Luigi Russolo, Futurist

by Luciano Chessa

  Although examples cited in Thought-forms percolated into The Art of Noises, which borrows concepts and structures from The Hidden Side of Things, Russolo chose not to highlight his occult poetics nor to mention theosophy explicitly in his theoretical writings about music. Yet, as we know, the futurists had no qualms about acknowledging occult influence. Theosophy, among other forces, had helped them reclaim both spirituality and the occult, allowing the futurists to view these thought systems not as musty old traditions but rather as expressions of the latest frontiers of science.

  Since spiritual and scientific goals were fully accepted within the futurist movement and are found, explicitly or implicitly, in most of the initiatives promoted by futurism, Russolo did not need to justify or explicitly state the occultist poetics underlying the art of noises. I was, however, principally concerned with discovering the various floating fragments of Russolo’s poetics, and from them reconstructing a mosaic: for this side of my work, explanations about the lack of an explicit exposition of Russolo’s modalities and operations are therefore not so essential.

  If many of the pieces of this mosaic were eventually covered up in the second half of the twentieth century, this was not Russolo’s fault. In fact neither Russolo, nor the other futurists, considered the connections between futurism and the occult to be per se shameful: futurism as a materialistic movement was a creation of modernist critics.

  After World War II, and once the general interest in theosophy had waned, modernist criticism of futurism entirely missed the futurists’ equation “Occult = Science.” By confusing futurist science with positivistic science, these critics dismissed or even censored the references to the occult and the irrational, which can be found everywhere in futurist works, and relegated all such references to the margins of critical discourse, instead forefronting a materialist reduction of machine and technology in their interpretive frame of the futurist movement. Those phases of the futurist movement in which the influence of the occult was unarguable they attacked as evidence of reactionism, postromantic or late nineteenth-century regurgitation, or, incongruently, regressive “abdication of the spirit of the avant-garde.”1

  Modernist criticism likely promoted this particular critical reading with the good intention of redeeming futurism as a progressive, modernist force in the eyes of the postwar international artistic community. Consciously or not, this was done to enable a discussion on futurism—which obviously has some merit—in a post-Resistance climate when openly to address or discuss or study anything relating to fascism was considered taboo in Italy.2

  Wishing to save the futurist movement from its uncomfortable connections with any form of fascism, modernism tended in the process to erase any reference to spiritual or irrational philosophy, and this was done in the name of a rational materialism that the futurists themselves, Russolo above all, would have abhorred.3 During this critical process some aspects of futurism (such as the worship of the machine) were inflated to excess, while, with the same casualness, others were put to death. Such was the price of rehabilitation.

  Some may object that modernist critics were not the only ones responsible for portraying futurism as materialistic, and it might even be argued that Marinetti’s rhetoric played a major role in this portrayal. Could it be that Marinetti and his scholars were swimming, so to speak, in the same modernist “waters” and so contributed to the affirmation of the materialistic interpretation of futurism? Or maybe this interpretation was the result of Marinetti’s self-construction, his self-serving, myth-producing rhetoric? Marinetti is an easy scapegoat, but I would like to argue otherwise.

  He may have been responsible for lobbying to erase the past, but if so, he could not also be charged with erasing the spiritual. In fact, Marinetti talked openly and consistently about the occult, in connection not simply with the symbolic foundational act of the movement but also with the 1912 breakthrough of the Words-in-Freedom theories, La radia of 1933, and beyond.4 True, Marinettian rhetoric placed machines front and center in the movement’s image, but the futurists’ machine—represented by Marinetti as that of Prampolini and Russolo—was not materialistic, bourgeois, fordist-rational comfort but rather the means to a spiritual, occult end.

  Is this, then, one of futurism’s many contradictions?5 Could it be that Marinetti allowed modernist critics to consider futurism materialistic, and that he accepted the misunderstanding purely for purposes of publicity? Regardless of whether this was the case, it is a fact that modernist critics exploited the ambiguity, lifting the weapon with which they were to make futurism “occult- free” from Marinetti’s own rhetorical arsenal.

  For the futurists, originality was of such fundamental importance (in a number of cases futurists backdated their works) that any relation with the past was vehemently deemed to be conservative and dishonorable. Since the occult can be understood as a source of wisdom received from the past, modernist criticism, using the reductive equation “Occult = Past,” rejected any reference to the occult within futurism, considering it to be passatista (passéist).

  Given modernism’s built-in materialism, modernist critics must have felt vicariously embarrassed by the spiritual and occult components of futurism. In unceremoniously lumping the occult together with the past, they made, to use a fitting Italian expression, “di tutta un’erba, un fascio.”

  Marinetti and the futurists considered principally those aspects of the occult that had been confirmed by the latest and most surprising discoveries of modern science; they never understood the occult as something from the past, and thus they never espoused the “Occult = Past” equation.6 Yet modernist critics deliberately misread the occult influence, considering it an embarrassing, if occasional, debt to the past and abdication of that innovative (and thus rational and materialistic) spirit that was expected always to propel the avant-garde. Modernist critics hijacked and turned back toward the occult the same rhetorical weapon futurists had directed toward the past: in short, Marinetti’s rhetoric and strategy backfired.

  The elements for a reading of the art of noises in spiritual terms, which are present in the sources, were quickly dismissed, if mentioned at all. For example, Lista first hints at Russolo’s interest, starting circa 1910–11, in “the studies of metapsychics and Eastern doctrines.” But he leaves this thought unexplored, setting it aside as a reflection of a broader interest that was common to all members of the futurist group.7 Some pages later, however, Lista declares that Russolo’s late interest in spirituality should be discounted because it was regressive.

  This example helps to explain the critical vacuum around the art of noises and the occult in the modernist Russolo scholarship established by Lista, Maffina, and Brown—authors whose work remains among the most substantial musicological contributions to Russolo studies to date and continues to be the starting point for subsequent investigations.

  This book should not be perceived as an attack on modernist critical ideologies. I have not wished to exploit Russolo’s misfortunes at the hands of his critics for an epistemological assault but have been primarily focused on studying Russolo’s poetics to uncover new materials and initiate a new basis for discussion.

  Modernist criticism used futurism’s self-professed ideology to construct an image of Russolo as an innovator of genius and acclaim the inventor as “the first major exponent of musical synthesis itself.”8 But it was modernist ideology that led to the suppression of the other, and no less important, sides of Russolo’s operation. By placing the analytic focus on materialistic—and technological—innovation and ignoring the proximity between technology and occult’s rhetorical approach, modernist criticism transformed the art of noises into a materialistic feast. This misunderstanding obliterated the fact that the futurist future was by and large a spiritual one, and that futurist machines were only the medium through which to explore spirituality.

  If in considering the spiritual link between Russolo and Leonardo one were to substitute Leonardo’s name for Russolo’s, the fol
lowing passage from Russolo’s Al di là della materia suddenly sounds tragically autobiographical, both foreseeing and attacking his future critical fate: “If his contemporaries understood in Leonardo only the artist, posterity, amazed by his experimental science, ended up wanting to make him into a positivist, even almost a materialist.”9

  Thus in the end Russolo became subject to the same critical reductivism that he had diagnosed in Leonardo’s critics. In the narrow reading of a futurist universe, constricted between the binaries of a materialist techno-idolatry and the blind cult of science—a scientismo that is far removed from what most of the futurists believed, and a cult to which Russolo never subscribed—there was no space for the ouija board of the séances, the divinatory responses of a medium, the dialogue with the dead or, more generally, parascience—all things that the futurists pursued.

  The portrait of Russolo as a materialist scientist was thoroughly convenient to modernist criticism. Modernist critics preferred to see him as a scientist who worked intensely with the sole objective of replacing the old instruments of the orchestra with new, noise-producing ones, and creating an orchestra to execute his futurist music with the objective of achieving sound innovations.

  This portrait, which has survived until now, is partially true but incomplete and much too reductive.10 Yet if we can free ourselves from the heavy modernist baggage that is still so much a part of the critical discourse surrounding futurism, then a new impression of Russolo’s image, enhanced by new interpretive angles such as those I have indicated here, can begin to materialize.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Maria Zanovello, Luigi Russolo: L’uomo, l’artista (Milan: Cyril Corticelli, 1958), 78–79; henceforth Zanovello, Luigi Russolo.

  2. Luigi Russolo, Al di là della materia (Milan: Bocca, 1938); quoted from the second edition (Milan: Luciano Ferriani editore, 1961), 102–3.

  3. Giovanni Lista, “Russolo, peinture et bruitisme,” in Luigi Russolo, L’art des bruits (Lausanne: l’Age d’Homme, 1975), 28; henceforth Lista, “Russolo, peinture et bruitisme.” This judgment was later echoed by other scholars. See Piera Anna Franini, “Il futurismo in musica fra rivoluzione e tradizione: Terza parte,” Musicaaa! 3, no. 8 (1997): 26.

  4. Barclay Brown was the first to point out “Russolo’s role in creating the first musical synthesizer”; see Brown, introduction to Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises, trans. Barclay Brown (New York: Pendragon Press, 1986), 1.

  5. These interests will include such alternatives spiritual practices as remote healing, spirit conjuring, etheric doubling, ectoplasmic materialization, sun gazing, palm reading, yoga meditation, etc. Because of the syncretic nature of the occult field of inquiry, more an all-encompassing ocean than a univocal stream of study, I prefer to let the term occult (as well as the discipline that studies it, occultism) define itself, with all its manifold and even contradictory allure, in the following pages than reveal it in a narrow definition. In this way I pay homage to the term’s etymology.

  6. A case in point is Anna Gasparotto’s thorough examination of Russolo’s late philosophy in the MART 2006 catalog (cited in n. 10), research that shows how Russolo’s spiritual and occult research is now taken more seriously. But if Gasparotto’s scholarship is presented in parallel with Russolo’s visual art explorations of the 1940s, no contribution in MART employs spirituality as an access key to a deeper understanding of Russolo’s futurist activities. Daniele Lombardi’s brief contribution to studies of Russolo’s futurist investigations in the realm of sound, which is also included in the catalogue, only makes passing reference to Russolo’s spirituality and does not provide any kind of interpretation of his sound theory. Instead, it mostly list facts and notions previously available in print, including some which meanwhile had already been corrected by my Luigi Russolo and the Occult (e.g., Russolo’s 1931’s nuovo istrumento musicale a corde is here still referred to as piano enarmonico).

  7. The word intonarumori first appears as apparecchi intonarumori (noise intoner instruments) in Russolo’s article “Gl’intonarumori futuristi,” dated May 22, 1913, and published in Lacerba on July 1, 1913. Since the word apparecchi was implied, it soon would be omitted. In the course of this book I will use the word intonarumori for both the singular and plural forms, as it is in Italian (e.g., “il singolo [apparecchio] intonarumori,” or “un’orchestra di [apparecchi] intonarumori”). Lacerba is available in facsimile (Milan: Mazzotta, 1970).

  8. Zanovello, Luigi Russolo, 21. Throughout this book, italics are mine unless otherwise noted.

  9. Gianfranco Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori: Con tutti gli scritti musicali (Turin: Martano, 1978), 115, 117; henceforth Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori. All quoted passages from The Art of Noises are based on the Barclay Brown translations (see note 4), which I edited when needed. Italics are mine unless otherwise indicated.

  10. Daniele Lombardi, “Tanto rumore per nulla?” in Luigi Russolo, Vita e opere di un futurista (Milan: Skira, 2006), 118; henceforth MART. Franco Tagliapietra, “Riflessioni sulla pittura: Teoria e produzione dal dopoguerra al 1930,” in MART, 56. In her essays for this catalog, Anna Gasparotto recognizes that Russolo’s late spiritual interests were rooted in his early Milanese years, but by claiming that they were the result of his early Milanese milieu and “resurfaced” later, that is, that Russolo had “pushed them aside” until he “revisited” them in Paris as part of his “curious and detailed investigations,” she implies that his occult interests skipped the futurist years altogether; Gasparotto, “Da Parigi a Tarragona al rientro in Italia,” in MART, 69, 85, and “Cerro di Laveno e il lago Maggiore: L’incontro e la conversazione con un gruppo di amici, la pittura ‘classico-moderna,’ ” in MART, 98.

  11. For the titles and dates of Russolo’s artworks, I rely on the chronology Franco Tagliapietra prepared for MART.

  12. Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 16.

  13. I first proposed the notion of a continuity in Russolo’s interests in my 2004 PhD dissertation. Russolo himself was aware of the continuity; see Luigi Russolo, “Catalogo della Galleria Borromini di Como,” partially reproduced in Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 122. In his diaries, Russolo wrote: “Despite the apparent differences of my occupations, there is a unity in my life”; diary entry of July 31, 1934, quoted in Gasparotto, “Da Parigi a Tarragona al rientro in Italia,” in MART, 87n54. For a more in-depth discussion of Russolo’s concept of unity, also a Boccionian keyword, see my chapter 8. The realization of continuity (and coherence) in Russolo’s early and late investigations led Gasparotto to a conclusion about the substantial unity of Russolo’s undertakings that agrees with mine, and she gets there by a similar path, though she does not consider apply her findings to Russolo’s futurism; see Luciano Chessa, “Luigi Russolo and the Occult” (PhD dissertation, University of California, Davis, 2004), 2, 7; Gasparotto, “Riprese, approfondimenti, nuovi orientamenti: Alcune considerazioni su riflessioni ricorrenti e modalità espressive negli scritti,” in MART, 67; and Gasparotto, “Da Parigi a Tarragona al rientro in Italia,” in MART, 85.

  14. Futurists, likely influenced by French symbolists, adopted synesthesia—which clearly has an occultist provenance—in their art and made it one of the cardinal point of their poetics. A first trace of synesthesia in Russolo’s output is his 1910 oil painting Profumo, which is imbued with symbolist and occult resonances alike.

  15. The synthesizer-like qualities of the intonarumori, alleged by Barclay Brown and others, were achieved mechanically. They arose from Russolo’s systematic and taxonomical (but also ecumenical!) approach to sound. Naturally, a single intonarumori would mechanically “synthesize” only one kind of sound; but these instruments displayed synth-like properties as a whole. This was the case until Russolo in the 1920s built the rumorarmonio, an instrument that combined all the timbres of the individual intonarumori and controlled them through a keyboard interface (a change that curiously resembles Moog’s
conceptual departure from Buchla). See Brown, “The Noise Instruments of Luigi Russolo,” Perspectives of New Music 20 (1981–82), 48; and Brown, introduction to Russolo, The Art of Noises, 1, 2.

  16. In the passage quoted above from the introduction to his French translation of Russolo’s book L’art des bruits (1975), Lista provided the classic example of this modernist ideology in defining Luigi Russolo’s later interest in the occult as a regressive phase, or, more precisely, as an “abdication de l’esprit d’avant-garde” (Lista, “Russolo, peinture et bruitisme,” 28). Very likely, Lista’s unexpressed fear of a connection between Russolo’s later occult theories and fascism played a role in the formulation of this judgment. The phrase “abdication of the spirit of the avant-garde” is edited out in the updated version of the essay, in Giovanni Lista, Luigi Russolo e la musica futurista (Milan: Mudima, 2009), which awkwardly omits any discussion of Russolo’s post-1930 work.

  17. In fact the opposite is true: for instance, on the title page of the publication Arte fascista, published by the Sindacati Artistici Torino in December 1927, Russolo’s name is prominently displayed (see figure 2).

  18. For this reason I wrote of that connection in depth in a separate essay, which follows the development of Russolo’s aesthetics after 1921 in the context of his developing political philosophy.

  19. Futurists considered the occult a progressive force, a spiritual expression of the newest, yet unexplored, frontiers of science.

  20. Luigi Russolo, “L’arco enarmonico,” Fiamma 2, no. 1 (January 1926).

  CHAPTER 1

  1. Maurizio Calvesi, Il futurismo: La fusione della vita nell’arte (Milan: Fratelli Fabbri Editori, 1967; 1975), 228; henceforth Calvesi, Fusione. Calvesi’s critical work on futurism decisively showed the movement’s aesthetic positions in all their density and contradictions. His research led to a far more complex image of futurism than that of the modernism-inspired critics.