Luigi Russolo, Futurist

by Luciano Chessa

  • a way to control dynamics through the pressure of a wheel or belt against a string;

  • indented or notched friction surfaces;

  • rotating sound generators;

  • resonating sound boxes with modifiable dimensions, allowing timbre filtering;

  • springs vibrating against a membrane;

  • tuned resonators applied to a membrane;

  • the continuous mechanical beating of a drum;44

  • continuous sound.

  DYNAMIC BOWING

  Russolo may have based his rotatory-friction instruments not so much on the hurdy-gurdy as on the more sophisticated principles of Leonardo’s viola organista. This instrument was most certainly the principal source for Russolo’s nuovo istrumento musicale a corde, and constitutes the most obvious point of contact between Russolo and Leonardo. Indeed, the nuovo istrumento is essentially a perfected version of Leonardo’s viola organista: a keyboard instrument that produced a continuous sound of strings with a series of friction belts that could also control the dynamic level of every string in real time, according to the degree of pressure applied on the keys. With this characteristic, the instrument, according to Russolo, surpassed the organ:

  [With the nuovo istrumento] one regulates the intensity of sound with a greater or lesser pressure of the belt [against the vibrating body], that is to say pressing with the finger more or less so as to lower the key more or less, as the violin regulates the intensity of the sound with the pressure of the bow against the strings.

  Therefore, one can obtain with this instrument all the effects of continuous, sustained chords as in the organ. At the same time one is able to give them all the expression of a violin because every smallest and quickest variation of pressure on the key is immediately reproduced by the belt that thus modifies with great sensitivity the intensity of the resulting sound.45

  It is useful to compare Russolo’s description of the nuovo istrumento with Winternitz’s speculation about the dynamic possibilities of Leonardo’s viola organista:

  Such an instrument would not have been merely a counterpart of the organ, where ten fingers control numerous pipes, but would have surpassed the organ in one significant aspect: that is, in the flexible dynamics permitting the fine graduation of volume [. . .] . In Leonardo’s viola organista the finger pressure on the keys would have [. . .] modified the loudness of the tones produced.46

  It is unclear whether Winternitz understood that the instrument, unlike the piano, could modify dynamics after the keys had been pressed, even though a contact lever for this purpose is shown in another sketch of Leonardo’s, also reproduced by Winternitz.47 Both Russolo, in his patent of 1931, and Winternitz, in describing Leonardo’s work, emphasize that the resources of the new instruments surpass those of the organ.48

  Russolo appears to have studied Leonardo’s viola organista projects with great attention: in the second of his detail drawings for the patent for his nuovo istrumento, for example, Russolo used the same perspective as Leonardo had in one of the sketches for the viola in Madrid MS II, folio 76r (fig. 28). Winternitz recognizes three phases in Leonardo’s search for an “infinite bow”: a true bow moving forward and back, a friction wheel, and a friction belt.49 Russolo, too, who may not have been familiar with the exact progression of the viola organista sketches, curiously progressed from the friction wheel of the intonarumori to the friction belt of the nuovo istrumento.

  FIGURE 28. Leonardo da Vinci, sketch for the viola organista, from Madrid MS II, fol. 76r.

  The viola organista and nuovo istrumento differ significantly in only one respect: in the nuovo istrumento the strings are excited lengthwise. Longitudinal vibration of the string is rare, because this requires very long strings, as an ordinary length would produce pitches that could easily pass beyond the upper audible range.50 Russolo overcame the problem of string length in a practical way, by using coiled springs of steel thread. Acting like an infinite bow, the friction belt sets the strings to vibrate along the plane of the coil. According to the patent, increased pressure would make the volume louder, an effect that Russolo claimed could be reenforced when traditional lateral vibration is added to longitudinal vibration.

  It has been suggested that the intonarumori derived from the hurdy-gurdy, and Winternitz says the same of Leonardo’s viola organist.51 Yet this is true only in the sense that what makes the strings of the hurdy-gurdy vibrate is the cranked wheel functioning as a perpetual-motion bow. But unlike Russolo’s and Leonardo’s projects, the hurdy-gurdy causes all the strings to vibrate simultaneously; most are drones, with only the so-called melodic strings (usually two strings at the unison) changing pitch. Moreover, the ambitus of the hurdy-gurdy is typically limited to an octave.

  Winternitz characterized the hurdy-gurdy as having three distinguishing features: its machinery, its continuous sound, and its reliance on a one-octave melody accompanied by a drone. The first two of these are certainly shared by some of Leonardo’s instruments, including the viola organista, and most of Russolo’s (the intonarumori, rumorarmonio, and the nuovo istrumento). But Leonardo’s projects deliberately avoid drones or fixed pitches, favoring rather mechanisms that allow melodic flexibilities (as in his tuned drums) and independent voice leading (as in the case of the viola organista). Russolo, too, preoccupied with enharmony, never called for the hurdy-gurdy’s most obvious aural characteristic: the fixity of the drone.

  SOUND SENSIBILITIES

  Russolo’s borrowings from Leonardo were not limited to principles of construction but extended to matters of acoustics and aesthetics. Chief among these was the notion of enharmony, which, along with the designing and building of enharmonic intonarumori, Russolo considered to be, as he wrote in his 1923 article “L’enarmonismo,” his paramount accomplishment. Here, too, he owed a substantial debt to Leonardo, not only as regards the design of instruments that could safely be called enharmonic but also in regard to intention, for Leonardo’s attempt to place music in the category of continuous quantity is strikingly close to Russolo’s theorization of enharmony.

  For both Leonardo and Russolo, building the instruments went hand in hand with the related theorizing. Among the enharmonic instruments Leonardo depicted in Codex Arundel 263 folio 175r are: the timpanilike drum with a crank-turned screw to adjust the tension of the skin; the instrument that Winternitz identifies as a pot drum; a type of ratchet; and a drum with a slide window opening into the resonance chamber. All of them were capable of modifying pitch (and/or filtering their timbre) along a continuous spectrum, and thus they were, in Russolo’s terminology, enharmonic.52

  Two instruments designed by Leonardo, sketchily described by Winternitz, seem to have had enharmonic possibilities: a friction drum and a second type of ratchet.53 In both these instruments, what was probably waxed fabric allowed the performer to modify the dimensions of the body of the instrument during performance, thus gradually filtering the timbre. The performer would have moved a hand inside and outside the instrument, while using the other hand to perform friction on the hairs, or to turn the crank. To stabilize the instruments, the loop of rope designed by Leonardo that Winternitz thought was a handle must instead have been a shoulder or neck strap.

  One of the most interesting among Leonardo’s enharmonic instruments is what Winternitz called the glissando flute, a sketch of which is found in the Codex Atlanticus (CA folio 397rb). In his explanatory text, Leonardo says that this flute does not change pitch by leap but “in the manner of the human voice” (nel modo proprio della voce umana). The instrument can produce microtonal pitches—“You can obtain one eighth and one sixteenth of the tone and just as much as you want” (possi fare 1/8 and 1/16 di voce, e tanto quanto te piace)—and, by extensively moving the fingers along the slits, glissandi as well.54

  Puzzled by Leonardo’s flute, Winternitz notes how little it would have had in common with the musical practice of the time: “Such a glissando instrument would have not fitted into the orchestra [sic] of Leonar
do’s day,” Winternitz wrote, naïvely adding: “Could he [Leonardo] have foreseen in a dreamy corner of his incredible brain glissando instruments such as that invented in 1924 by the Russian scientist Lev Theremin?”55

  Since the slide trumpet and trombone were already in use, the theremin seems hardly relevant.56 By maintaining that “obtaining an eighth and one sixteenth obviously means [. . .] to reach the upper octave,” Winternitz fails to understand the microtonal implications of this instrument.57 More important, he does not connect any of these enharmonic instruments with the theoretical base found in Leonardo’s writings on acoustics, even though he analyzes these very writings in the last section of his book.58

  LEONARDO’S ENHARMONY

  The notion of a musical system comparable to the one Russolo called enharmonic is implied in Leonardo’s Il paragone.59 This treatise in a treatise constitutes that section of his Trattato della pittura written to prove that painting has a greater metaphysical status than the other arts. According to Winternitz, however, Leonardo contradicts himself when later in this passage (Trattato 31C) he then recognizes the same status for music: “If you [the musician] say that only the nonmechanical [physical, bodily, material] sciences [liberal arts] are concerned with the mind and that, just as Music and Geometry deal with the proportions of the continuous quantities, and Arithmetic with the proportions of the discontinuous quantities, [so] Painting deals with all the continuous quantities and also with the qualities of the proportions [degrees] of shades and lights and, thanks to perspective, distances as well.”60

  Leonardo believed that music could only achieve the status of painting when it deals with continuous quantities, that is, when it has “continuous flow.” As Winternitz has it: “The flow—that is to say the smooth gliding from one tone to the next—elevates music to a scientia mentale dealing with continuous quantities, like Geometry and Painting. Thus, to a scientific scrutiny, an equality of rank is established between Painting and Music.”61

  Winternitz defined “smooth gliding” as the unfolding of a melody in time, one note after the other—the kind of a continuity in time that he thinks Leonardo discusses in a passage in Codex Arundel 263:

  Although time is included among the continuous quantities, it does fall—since it is invisible and incorporeal—into the realm of geometry, whose divisions consist of figures and bodies of infinite variety, as a continuum of visible and corporeal things. But only in their principles do they [geometry and time] agree, that is, with regard to the point and the line; the point is comparable to an instant in time; and just as the line is similar to the length of a section in time, so the instants are ends and beginning of each given section of time. And if the line is infinitely divisible, so is the section of time resulting from such division; and if the sections of a line are proportionable to one another, so are the [successive] sections of time proportionable to one another.62

  Unlike Winternitz, I am convinced that Leonardo in Trattato 31C was referring to the possibility of an infinite (and therefore continuous) micro-tonal division of a given interval (continuity in pitch space). Since continuous quantities are infinitely divisible—Leonardo discussed this in the passage from Codex Arundel—painting is quantifiable as continuous because of shading (light, shadow) and perspective, a conventional system that allows simultaneous two-dimensional representation of objects that actually exist in a three-dimensional space. Because the lines of a field of perspective are infinitely divisible, the portrayed objects can occupy every position within the simulated field, exactly as they occupy three-dimensional reality.

  In Trattato 31C, Leonardo suggested that, just as painting allows and displays all degrees of shadow and light and all degree of distance in perspective, filling the space uniformly and continuously, music can aspire to an equivalent status only when it produces all the intermediate shadings of frequency between two distant pitches. Leonardo believed that music must be continuous not simply in time (as Winternitz maintained) but in that continuous dimension I refer to as pitch space.63

  Here Leonardo posits a difference of metaphysical status between music and poetry and claims that as music unfolds in continuous pitch space, it occupies a dimension unknown to poetry.64 Music can live in a continuous dimension when its sounds can inhabit any position of the infinite pitch space, a dimension that is, like perspective in painting, continuous. Just as the perspective line is infinitely divisible, so is the interval in acoustics. Pitch is a continuous quantity because every interval between two pitches is infinitely divisible: possibly it was on this basis that Leonardo explained the difference in status between poetry and music: music’s proportions (by which Leonardo must have meant the intervallic proportions) are unknown to poetry.65

  In the process of demonstrating the difference in status between poetry and music, Leonardo in Trattato 21 introduced the notion of armonico concento, which Winternitz describes as the harmony created by proportions between different pitches: a harmony that, according to Leonardo, poetry is not able to create. Leonardo described armonico concento as a phenomenon that hits the senses simultaneously (the eye in painting, the ear in music—but not in poetry). But when read into the context of its time, armonico concento can only refer to a broad acceptance of the term harmony as a relationship between different pitches in the pitch-space continuum—a harmony of intervals, whether simultaneous or not.

  Winternitz sometimes failed to realize that Leonardo’s theoretical approach does not place harmony and melody in opposition.66 However, it is important to remember that in these texts we are not dealing with a question of horizontal and vertical in the modern sense.67 Armonico concento is a science of intervallic proportions, not necessarily of verticalities. Difference in time is not pertinent, therefore, because intervallic proportions occupy space, not time, and if considered from the point of view of their existence in pitch space, what we currently distinguish as melodic interval and harmonic interval was in Leonardo’s time considered one and the same. In the pitch-space continuum, time and space collide.

  This intervallic space can be envisaged much as Schoenberg thought of dodecaphonic space, or as Swedenborg thought of skies—a conception that in fact inspired Schoenberg’s.68 Special topological properties apply here: it does not matter if the intervals are horizontal and melodic or vertical and harmonic, nor does their direction matter but only the continuous pitch space that these intervals imply or evoke.69

  Hence, if any melodic winding usually implies a harmonic pitch space (for an arpeggiated chord is still a chord), the melodic winding of a monodic instrument like the glissando flute or the intonarumori showcases the continuousness—what we would call enharmonic—of pitch space. (By the same token, a discussion of form, whether in music or poetry, is not pertinent here, since form, which Leonardo understood to be a different kind of harmony—formal harmony between proximate sections of a poem or a musical work—unfolds continuously only in time and is, in the last analysis, about memory.)70

  Leonardo believed that poetry, though continuous in time, cannot be continuous in space because it lacks the possibilities provided by pitches and intervals; its lower status is due to the inability to produce armonico concento, that is, it does not function with intervallic proportions. Though music, likewise, unfolds in time, it is active—either harmonically or melodically—in pitch space.71 By doing no more than operate in the time continuum, poetry cannot inhabit the continuity of infinite pitch space that is the realm in which music operates.

  This is why Russolo’s and Leonardo’s instruments, which can slide or make true glissandi and therefore display enharmonic properties, are so significant. They achieve a functional perfection of musical time and space. In fact, the only way to understand the function of Leonardo’s instruments is to consider the music that he dreamed of as continuous not only in time but also in pitch space.72

  Leonardo’s music deals with continuity in two ways. First, by the prolongation of sounds and sustained notes, which he explored with whee
ls or friction belts and his “perpetual” bellows (a manifestation of the continuity in time).73 Second, with enharmony, a manifestation of the continuity in pitch space.74 The relationship with continuous quantities confers spiritual properties on the music because continuity, addressing infinite divisibility, is linked to divine perfection.75 Russolo may have become attracted to Leonardo’s projects precisely because he saw spiritual worth in them.

  Russolo’s instruments have properties that are similar to those of Leonardo’s instruments, manifesting continuity in both time and pitch space. Continuity in time was not a new concept—all music unfolds in time, and instruments that can sustain sound, such as the organ, showcase the property well—but achieving enharmonic continuity in pitch space was a key accomplishment for Russolo, as he proudly confirmed in writings such as “Conquista totale dell’enarmonismo mediante gl’intonarumori futuristi,” “Grafia enarmonica per gl’intonarumori futuristi,” and the polemic “L’enarmonismo.”76

  Certainly Busoni’s Abbozzo di una nuova estetica della musica was, with all of its spiritual and metaphysical implications, an important source for Russolo’s enharmonic vision. But Leonardo’s Il paragone is what, above all, echoes in Russolo’s writings.77

  ROMORI VS. RUMORI

  When Leonardo discussed noises in his writings on acoustics, he formulated an early aesthetics of the subject. He used two different words for noise: strepido, the sound of a loud explosion, and romore, a prolonged, less aggressive yet loud sound.78 Leonardo uses the term strepido in contexts like this one: “The tone [strepido, or noise] of the bombard directed against water kills all animals that find themselves in such water.”79 Strepido is associated with a military explosion, and in fact Leonardo discusses it in his studies of acoustics as applied to the science of war. Winternitz remarks: “As a sought-after technical adviser on artillery and especially as the military engineer for Cesare Borgia, Leonardo was familiar with the functioning of firearms, including naturally the acoustic aspects of firing cannons, and in particular the effect of the length of the gun on the volume of the sound produced and the impact of the atmosphere, misty or clear, on the loudness.”80