Luigi Russolo, Futurist

by Luciano Chessa

  34. Quoted in Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 131.

  35. For a list of the instruments that Russolo would accept to accompany the intonarumori (incidentally, all percussion instruments), see Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 172.

  36. Quoted in Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 172.

  37. See Edward Venn, “Rethinking Russolo” Tempo 64, no. 251 (January 2010): 8–16. After reducing Russolo’s seven bars into a conventional score, Venn proceeded to analyze and criticize harmonic and voice-leading choices from the transcription; he treated the intonarumori without any regard to timbre, as if they were merely sirens, and went to the absurd length of finding a ”tonic” of E minor in the second bar. Opining that Russolo was “not a particularly inspired composer,” he proceeded to prove it by looking for compositional “weakness” and “mistakes” with the pedantry of a novellus Théodore Dubois. Venn argued that the piece “deploys all the resources” far too soon (“Clearly the city is awaking quickly!” he states), evidently forgetting that he is not analyzing a whole composition but only a musical example of seven bars, the length of which in terms of absolute time is actually impossible to determine, as Russolo did not indicated in this excerpt any tempo or metronome markings.

  38. Russolo introduces the Dynamic continuity in Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 164.

  39. Quoted in Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 176.

  40. Quoted in Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 175.

  41. Quoted in Brown, introduction to Russolo, The Art of Noises, 5.

  42. In answer to this essay, Hans Pfitzner published his famous Futuristengefahr (Futurist danger). Busoni answered him in June 1917 with an open letter that is a masterpiece of elegance and irony; see “Lettera aperta a Hans Pfitzner,” in Busoni, Lo sguardo lieto, 109–11. On the cross-pollination between Busoni and Russolo, see Lombardi, Il suono veloce, 76. Lombardi, analyzing the common ground between the two artists, also pointed to the substantial difference between them. He shows that Busoni operated a “nonhistorical “synthesis of past and future, and Russolo is entirely driven by “an iconoclast fury.” To my way of thinking, both Busoni and Russolo operated in the fields of a “nonhistorical” synthesis (or asynchronous, inattuale synthesis). Both of them, more or less openly, more or less painfully, revealed a comparable attraction for the cultural traditions (musical, philosophical) of the past.

  43. In Busoni, “Il regno della musica (epilogo della nuova estetica)”; reprinted in Busoni, Lo sguardo lieto, 71–72.

  44. Busoni, “Abbozzo di una nuova estetica della musica,”; reprinted in Busoni, Lo sguardo lieto, 68n18.

  45. Leadbeater, The Hidden Side of Things, 4.

  46. In these two paragraphs, Leadbeater classified as “sounds” some acoustic phenomena that Russolo, perhaps more terminologically conservative, considered to belong to the category of noise: natural sounds such as that of wind or the sea, and those produced by savage and domesticated animals—even the sound of the human voice.

  47. Compare Leadbeater, The Hidden Side of Things, 204–10, with the Russolo quote in Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 143–58. Russolo mentioned animal sounds in the sixth famiglia of noises, a taxonomy previously published in his 1913 manifesto. See Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 133.

  48. The word “Pan-ic” is used here to translate the Italian pànico, which is a term that refers to a sense of deliberate downward canceling of the self, a primordial togetherness, that man feels when he is at one with nature. It is therefore distinct from pantheistic, a term that implies more of a religious, certainly upward motion of the soul towards the divine in nature. The original Italian word refers the Greek god of nature, Pan.

  49. Fiorda’s Procession is mentioned in Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 77. Russolo cited Antonio Russolo’s La pioggia in a letter to his wife of July 1, 1927 (Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 278–79). In this letter Russolo describes the concert he gave at the Sorbonne the previous week, and mentions La pioggia among the pieces he played with the noise-harmonium. A recording produced in 1997 by the Russolo Foundation in Varese includes a version of La pioggia for voice, piano and three intonarumori; the recording dates that work in 1914, which seems highly implausible.

  50. A good example is the Florentine group Leonardo and, among the futurists, Pratella, who professes himself to be pantheistic in his letter to Lacerba of February 28, 1915.

  51. This quote was brought to my attention by the Savinio scholar Luca Valentino of the Conservatory of Alessandria, Italy.

  52. In L’Italia futurista (July 25, 1916).

  53. Interestingly, Leadbeater, in The Hidden Side of Things (279), includes an entire section on war, in which he even cites the same battle of Tripoli that futurist scholars would have been familiar with through Marinetti’s 1911 poetical reportages.

  54. Tagliapietra (in MART, 53) describes the painting only briefly, missing the link between this canvas and the section on the noises of the war in The Art of Noises.

  55. Evidence of this subjective approach can be found in the first sentence of this quotation, in which Leadbeater stresses the point that, to capture the sense of unity, it is necessary to have a higher, privileged point of view.

  56. In Leadbeater, The Hidden Side of Things, 210.

  57. If it is true that Russolo “nourished himself with the essential Pythagorean doctrine” (Buzzi, quoted in Zanovello, Luigi Russolo, 13), we must also say that Russolo’s own version of the monochord, the intonarumori, did not divide the string (the space) into finite discontinuous intervals (the ratios of the harmonic series) but rather divided it infinitely, throughout the enharmonic continuity.

  58. Russolo did not refer, as Leadbeater does, to the harmony of the spheres. However, it is fair to read in the concept of Russolo’s synthesis an echo of that principle of reordering multiplicity in unity, which for Leadbeater produces the frequency of resonance of each planet.

  59. Russolo, cited in Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 131.

  CHAPTER 9

  1. Barclay Brown, in the introduction to his translation of Russolo’s The Art of Noises (3), mentions the “astonishing speed” at which Russolo conceptualized and built the intonarumori. Carlo Piccardi has written that the process was “immediato”; Piccardi, “Futurismo,” in Dizionario enciclopedico universale della musica e dei musicisti, ed. A. Basso (Turin: UTET, 1985) 2:309.

  2. Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 26.

  3. “Gl’intonarumori futuristi” was published in the Lacerba issue of July 1, 1913, but it is dated May 22, 1913.

  4. The fact that the construction of the instruments was announced on March 11 and the completed instruments presented on August 11 is not coincidental. On Marinetti’s numerological fixation on the number 11, see Calvesi, Fusione, 336n28.

  5. Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 27.

  6. Francesco Cangiullo, Le serate futuriste (Naples: Editrice Tirrena, 1930), 248.

  7. See, for example, the discussion of the relationship between Leonardo and Duchamp in Henderson, Duchamp in Context.

  8. Russolo, like other futurists, had an early creative phase with a symbolist thrust. Symbolism remains the father (albeit often unacknowledged, even oedipally repressed) of the creative behavior of several futurists. On the spiritual consideration of Leonardo’s work by late nineteenth-century movements, see Pietro C. Marani, “Leonardo, i moti e le passioni: Introduzione alla fortuna e sfortuna del Cenacolo,” in Il genio e le passioni, Leonardo e il Cenacolo: Precedenti, innovazioni, riflessi di un capolavoro, exhibit catalog, ed. Pietro Marani (Milan: Civico Museo d’Arte Contemporanea 2001), 29–38; henceforth Marani, “Leonardo, i moti e le passioni.”

  9. Archivi del futurismo, 1:228.

  10. Marinetti, La grande Milano, 69, 173. Marinetti mentioned Leonardo and his machines on page 187.

  11. According to Marian
ne Martin, Carrà was one of these friends. Martin cites Buzzi’s article in Cahiers as a source; see Futurist Art and Theory, 70n2. However, I was unable to locate in Buzzi’s article the information quoted by Martin.

  12. Quoted by Tagliapietra in MART, 16.

  13. See Zanovello, Luigi Russolo. This account is repeated in Lista, “Russolo, peinture et bruitisme”; Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori; Martin, Futurist Art and Theory; Tagliapietra, Luigi Russolo: Pittore musicista filosofo (Treviso: Europrint, 2000); and elsewhere.

  14. The extensive report on The Last Supper produced by the Lombard public administration, contemporaneously with Cavenaghi’s restoration, never refers to Crivelli in the course of a very detailed account of every single restoration up to the date of publication. See Achille Patroclo, ed., Le Vicende del Cenacolo di Leonardo da Vinci nel secolo XIX (Milan: Ufficio Regionale per la Conservazione dei Monumenti della Lombardia, 1906). Yet in the very years in which Leonardo is working on The Last Supper and the Stanze of the Sforza Castle, he is also painting the famous La Belle Ferronnière, which is believed to be the portrait of Lucrezia Crivelli, the mistress of Ludovico il Moro, Duke of Milan, who was also Leonardo’s boss at the time. Since Russolo was involved in the restoration of both The Last Supper and the Stanze, I suspect that this is perhaps where the name Crivelli came from. It is not the only incorrect information in Zanovello’s biography.

  15. Lacerba (September 1, 1913).

  16. Marinetti, La grande Milano, 118–19. All that now remains about this lecture is a brief text that is known through a copy made by Boccioni. Because of Boccioni’s handwriting, and because Marinetti, who sorted Boccioni’s papers after his death titled it “Ricerche sull’arte di Russolo,” the writing was misattributed to Boccioni by Zeno Birolli, who published it, although expressing some perplexity over its authorship, in his collection of Boccioni’s posthumous writings. In this text, Russolo makes a list of several fourteenth-, fifteenth-, and sixteenth-century frescoes that have been destroyed or painted over by subsequent artists, as a sort of Darwinist justification for futurism: “Thus we know that where Michelangelo painted his Last Judgment, there was already a fresco by Perugino. Likewise, Raphael scraped away from the Vatican’s Raphael Rooms other frescoes by Sodoma and even some by his own mentor, Perugino.” In Boccioni, Altri inediti, 50; Marinetti eventually recycled the Raphael/Sodoma argument in his manifesto “Dopo il teatro sintetico e il teatro a sorpresa noi inventiamo il teatro antipsicologico astratto di puri elementi e il teatro tattile,” reprinted in Teoria e invenzione futurista, 173. Yet in describing the “gesticolante agonia di colori,” Marinetti (or Russolo, if Marinetti was citing him verbatim) was directly quoting from—and directly aligning himself with—Bernard Berenson’s famous attack on The Last Supper. In The Study and Criticism of Italian Art, Berenson writes of the (now much studied and praised) fresco’s position of the characters: “What a pack of vehement, gesticulating, noisy foreigners they are, with faces far from pleasant, some positively criminal, some conspirators, and others having no business there”; quoted in Marani, “Leonardo, i moti e le passioni.”

  17. Russolo, Al di là della materia, 272.

  18. Besides Carrà and Piatti, Romolo Romani, another friend of Russolo from the prefuturist years, also admired Leonardo’s work. See the section on the young Romani in Giorgio Nicodemi, Romolo Romani (Como: Cairoli, 1967).

  19. For Russolo’s references to Vasari, see Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 306; see also Russolo, Al di là della materia, 210.

  20. Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de piv eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scvltori italiani, ed. Corrado Ricci (Milan: Bestelti e Tumminelli, 1927), 8:17; henceforth Vasari, Le vite). See also the chapter “The Mystery of the Skull Lyre” in Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 39–72.

  21. Russolo went to Paris, London (in 1914), and Spain (in 1932). In Spain we know from Al di là della materia that he visited the Prado museum; see Russolo, Al di là della materia, 184. On the same page Russolo claims to have seen all of Titian’s paintings that were to be found in European museums. This voracious, almost compulsive collecting of knowledge is characteristic of him (another example is his sudden interest in dairy art that Russolo’s wife described in Zanovello, Luigi Russolo, 19). Russolo may well have hunted all over Europe for manuscripts of Leonardo that contained musical instruments.

  22. The full title of the 1923–30 facsimile is Codice Arundel: I manoscritti e i disegni di Leonardo da Vinci pubblicati dalla Reale Commissione Vinciana, vol. 1, Il codice Arundel 263 del Museo Britannico, Riproduzione fototipica con trascrizione diplomatica e critica, part 1 [–4] (Rome: 1923 [–1930]). Arundel 263 famously contains preparatory studies for The Last Supper. Given Russolo’s special association with this work, we assume that Russolo was aware of the existence of this codex by 1904. See Pedretti in Leonardo da Vinci: Il Codice Arundel 263 nella British Library, Edizione in facsimile nel riordinamento cronologico dei suoi fascicoli, ed. Carlo Pedretti, with transcription from the manuscript and critical notes by Carlo Vecce (Florence: Giunti, 1998), 14.

  23. Russolo, Al di là della materia, 270.

  24. Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 347. Though Baudelaire’s name is not mentioned in this essay, the subject matter and especially the two keywords in Russolo’s title, eterno and transitorio, were surely lifted from Baudelaire’s well-known essay “Le peintre de la vie moderne” (“The Painter of Modern Life”), published in installments in Le Figaro on November 26, November 28, and December 3, 1863; see Charles Baudelaire, Selected Writings, (London: Penguin, 1972), 402–3. Writings in which Russolo make a passing reference to Leonardo are the reviews “La mostra di Achille Funi,” La Testa di Ferro, November 7, 1920; “L’arte è creazione, non è plagio,” L’Impero, April 7, 1926; “Il Novecento italiano,” La Borsa, March 4, 1926; and “Conferenza sull’architettura tenuta da Russolo alla Galleria Borromini di Como nel 1944,” reprinted in Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 306; as well as three letters to Edgar Varèse of January 14, February 8, and March 22, 1934 (see Lista, Luigi Russolo e la musica futurista, 145–48).

  25. Quoted in Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 314.

  26. From Russolo’s “L’eterno e il transitorio dell’arte,” quoted in Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 315. This position on The Last Supper differs significantly from the one Russolo apparently held many years earlier (see Marinetti, La grande Milano, 118–19). The version we have of Russolo’s lecture (see note 16 above) does not mention Leonardo’s Last Supper. This may be yet another instance of Marinetti’s creative paraphrasing or manipulating facts to advance his modernist agenda. He “edited” most of the writings of his futurist associates in his activities as a publisher. Gino Severini was one of the few to object to Marinetti’s interpolations in his writings; Calvesi claims that this explains why Severini’s manifesto of 1913, “Le analogie plastiche del dinamismo,” was not published; see Calvesi, Fusione, 78.

  27. It is striking that this thought, written almost thirty years after the 1909 manifesto, more gently rearticulates—and fully illuminates—one of the manifesto’s central and most provocative enterprises: destroying the museums. Since the passing of time would destroy art, we cannot cling to its exterior materiality, and neither should we worship it. It is the spiritual power of the artworks that we have to absorb, and embrace, if even to direct it, as the 1909 manifesto states, toward the creation of new art.

  28. Leonardo, Codex Atlanticus, folio 71r, translated by Richter and quoted in Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 224.

  29. Leonardo’s notion of time as continuous is found in Arundel 263; see Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 221. See also Leonardo’s definition of time and psychological time in Codex Atlanticus, which seems to anticipate Bergson (and therefore Boccioni).

  30. Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 228.

  31. On the term inattuale, see chapter 5.


  32. Buzzi, introduction to Zanovello, Luigi Russolo, 11–12. The reference to the lyre betrays Buzzi’s familiarity with Vasari. In Buzzi’s poem “Inno alla poesia nuova” of 1912, he presents both “the Machine” and the Russolo-inspired sound produced by it, as “our days’ Lyre.” By associating the noise of an engine to the lyre, that is, the bard’s accompanying instrument, Buzzi implies that the noise of machines must inspire today’s poetry as the lyre inspired classical poetry. See the anthology I poeti futuristi, ed. Filippo T. Marinetti (Milan: Edizioni Futuriste di “Poesia,” 1912), 107. Buzzi’s poem, in evoking the music of the spheres, is imbued with occult suggestions (Viazzi has appropriately written of its “cosmic-esoteric dimension”; see Viazzi, ed., “I poeti del futurismo,” 114). Russolo read Vasari, as he quotes Vasari’s Le vite in Al di là della materia, 210.

  33. Quoted in Zanovello, Luigi Russolo, 13–14.

  34. Zanovello, Luigi Russolo, 95. This poem is rich in allusions and influences, from D’Annunzio to Mallarmé. These references, so synesthetically rich, are a perfect homage to Russolo. Furthermore, the poem presents a landscape of great beauty: lush and green, but with a variety of shadows and light, in the visual realm; the mention of the intonarumori offers the aural, and the garden with perfume of laurel provides the olfactory.

  35. The overview of the intonarumori I offer here is the result of a research grant from Performa 09, the Biennial of Performance Arts in New York City, which commissioned me to direct a new reconstruction project of the intonarumori. With full support from RoseLee Goldberg and Esa Nickle from Performa, Frank Smigel from SFMOMA, and Johannes Goebel and Micah Silver from EMPAC, I was able to reconstruct for the first time the earliest intonarumori orchestra of sixteen instruments that Russolo unveiled on August 11, 1913, at the Casa Rossa. Much was learned during the reconstruction process, which was executed under my supervision by the luthier Keith Cary and with help from Dna Hoover. In an earlier stage of construction, help came from EMPAC’s Bill Bergman and Jenni Wilga, and in a later stage from Nora Cary and Ellen Fullman. I am indebted to the scholarship of Barclay Brown and Hugh Davies, and to Pietro Verardo’s intonarumori reconstruction—a partial one, but the first ever attempted—that I was able to visit while being interviewed by the BBC in summer 2009.