Luigi Russolo, Futurist
Page 36
36. Giovanni Lista, in his Luigi Russolo e la musica futurista (Milan: Mudima, 2009), 183, disagreed with Maffina and claimed that he was the first scholar to have, in 1975, published Russolo’s patents. This may be the case; however, Lista misdated the first patent (rather than January 11, 1914, the actual date was March 30, 1914) and gave the wrong classification number for the October 8, 1921, patent (rather than 420171, vol. 895, the actual number is Reg. Gen. N. 204171, Reg. Att. N. 207, vol. 598). As these are similarly wrong in Maffina, it is likely that both Maffina and Lista relied on the same secondhand source (perhaps Zanovello’s files) instead of the primary source.
37. This photo was first published in Maffina’s catalog for the Venice Biennale Exhibit of October–November 1977, Luigi Russolo: L’arte dei rumori, 1913–1931, 55.
38. The sibilatore, the most complex of Russolo’s intonarumori (and the one with the most extensive pitch range), had two registers plus an additional stop, the same scrosciatore (hisser) that was also employed in the gorgogliatore (gurgler).
39. Brown, introduction to Russolo, The Art of Noises, 5.
40. Including Lombardi’s essay in MART, 117.
41. Zanovello, Luigi Russolo, 77.
42. Maffina’s 1977 catalog reproduced a picture of this model with a caption indicating that Russolo reconstructed this prototype in Cerro di Laveno in 1945 according to the 1931 patent.
43. Russolo’s draft for the 1931 patent is quoted in Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 225. The Fondo Russolo of MART [Rus 2.3.16] has preserved an unpublished manuscript with five detailed sets of computations, which may be the calculations to determine the diameter and thickness of coils and other parameters required to build the five-keys prototype. Further research is needed to validate this hypothesis.
44. Compare Russolo’s ronzatore with the mechanical kettledrum sketched in Leonardo’s Codex Atlanticus or the “enharmonic” pot drum sketched in Arundel 263 (both reproduced in Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 169, 181–82). The main difference seems to be that Russolo used an electric motor instead of a crank.
45. Quoted in Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 224–25.
46. Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 155, 164.
47. Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 153 (fig. 17).
48. However, the desire to improve on the organ was widespread. Cahill was motivated by this wish when he developed his telharmonium; see Busoni, “Abbozzo di una nuova estetica della musica,” in Lo sguardo lieto: Tutti gli scritti sulla musica e le arti, ed. Fedele d’Amico (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1977) 68n18.
49. The first two phases happened quite quickly, as documented in Codex Atlanticus, folio 218r.
50. One of the few successful instruments to use longitudinal vibration is Ellen Fullman’s long string instrument, created at the beginning of the 1980s, and tuned in just intonation. Fullman designed her instrument with strings more than one hundred feet long. She played by walking a platform placed under the strings forward and back along their length, sublimating with the gracefulness of her motion what might seem the logistical problem of impractical dimensions.
51. On differences between the intonarumori and the hurdy-gurdy, see for instance Lombardi, Il suono veloce, 39.
52. Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 181–83, 179.
53. Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 185.
54. Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 192; CA folio 397rb is reproduced on p. 194.
55. Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 192.
56. In the explanatory text of Codex Atlanticus, folio 397rb, Leonardo explained that the glissando feature is achieved by moving “la mano su e giu, come alla tromba torta, e massime nel zufolo a” (the hand up and down [along the slits] just as with the tromba torta and even more so in the zufolo a); Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 192. These tromba torta and zufolo can be, respectively, an early example of a slide trumpet and of a flute à coulisse.
57. Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 192. He was here likely thinking in terms of natural harmonics.
58. Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 204–23.
59. Both notions are in fact based on the assumption that pitch space is continuous, and that every selection of pitches (i.e., every scale) extracted from this continuity is therefore arbitrary. Leonardo also discussed continuity in Codex Arundel 263; see Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 221.
60. Leonardo, Trattato 31C; see Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 215–16 (translation by Winternitz).
61. Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 216.
62. Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 221.
63. For a brief mention of this division of art in space and art in time, see Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 208. Pitch-space is a continuous space: the pitch is a continuous quantity because an interval between two pitches is infinitely divisible.
64. Winternitz was not convinced by Leonardo’s argument; see Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 208–9.
65. Winternitz noted that Leonardo thought of intervals as the relationships between notes of different pitch; Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 206, 206n4). On the difference in status between Poetry and Music, see Leonardo, Trattato 21; Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 205–6.
66. Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 211.
67. This opposition was unknown in Leonardo’s day; see Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 205n3.
68. Franco Ballardini, Swedenborg e il falegname: Poetica, teoria e filosofia della musica in Arnold Schönberg (Modena: Mucchi Editore, 1988).
69. The current difference between melodic and harmonic intervals is a difference in time and not pertinent in this discussion. However, the relationships among pitches are always considered to be harmonic relationships, even when the sounds occurs one after another, because the comparison between subsequent notes that are different in pitch is measured within the field of harmony, here understood—repetita juvant—as the science of intervallic proportions and not as the science of verticalities.
70. Leonardo, in Trattato 30 and 32, acknowledged for music the existence of harmony of proportions in time between consecutive sections of a piece, but he did not acknowledge the same for the poetry. This conclusion did not satisfy Winternitz. On these aspects, see Leonardo, Trattato 21 and 23, and Winternitz’s comments on them in Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 205–9.
71. Even when only melodic, music is never exclusively about time, for melody always implies harmony; this is true of musical practices even after Leonardo’s time.
72. Leonardo, in Codex Arundel 263, writes directly about time as a continuous quantity (see Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 221); Leonardo’s understanding of pitch-space continuity, though not openly stated, can be evinced from his discussion.
73. Leonardo discusses sound that fades away, for example with the plucked strings of a lute, in Trattato 29 (see Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 210–11). Leonardo considered this sound volatility, or fading, to be music’s main problem (see Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 208); this may explain why most of Leonardo’s instruments are capable of sustaining sound.
74. Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 216.
75. In fact, it is in proving that time is a continuous quantity that Leonardo claims that continuous quantities are infinitely divisible. This passage is in Codex Arundel 263 and reprinted in Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 221.
76. All reprinted by Maffina.
77. Compare Leonardo’s definition of music as capable of making invisible things visible (figuratione [. . .] delle cose invisibili) in Trattato 32 (reprinted in Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 217) with the quotation from Leonardo that defines painting as poetry made visible (pittura è una poesia che si vede), in Russolo, Al di là della
materia, 270.
78. Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 104, 105, 183.
79. Translated in Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 104.
80. Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 120.
81. Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 122.
82. Translated in Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 105.
83. Quoted in Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 151. On Russolo’s analysis of the battlefield, see Marinetti, “Quinte e scene della campagna del battaglione lombardo volontari ciclisti sul lago di Garda e sull’altissimo: La presa di Dosso Casina,” part 2, Gazzetta dello sport (February 7, 1916); reprinted in Enrico Crispolti, “Zang Tumb Tuum I futuristi vanno alla guerra. Giochi, burle e travestimenti dei futuristi del battaglione ciclisti,” Bolaffiarte 79 (May 1978): 15.
84. Quoted and translated in Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 105.
85. See Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 183.
86. See Carlo Pedretti, “ ‘Non mi fuggir, donzella . . . ,’ Leonardo regista teatrale del Poliziano,” in Arte lombarda, n.s. 128 (2000): 7–15. I am indebted to Professor Pedretti for this information.
87. Quoted in Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 177–78.
88. These instruments are all rather noisy. The name fischiatore already seems a potential name for an intonarumori.
89. Piedigrotta’s performance left yet another mark: in 1915 Giacomo Balla designed, built, and decorated an instrument called the ciac-ciac, which was based on the triccaballacche; this instrument is now preserved in the Museo degli Strumenti Musicali in Rome.
90. On Leonardo and clockworks, see Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 137; Zanovello has documented that watch- and clock-making was the Russolos’ family business. Leonardo’s interest in automata is well known, and is even, famously mentioned by Vasari. As we have seen, the dream of “creation” developed in a different way in Russolo’s mind, because of his interest in theosophy. On Leonardo and “creation,” see the passage from BLAST quoted in chapter 10.
CHAPTER 10
1. Marinetti, “Fondazione e manifesto del futurismo,” in I manifesti del futurismo, 7–8.
2. Boccioni, “Fondamento.”
3. For more information on Leonardo as prefuturist, see Henderson, Duchamp in Context.
4. This advertising campaign offered an easy target for ferocious futurist irony. Marinetti reused the phrase “ ‘GIOCONDA’ ACQUA PURGATIVA” in his manifesto on “Teatro di varietà.”
5. Carrà, “La pittura dei suoni, rumori e odori” in I manifesti del futurismo, 153.
6. Quoted in Marani, “Leonardo, i moti e le passioni,” 29–38.
7. Calvesi, Futurismo, 10. Leonardo’s spiritual side can also be observed in his research on hydraulics, for he considered water to be a creature always in motion, gifted with a spiritual virtue and power.
8. Quoted in Fagiolo dell’Arco, Compenetrazioni, 13.
9. Quoted in Fagiolo dell’Arco, Omaggio a Balla (Rome: Bulzoni, 1967), 62.
10. Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 104n9.
11. Reproductions of Vortice are included in Calvesi, Fusione, 267. Leonardo’s influence on Balla’s flying swallows was also noted in Fagiolo dell’Arco, “Giacomo Balla verso il futurismo,” 23.
12. The connection between Leonardo and Marey is debated in Lista, Futurisme, 63.
13. Marinetti, La grande Milano, 173.
14. Marinetti, La grande Milano, 33; italics in original.
15. Una sensibilità italiana nata in Egitto, in Marinetti, La grande Milano, 256. Particularly insightful is the aim of “synthesizing simultaneously the universe.”
16. Wyndham Lewis, “Futurism, Magic and Life,” BLAST 1 (June 20, 1914): 132 (facsimile repr., Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1997); boldface and capitals follow the original. This text was published about a week before the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
17. For an introduction to the Movimento Fiorentino, see the chapter “New Directions: The Florentine Movement” in Martin, Futurist Art and Theory, 19–27.
18. Martin, Futurist Art and Theory, 20.
19. Martin, Futurist Art and Theory, 20.
20. On the brawl of 1911, see Martin, Futurist Art and Theory, 81. With Lacerba, Soffici and Papini finally separated from Giuseppe Prezzolini and La Voce. Papini and Prezzolini had founded the periodical La Voce in 1908 after Prezzolini dreamed of a gramophone through which a mysterious voice suggested, like an oracle, that he do so; see Martin, Futurist Art and Theory, 26. La Voce was dominated by Prezzolini’s personality. The periodical’s main concerns were sociology and politics, and little space was dedicated to the arts. This led to the split between Papini and Prezzolini. Even though Papini never considered himself a futurist and, in fact, maintained a slightly ambivalent position (he claimed in Lacerba that he could offer a more objective critique of futurism precisely because he had never actually been a futurist), he was sufficiently aligned with futurist aesthetics to transform Lacerba into the official organ of the futurist movement for a few years. As he himself claimed, this was a time in which he shared most of the futurists’ ideas, values, objectives, and cultural references.
21. The header of Il Leonardo was a symbolically elaborate engraving designed by Adolfo De Carolis.
22. See Sandra Migliore, Tra Hermes e Prometeo: Il mito di Leonardo nel Decadentismo Europeo (Florence: Olschki, 1994).
23. Cited in Marani, “Leonardo, i moti e le passioni.” 29–38. Marani explains that the history of the worship of this work had begun in 1498, with the first enthusiastic comments by Luca Pacioli.
24. The term fari is already found in Papini. In 1906 he published his first philosophical book, Il crepuscolo dei filosofi, in which he attacked the work of sei fari (six beacons) of contemporary culture (Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Comte, Spencer, and Nietzsche), and declared the entire discipline of philosophy dead, favoring instead what he called “vital irrationalism.” But in the mid-1930s Russolo’s iconoclastic past was far behind him and he gives the expression fari a positive spin, likely modeling the section on i fari dell’umanità on Édouard Schuré’s The Great Initiates, a book that we know Russolo had read (see Zanovello, Luigi Russolo, 77).
25. Russolo, Al di là della materia, 269–70.
26. Lista, “Russolo, peinture et bruitisme,” 140.
27. Russolo, Al di là della materia, 246–47.
28. Russolo, Al di là della materia, 210. It is particularly meaningful that in the following paragraph, on the same page, Russolo again mentions Leonardo and quotes him.
29. Giovanni Testori, “Reliquiae fugientes,” cited in Marani, “Leonardo, i moti e le passioni.”
30. Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 27.
31. Zanovello, Luigi Russolo, 83–84.
32. According to an unsigned article in the Pall Mall Gazette of November 18, 1913, Russolo gave the general public the opportunity to examine the insides of the intonarumori on only one occasion, the press concert of August 11, 1913; at all other times he kept the boxes carefully occulted. See Brown, introduction to Russolo, The Art of Noises, 5.
CHAPTER 11
1. See Steiner’s previously mentioned lecture “Investigations into Life between Death and Rebirth,” in Steiner, Life between Death and Rebirth, part 2I, 18–30.
2. Calvesi mentioned the music produced in séances, and its popularity, in his study on the automatic writing techniques of the futurists and surrealists; Calvesi, “L’écriture médiumnique,” 47. Calvesi focused his article on literature, and he does not discuss futurist music, let alone link Russolo’s art of noises to the conjuring of spirits.
3. Buzzi, “Russolo ferito [January 1918],” in Archivi del futurismo, 1:378.
4. The expression “skeletal sorcerer” is one of Marinetti’s “simultaneous portraits” of Russolo; Marinetti, La grande Milano, 106.
5. See Leadbeater, The Hidden Side of Things,
198.
6. Besant and Leadbeater, Thought-forms, 27; these forms were actually meant to offer models for the painter.
7. See Leadbeater, The Hidden Side of Things, 88, 121.
8. See Guerra sola igiene del mondo, in Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione futurista, 299–300. For “mediumistic materialization,” see Boccioni, Scritti, 203.
9. For “exteriorization of sensitivity,” see Russolo, Al di là della materia, 102. Russolo’s wording is likely derived by the 1895 Albert de Rochas’s book Extériorisation de la sensibilité, also quoted by Cesare Lombroso.
10. Cahiers d’art 1 (1950): 85–86; italics in the original. This translation has been revised with the help of Pierina Demelas and Karen Vanhercke. The original reads:
Héros aiguisé par l’angoisse
Tournoyante de chaque heure, toi, cherche
L’acoustique ivresse la plus nouvelle
Dans le heurt des bruits: toi, regarde
Avec les yeux du basilic mental
Le décor magnifique des ouragans,
Et écoute, écoute
Les Golfes mystiques des tonnerres et des pluies:
Et descends, avec de lestes pupilles d’ambre jaune,
Aux orchestres des usines et des chantiers: