Luigi Russolo, Futurist

by Luciano Chessa

  And once again, this process, both spiritual and technological—one might call it biomechanization—is what leads to spiritual elevation: “The man, thus galvanized, seems to hurl himself, with his conducting gestures, into the sky.” (Even if cemeterial themes are not as pronounced in this chapter as elsewhere in the novel, their echo is always present and surfaces with the topos of galvanic awakening.)

  Once spiritual elevation is reached, creation can be achieved in all its synesthetic luxuriance: “When sounds, ably regulated by the technical ability of the performers, are abandoned to their aerial destiny, one hears that all life finds again its breaths, its tremors, its harmonies; certainly also scents and colors. ‘Awakening of a modern capital.’ ”

  The composition Risveglio d’una capitale moderna (Awakening of a modern capital), whose title is an intentional reference to Russolo’s Awakening of a City, aims to concentrate “on the snow-white summit of Europe [ . . . ] all the sound waves of the human labyrinth” so that, while conducting, Marzio/Russolo can swim over a boundless “polyphonic and polyethereal ocean.”

  Buzzi describes Marzio/Russolo’s visionary composition as “the symphony of the morning of Life offered with the original elements: the ecstatic music reproducing sounds and noises of the cosmos, renewed and revealed in its very miracle of genesis, simultaneously simple and complex.” Enraptured by this description, Buzzi sings visionarily—and martially, in line with Mar- zio’s etymology—about this sound fusion: “One of the supreme pleasures denied to Hector Berlioz, who in the Treatise of Instrumentation complained that he could not find the musical means to render, accurately, the sound of a thousand rifles operated by a regiment on the Esplanade des Invalides, turned a smile—full, vehement, cosmic, and astral—on Marzio standing on his fantastic podium, which the stars illuminated like miraculous lightbulbs.”

  ART OF NOISES AND REINCARNATION

  Buzzi thus understood the art of noises as an experiment in alchemical creation: the noise first comes to be spiritualized through the intonarumori; on a second level, the chaotic multiplicity of noises produced by the orchestra of intonarumori comes to be transfigured through simultaneity and dynamism into a synthesis that fuses the opposites into unity. Then in the third level, the spirits of the dead, which supplied the energy for the first two levels, reach their objective through the medium of the possessed artist, achieving incarnation. The explosion of noises, according to Buzzi, is what furnishes the surge for this last operation of transformation.

  Leadbeater believed that the spirits could not incarnate themselves out of nothing but needed to find physical, corporeal matter.20 And it is here that this process of transformation crosses the line into black magic. The reanimation of the dead through a concentration of energy (in this case magnetic) is an example of the phenomenon of magnetism. Russolo dedicated numerous pages of Al di là della materia to the Austrian doctor Franz Anton Mesmer and to the analysis of Mesmer’s method of magnetization, but he would also have known of the practices of magnetization through their popularization by way of the Hoepli manual by Giulio Belfiore, Ipnotismo e magnetismo (Hypnotism and magnetism).21

  Mesmer and his studies were cited by the counts Ginanni Corradini in their Metodo of 1910. In Arte dell’avvenire of the same year, Ginna and Corra translated mesmerism into a practical occult tool that in the hands of the inspired artist could activate the reanimation of “the dead things of nature.”22 The ambition of creating life as a biomechanical experiment of reanimating cadavers returns frequently in Marinetti, who in Guerra sola igiene del mondo of 1915 claims that the futurists have the power to awaken mummies through the electricity of their gestures: “Everywhere, we saw growing in a few hours the courage and the number of men who are truly young, and [we saw] the galvanized mummies that our gesture had extracted from the ancient sarcophagi becoming bizarrely agitated.”23

  In La Radia, the manifesto drawn up together with the occultist Pino Masnata, Marinetti expanded on this idea and wrote of the “overcoming of death ‘with a metallicization of the human body and the capturing of the vital spirit as machine force.’ ”24 The words he quoted come from another futurist manifesto that appeared in the same year as La radia: Il macchinesimo (Machineism, 1933), signed by the sculptor Renato di Bosso and the poet Ignazio Scurto. In Il macchinesimo, di Bosso and Scurto proposed an originally futurist—and metallic—alternative to cremation, that unquestionably reads as an alchemic transformation. This is one of the most extreme, quasi-cartoonish representations of the futurist occult experience. It also shows how much larger a circulation (and grotesque a deformation) some of Russolo’s ideas, including the musical ones, had achieved by the 1930s.

  Machineism

  BEGINNING OF A NEW ETHIC AND END OF THE WORLD

  I have pondered over the actualization of this new ideology thanks to the enthusiasm of a faith and with projects and architectonical displays that are not meant by the artist to be mere empty decorative exercises but are instead created as a MACHINEANTROPOS for the MACHINEISM! They are the result of aperfect sympathy between my modern, futurist spirit and the mechanical state of mind.

  This new futurist ethics will be the beginning of a new civilization and will also be the last funeral service mankind will ever perform, because my thought, sped up by a profound conviction of spirit, is projected in the mechanical future and infuses in me such clairvoyance that it suggests to me the striking prophecy of a NOT-SO-DISTANT END OF THE WORLD!

  This prophecy should not be confused with the cruel, martyrizing predictions of religions founded over the terror that divinity instills in the believer! The catastrophic epilogue that will instantaneously stall the path of human civilization, erasing, in a huge pyrotechnic scenery, human history, I foresee to take place in the time in which the MACHINANTROPI, having reached the highest point of their development, will be able to obtain such knowledge as to permit them to take full control of natural forces now still unknown, forces whose measureless powers, getting in contact with one another, will magnify to the point of determining the total combustion and the FINAL EXPLOSION!

  RITUALS AND MANIFESTATIONS OF MACHINEISM

  The MACHINANTROPOS, once he has concluded his life cycle, will be conducted to the METALLIZATORY or Mechanical Temple where a speaker cone will amplify, for the audience’s benefit, the last will and last greetings of the dead; the will would have been transferred to a phonograph record that the MACHINANTROPOS will have pressed and deposited, while still alive, with a reliable attorney. (The record will substitute for the hard copy of the testament.)

  While this thrilling recording is broadcast to the audience attending the ceremony, the open casket will be laid over the RADIOPHORE or altar of mechanical civilization. When the MACHINANTROPOS, with his voice, has sealed this first manifestation of his demonstrating the existence of a mechanical hereafter, from the MOTORARMONIUM will rise, softly, a caressing, motoristic buzz that, vibrating, will gradually increase in volume while the casket is carried by the transmigration officers inside a long hallway, at the entrance to which those present at the ceremony will be asked to stop, and in which, by moving through predetermined, subsequent areas of increasing darkness, the corpse will disappear.

  Finally, the body of the MACHINANTROPOS, running on an inclined plane, will end up immersing itself in a crucible filled with burning metal, where the useless matter will dissolve almost instantly, while the metallic essence of the departed will be catalyzed [sic] in the brand new metal. At this point, the METALHARMONIUM WILL SONORIZE, with the highest scream, the culmination of the fusion ceremony, and will soon after slowly fade into silence.

  A few hours after the transmigration ceremony, the tiny metallic soul of the MACHINANTROPOS will be incorporated in the new matter. A small tag recording the name and the vital statistics of the deceased will be incised by pressing a small part of the liquid metal, and it will be filed in the METAL TAGS LIBRARY.

  From this point the MACHINANTROPOS will start his own SPIRITUAL ME
CHANICAL HEREAFTER IN A PRACTICAL MECHANICAL HERE AND NOW, because the portion of the metal not used in the tag will recuperate its useful, productive function as a machine or part thereof. And so, the few microparticles of metal contained in the transmigrated human body will continue, when transplanted into the body of other men, to run toward the future. This process will definitively eliminate the cumbersome occupation of vast surfaces of land for the repellent and absurd conservation of human bodies in fatal decomposition.25

  This manifesto included a (supposedly) intimidating photograph representing an imposing “motoristic musical instrument that will sonorize the death.”26 To top it off, it had a foreword by Marinetti, boasting that “The IDEA of mechanization of the dead obtained by metallizing their essence may seem insane, but when seriously studied and pondered, it can offer UNFORESEEABLE ideological and practical solutions!”27

  Marinetti’s position would not have surprised anyone. In fact, a first, embryonic manifestation of the concepts found in Il macchinesimo, and part of the origins of the futurist movement (the foundation manifesto of February 20, 1909), was Marinetti’s description of his car accident, a true archetype—before Warhol, before Ballard—of the many car crashes in twentieth- century art history and culture.

  After the accident, the car, which had fallen into a ditch, was fished out, in the presence of a crowd of curious onlookers, with the aid of enormous iron nets:28 “The car slowly came up from the ditch, leaving in the bottom, as if they were scales, its heavy bodywork of common sense and its soft upholstery of comfort. They thought it was dead, my beautiful shark, but a caress from me was enough to revive it; and there it was, resuscitated, running again on its mighty fins!”29

  By the 1930s, this enthusiastic lightheartedness was gone, and the political atmosphere had changed sharply. When in 1933—the year Russolo moved permanently back to Italy—Ginna in L’uomo futuro spoke again of reincarnation, it was clear that the alchemical and occult plan of futurism had become subordinate to the aims of the Fascist regime.30 Embodying as it does Mussolini’s desire of forging anew the Italian race of the future, the uomo futuro constituted the embryonic stage of Fascism’s racial campaign, something that is also evident in the frightening warnings to the Italian Jewish community of forced racial assimilation that were proclaimed in La radia in that same year 1933.31

  Notwithstanding Ginna’s aspiration to perfect the human by creating a biomechanical man of the future, no one looking back can feel empathy for his homunculus, for it is an idiot under the orders of the Duce, a frightening automaton whose direct precedent was not the intonarumori but the infernal metallic war animal produced in “millions of unities” promised by the Ricostruzione futurista dell’universo in the wake of World War I.

  In 1913, though, with that war still around the corner, and future political directions (let alone involuntary parodies à là Ginna) still impossible to predict, futurists could still optimistically believe in a renewed art, a renewed sovereign Italian nation, a renewed humanity, and a renewed future, and they hoped for the spiritual energies and occult means to make these hopes real. Yet no oracle came to warn Russolo of the imminent deaths of Boccioni, Sant’Elia, and Carlo Erba, nor did the aura around his body protect him in battle from a forehead wound that left him convalescent for over a year.

  INTONARUMORI AND THE UNCANNY

  Although unable to protect Russolo, some kind of supernatural aura enveloped the intonarumori, as even the contemporary press could not avoid acknowledging. In a Daily Graphic article published on the occasion of Russolo’s concerts of June 1914 at the Theatre Coliseum, the arrival of the crates of intonarumori in London was described as “the materialization of a nocturnal nightmare.”32 In a later review of the first of the three concerts at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées in 1921 which appeared in L’Avenir on June 19 of that year, the commentator perceived them as something ominous: “These terribly mechanical intonarumori appeared somewhat frightening.”33

  The intonarumori do indeed sound disturbing in the only surviving gramophone recording of 1921, which reproduces two of the pieces for mixed orchestra played in the Paris concerts: Corale and Serenata, by Antonio Russolo. The recorded sound of the intonarumori can be described as a disturbing spiritual intrusion in a context otherwise so annoyingly conventional and mundane that it is almost anodyne. The intrusion creates an effect that at first sounds humorous but is actually uncanny.

  The term uncanny points to the noted Freudian dialectic of heimlich/unheimlich, or revealed/occult, two terms in opposition that resolve into the same disturbing outcome.34 Think of an automaton: it is uncanny because of the strident presence of familiar, humanlike features that hide the unfamiliar, mechanical element that animates it. The cohabitation of the heimlich of external human features and the unheimlich of the internal mechanism frightens the viewer the moment he becomes aware of such coexistence and the fact that something is not as it seems, that something is wrong.

  The Freudian uncanny is the horror of the unfamiliar busting into the familiar, the feeling of danger in a place considered safe, the private (as in familiar and occult) becoming the place of the obscene. The uncanny can derive from the unpleasant surprise of discovering the prosaicness of a mechanical interior, the discovery that what we thought spiritual—the soul moving the body of the automaton—is nothing but a grotesque camouflage or mechanical travesty. It can be the unsettling feeling of having been tricked.

  An exhumation, understood as unveiling of the internal mechanism, is always an obscene, trivial, and fundamentally melancholic operation. In his own private Genesis, the 1909 manifesto, Marinetti lingered ingenuously over this horror when he described the car departing without its outer body or any padding to hide the internal mechanism. But, unlike Marinetti, Russolo was troubled by the dialectic of heimlich/unheimlich, revealed/occult, and especially by how this external/internal dilemma played out in the intonarumori.35

  Obscene was the pressing request of the audience in the Storchi Theater, who interrupted Russolo and Piatti during the ritual solemnity of their presentation of the intonarumori prototype, trivially demanding to see the insides of the instruments: “It’s a trick, it’s a trick! Open the box!!”36 And both obscene and melancholic was Michel Seuphor’s description of the insides of the later rumorarmonio, which speaks of frightening mechanical “intestines.”37

  To his credit, Russolo was sufficiently aware of the heimlich/unheimlich dialectic and its place within futurist aesthetic discourse to refer to it in writing. He opened his French article “Les bruiteurs futuristes italiens,” published in the Revue de l’Epoque in July of 1921, with Marcello Fabri’s definition “FUTURISM MAKES THE EFFORT TO RENDER SIMULTANEOUSLY THE INTERNAL AND THE EXTERNAL, THE PSYCHIC AND THE PLASTIC [ . . . ]. THROUGH THE INTERPENETRATION OF PLANES AND VOLUMES, IT ATTEMPTS TO REALIZE AT THE SAME TIME THE FAMILIAR AND THE UNFAMILIAR.”38 Russolo must have thought Fabri’s catechism of plastic dynamism a fitting introduction to the theory of the art of noises. Yet the reference in this quote to the simultaneity of intimacy and strangeness cannot but evoke Freudian ghosts.

  Because of the mechanical nature of their internal devices, their strong supernatural charge, and the secrecy with which Russolo treated the occult aspects of the project, the intonarumori transport the listener into the arena of modernist alienation, that mechanical anguish of modernism—a true angoscia delle macchine, to borrow the title of a futurist play by Ruggero Vasari—that in futurism seems to materialize everywhere we look.

  The intonarumori were and are disturbing for yet another, subconsciously perceived, reason. Critical reflections of modernism have successfully linked the anguished obsession of modernist aesthetics for machines and automatic movements—Ravel’s and Stravinsky’s works provide convincing examples of this obsession—with the repression of romantic aesthetics and sentimentality, which for the modernists represented a past that should best be forgotten.39

  Far from being the crucible for an artist-creator
’s subjective synthesis of reincarnation, the intonarumori became a vehicle for modernist dehumanization, symbol of the obliteration of the (human) self caused by technological alienation. An attempt to recover this lost humanity by opening the box and unveiling its mechanism is a futile operation, one that haunts us with its horror. Today, the City of the Future that populates itself with the dead brought back to life is no longer a paradoxical image. The reanimated dead represent the past—the nineteenth-century sentimentality repressed by modernist mechanisms, by automata—that has returned to torment us.

  Conclusion

  Materialist Futurism?

  Se i contemporanei non hanno capito in Leonardo che l’artista, i posteri sbalorditi della sua scienza sperimentale hanno finito col voler fare di lui un positivista e anche quasi un materialista.

  —Luigi Russolo, Al di là della materia

  The question whether there are such things as black or red magic, mediumistic séances or ideoplastic materializations, is not germane to my discussion. But what about the intonarumori? Were they or were they not a “portal to the beyond”? Or were they only a metaphor for it? That, too, does not matter. Artworks are screens over which artists project their (he)art’s desires, their poetics: considered from this point of view, artworks are always revelatory. What really matters—and what I have proposed—is that Russolo and other futurists believed in these occult concepts from the very beginning.

  Russolo’s theosophy is the key that allows us to identify, decode, and contextualize the occultist interests that were ever present in his work: from his printmaking and paintings (Maschere, autoritratto [con doppio eterico], La musica, etc.) to his theoretical writings on music.