keys that Russolo probably rebuilt in 1945, is now preserved at the Russolo Foundation in Varese.42 This instrument is not, however, the prototype with five keys that Russolo mentioned in the Italian draft for the 1931 patent, and which presumably he had left behind in Paris.43

  COMPARING THE DESIGN

  Leonardo da Vinci’s projects involving newly invented musical instruments, like his activity as performer-improviser on the lira da braccio and his studies on acoustics, have been extensively documented by Emanuel Winternitz in Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician. Leonardo’s projects can be summarized as follows:

  1. a mechanical kettledrum activated by a crank to control the beaters;

  2. mechanisms for tuning of percussion instruments such that they acquire melodic, harmonic, and enharmonic properties. This was realized in various ways:

  • by mounting differently tuned drums on one support, such that they could be played by one musician;

  • by mechanically modifying the tension of a drumskin with ropes and a screw controlled by a crank, resembling modern timpani;

  • by placing along the drum box lateral apertures that could be opened or closed by the palms of the hands so as to obtain different frequencies and timbre filtering—a sort of drum flute;

  • by controlling three tuned ratchets of different length with the same cran
k, thus producing a chord of three frequencies;

  • by attaching cones as tuned resonators to the base of a side snare drum;

  • by using devices that could continuously modify the size or the morphology of a sound box, thus affording the instrument enharmonic possibilities by changing actual pitch or filtering the timbre (e.g., an enharmonic ratchet, an enharmonic drum, an enharmonic friction drum, an enharmonic pot drum);

  3. instruments where a skin membrane amplifies the noise of horsehair drawn through it (a friction drum) or the noise of coiled springs moved by a crank to scratch against an indented board attached to a drumskin;

  4. an “enharmonic” flute;

  5. a double-bellows device for organs, allowing continuous feeding of the pipes and thus sustained sound at will;

  6. a keyboard instrument, called by Leonardo the viola organista, that produced a continuous sound on strings. In the first version, the sound was produced by a bow moving forward and back. Leonardo soon replaced the bow with a wheel that excited the strings, similar to that of the hurdy-gurdy. In the final version he called for a double friction belt, probably made from horsehair or silk thread. The sound was controlled dynamically by pressure on the keys that precisely regulated the pressure of the belt on the strings (like the bow of a violin), making crescendos and decrescendos possible.

  Leonardo also developed functional characteristics such as amplifying cones, cranks, and supports designed to free the hands to use drumsticks.

  The similarities between Leonardo’s mechanical principles and those at the heart of Russolo’s projects are striking. Principles common to both include:

  • the skin membrane, or drumhead, as a means of amplifying a noise;

  • mechanisms to change the tension of the membrane during performance, so as to change the pitch;