Luigi Russolo, Futurist

by Luciano Chessa

  These two approaches to producing art are polar—and complementary—opposites. Moreover, when applied to Russolo’s poetics, this binary critical paradigm will reveal an artist who, while showing some common elements with Balla’s objective analysis, was more closely connected with the subjective synthesis of Boccioni.

  CHAPTER 3

  Spotlight on Russolo

  A NEW READING

  At its core, the art of noises was for Luigi Russolo a process of conjuring the spirits, a process he divided into two parallel moments: one in which noise became spiritualized, the other in which spirits materialized. Russolo first painted this process in 1911, and he began to put it into practice a year later.

  Some scholars have mentioned the relationship between Russolo and the occult arts in his early years as a painter (either when analyzing key artworks, or in passing), and the occult is certainly part of all discussions of his late creative phase—for several years after 1930, the occult arts were his only interest. But the role the occult arts played between 1913 and 1930, during the years he focused on music as theoretician, composer, builder of musical instruments, conductor, and improviser, has so far been ignored.

  Given Russolo’s occult interests during both the early and late periods, this critical vacuum seems curious. It becomes even more curious if one looks at the cultural environment in which he took part during his formative and futurist years and the early post—World War I period. Surrounded by companions with similar occult interests, it seems strange that Russolo would not have participated (or would have stopped participating) in the debate that preoccupied those he associated with daily.

  It seems highly improbable that the Russolo who was a close friend of Romolo Romani, who assiduously frequented the society of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Paolo Buzzi, and Carlo Carrà, who was probably familiar with the early writings of Arnaldo Ginna and Bruno Corra, and who was fraternally attached to Umberto Boccioni, would have developed a musical aesthetics completely shielded from the occult interests of his futurist friends.1 And, in fact, the opposite was true: on many occasions Russolo promoted the occult arts within the futurist movement.

  Occultist theories circulated in the environment that Russolo frequented in his futurist and musical years, which constitutes some proof of his interest in the subject. I am convinced, however, that, proof of the connection must be found in his works. My aim, therefore, is to uncover points of contact between Russolo and the occult not merely in texts written by other futurists but also in Russolo’s own musical research and writings; this connection, once uncovered, could be a key to reinterpreting both Russolo’s work as a builder of musical instrument and his futurist aesthetics.

  Many of the usual sources for this kind of investigation—printed scores, manuscripts, drafts, and musical instruments—are no longer extant. Other materials therefore become all the more precious, including iconological sources (paintings, photographs, films), letters, newspaper articles and reviews, contemporary literary sources that cite Russolo (factual, fictionalized, and poetic), and written evidence from friends and relatives.

  Russolo’s activity during his association with futurism has been studied principally within musicology, a discipline that, when dealing with the twentieth century, is often spoiled by a great exuberance for sources. That may be why, in the case of Russolo, since the preferred primary sources are largely missing, musicologists have not yet reconstructed a complete picture of his activities. It seems as if Russolo scholars have been reluctant to adopt critical instruments used to comprehend and reconstruct musical repertoires more distant in time, as in the field of medieval studies. In Russolo research, information often comes from a detail of a painting, or a novel or poem; such information should be regarded with caution, but it should be considered.

  If one investigates Russolo’s artistic work from this angle, the occultist aspect can be observed in all of his works, beginning with his early artworks and continuing through his futurist phase and, as has been recognized, from the 1930s onward. Russolo was interested in the occult all of his life: this interest gives continuity, unity, and coherence to his figure. Thus, the occult is a fine thread unifying all of his works, starting in the years when he espoused symbolist aesthetics and quite likely continuing throughout his futurist years and beyond.

  Throughout this book I have resisted the temptation to apply Russolo’s later formulations to interpretation of his early works, yet I have been surprised by the consistency of his ideas. Naturally, Russolo’s thought processes evolved, but differences in his beliefs are those not of kind but only of degree.

  Both Zanovello and Maffina have mentioned Russolo’s period of intense theosophical and occultist studies, starting in the 1930s (these studies included the practice of magnetism, yoga, techniques of doubling the body, and materialization), as an unexpected, and unpredictable, change of interest. Like Giovanni Lista, they were surprised at an aesthetic maneuver they considered incomprehensible and possibly even regressive.2 The notion of sudden regression is still found in all of the general biographical references on Russolo.3 They neglect the occultist sources that would have been available to Russolo long before 1931—the periodical Ultra from 1907 on, and the work of the young Romani, Ginna (by 1910), and Boccioni (by 1911).4

  Notable is Celant’s seminal article “Futurismo esoterico,” in which the author maintains that “there is no trace of Carrà’s and Russolo’s attention to the esoteric,” save for Russolo’s interest in “the penetration of the ultrasensitive realm in La musica.”5 But Carrà, himself interested in the occult, had quite a different opinion of Russolo’s “attention to the esoteric.” In his review of Russolo’s late treatise Al di là della materia, published in the Ambrosiano issue of July 28, 1938, he wrote that “the book appears open to every kind of reading. Nor could it be otherwise for those who, like we, have known for many years of Luigi Russolo’s fervid passion for all that which is a spiritual problem.”6

  The critical silence on Russolo’s interest in occult practices, which the artist deliberately cultivated throughout his “progressive”—futurist—phase, came about because scholars deemed these preoccupations aesthetically regressive. They were thought to constitute Russolo’s abdication from the avant-garde, and modernist critics therefore condemned them as a volte-face.7 A similar fate befell the other exponents of the futurist group, whose occult interests were until recently neglected by many critics.8

  A TINKERING LINEAGE: THE RUSSOLOS’ CUTLERY NOISES

  Luigi Russolo’s father, Domenico (1847–1907), must have been a singular character. As we learn from Maria Zanovello, Domenico’s eccentric personality probably left a mark on the equally eccentric soul of his son. To his profession of watch- and clockmaker, inherited from his father, Domenico Russolo early on added the study of music, and he instilled this passion in his children as well.

  Zanovello introduces information about Domenico’s earliest musical training by means of the following anecdote. Following a series of lessons from an elderly Portogruaran musician, Domenico decided to study the pianoforte. He received as a gift an old piano, which he placed by his father’s watch shop, facing the town’s main square. Only the frame of the piano was intact, so that “the old keyboard produced such sounds that his friends kept teasing him, asking, ‘Menegheto, are you moving the cutlery drawer?’ ”9

  Zanovello can have learned these things only from her husband, who probably enjoyed telling the story. But this fleeting reference to his father’s “art of noises” should not be overlooked by the attentive historian, especially as cutlery noises would appear in Russolo’s music. In his preface to Zanovello’s biography, Russolo’s friend Paolo Buzzi recalled the famous concert of 1914 at the Teatro dal Verme, at which Russolo’s three spirali di rumori were performed for the Milanese public. About the second piece in the concert’s program, Si pranza sulla terrazza del Kursaal, Buzzi remarked on the “effects of a terrace of a large restaurant with echoes of a small orchestra int
erspersed with the sound of waiters’ footsteps and noises of plates and of cutlery.”10

  Domenico Russolo studied music intensely and soon became the town organist, responsible for regularly tuning and playing the handsome mechanical action organ of the cathedral of Portogruaro. To investigate, if briefly, the instrument’s type and resources will prove useful. The cathedral of Portogruaro now unfortunately hosts a dubious electronic pipe organ, that was forced into the somber sixteenth-century organ loft designed by Pomponio Amalteo, a pupil of Pordenone. The electronic organ replaces a previous organ constructed by Beniamino Zanin in 1911, which the Zanins expanded in 1942 by reusing material from an earlier organ of the Venetian school. The instrument that Domenico Russolo played and tuned was almost certainly a nineteenth-century Venetian organ. The sonoral characteristics that the young Russolo heard would have been those typical of Venetian organs constructed by the Callido or Nacchini families of organ builders.

  Although not endowed with the rich timbral resources that the organ builders of other northern Italian areas could provide (for example, the birdsong [Rosignuoli] or bell-like [Campanelli] organ stops of the Bernasconi or Tamburini organs), this type of organ could display sophisticated acoustic and mechanical tricks. These included such effects as the characteristically Venetian regal stops called Tromboncini and Violoncello (similar to the sound of the Regale) and, above all, the Rollo (drum-roll), a sort of rumble produced by two very deep pipes, tuned almost to the unison and controlled by a pedal that, by means of the two frequencies sounding simultaneously, produces very fast beats and gives a surprisingly accurate illusion of the roll of timpani.11

  Domenico Russolo eventually became director of the Philharmonic School of Portogruaro and entered on a fertile compositional period. The Russolos then moved to the near town of Latisana, where Domenico took the job of maintaining the town clocks. In Latisana, Domenico assumed direction of the Philharmonic School and the Schola Cantorum, opened a photographic laboratory, and occupied himself with the tuning of organs and pianos.

  All of Domenico Russolo’s professions—watch- and clockmaker, organist, piano and organ tuner, and later photographer—required considerable mechanical competence, and they were undoubtedly an important influence on his son, Luigi. A passion for levers, cogwheels, and sophisticated clockwork mechanisms, together with acquaintance with the mechanical principles of keyboard instruments such as the organ (justly considered the most complex machine of antiquity), were fertile seeds in Luigi’s development.

  Luigi Russolo’s interest in organ building can be seen in the earliest models of his rumorarmonio (noise harmonium), the instrument that Russolo built in the 1920s, which reproduces and controls the same timbres as the intonarumori through an organlike keyboard mechanism.12 Russolo’s passion for organs in 1928 led him to propose a modification of organ pipes (and wind instruments) with which he sought to reduce the instruments’ production costs.13

  Domenico Russolo taught his children music and succeeded in preparing Russolo’s two brothers, Giovanni (born in 1874) and Antonio (1877–1943), for the entrance exam to the Conservatory of Milan. They passed the exam brilliantly, and whereas one graduated with degrees in violin, organ, and viola, the other took degrees in piano and organ. Luigi took a different path. He started studying piano but passed quickly on to the violin, and then as quickly abandoned that instrument when he became interested in painting.

  While studying music, Russolo completed his secondary education at the Seminary of Portogruaro, an institution that gave him a solid, if orthodoxly Catholic, spiritual education. As his writings reveal, his interest in all that is spirit and its emanation was never to diminish: those years of seminary training may explain the Christian mysticism of Russolo’s later years, a leaning that in fact prefigures his later interest in Steiner’s anthroposophy, found in Al di là della materia. Indeed, Zanovello, referring to the last spiritual period of Russolo’s intellectual activity, considers the Seminary of Portogruaro to have been “the origin of the religious-Christian substratum of this artist’s soul.”14

  But Russolo did not choose ordination. In 1901, his seminary training completed, he rejoined his family, who had moved to Milan so that his brothers could attend the conservatory, and, once there, found himself increasingly drawn toward visual arts.

  DETECTING THREADS

  Mention of the relationship between Russolo and the occult prior to 1930 can be found in books of art criticism, but only when authors attempt to contextualize some of his early works as a painter and printmaker. With the single exception of Gasparotto’s contributions in the MART catalog, these references appear only sporadically and often in the context of a general discussion. Ester Coen, for instance, comparing Russolo to Boccioni, emphasizes the preferential use of color to suggest an atmosphere of “impalpable, magical manifestations.”15 Calvesi compares Russolo to Balla and mentions fleetingly, without developing the claim or giving it precise chronological coordinates, the interests common to both men toward “theosophy, anarchy, freemasonry, and humanitarian socialism,” to which Calvesi also adds sympathy for those theories of Nietzsche and patriotism that ended up being common to the entire futurist group.16

  Lista has advanced the hypothesis that Russolo began to take an interest in occultism in 1910–11, but pointed to his intellectual independence from Boccioni. He wrote: “It is possible that his research into metapsychics and Eastern doctrines dates back to these years [1910–11], although it would be difficult to maintain whether these studies were an autonomous interest of his own or a common direction of research for the futurist group, still little studied [. . .]. The second hypothesis seems the more probable.”17

  Jean-Marc Vivenza confirmed the hypothesis of an early occultist interest when he commented on Russolo’s large canvas of 1911–12, La musica (fig. 6), which he felt “reveals a strong interest in metapsychics and especially in occultism, an interest that would become, some years later, his only intellectual preoccupation.”18 Like Lista, Vivenza does not develop the point, nor does he analyze the painting.

  FIGURE 6. Luigi Russolo, La musica (1911–12). Estorick Collection, London, UK / The Bridgeman Art Library.

  Germano Celant also related La musica to Russolo’s interest in occultism, but he is among those who consider this interest to have been a pallid reflection of Boccioni’s theories, absorbed almost by osmosis through “having lived in the same Milanese environment.”19 Celant believed that La musica attests to Russolo’s interest in “the penetration of the ultrasensitive realm;” in this painting “musical ultrasensitivity is recalled, on the canvas, by the ‘traces’ of the pianist’s face, residual images spread and dispersed in an undulatory and sinuous turbine of blue, red, and yellow bands; La musica reproduces, in a metaphysical light that can be found also in the Vinti, traces produced by the pianist (the residual images converge toward the focal center constituted by the subject) in a particular state of mind.”

  According to the art historian Marianne Martin, the many-armed pianist in this painting represents Siva Nataraja, the “creator and lord of the cosmic dance in the Hindu pantheon”: an element that could further prove Russolo’s early interest in Eastern philosophies, which were a main source of theosophy.20 Martin is the only scholar to recognize the conceptual originality of Russolo’s painting and its independence from the cubist influence so clearly seen in the other painters of the first futurist nucleus (above all, Boccioni and Carrà, but also Severini). Martin sketches Russolo as a “sensitive and mystical temperament,” and she hints at his interest in synesthesia, attributing it to his symbolist background but never linking his synesthetic interest to that in the occult arts.21

  Martin noted, moreover, that it may have been Russolo’s two explicitly synesthetic paintings (Profumo of 1910 and La musica of 1911) that inspired Boccioni in his Roman lecture of May 1911 to theorize “paintings [as] whirling musical compositions of enormous colored gases”: something that should have signaled the future developm
ent of painting in the direction of dematerialization (or, even better, of spiritualization).22 If this were true, Profumo and La musica would constitute a further step toward the dematerialization—moving from sense to sense, and vibration to vibration—that Russolo’s research aspired to enact. In interrupting his pictorial activity to take up musical research, then interrupting his musical research to concentrate on metaphysics, and finally returning, with eyes profoundly changed, to painting, Russolo was motivated throughout by his occult interests.

  In an article by Mario Verdone, published in the catalog of the exhibition Okkultismus und Avantgarde, Russolo’s name is mentioned first in an incomplete list of futurists interested in the occult arts (the list further included Benedetta, Giuseppe Steiner, Thayaht, etc.).23 Russolo’s name does not, however, reappear in the article. In the same catalog, an essay by Lista titled Futurismus und Okkultismus refers to Russolo on two occasions, recording that some of his first engravings (Trionfo della morte and Tentazione) adopt themes of mystical, visionary, and demonic symbolism. Lista also affirmed that the powerful and shocking Autoritratto con teschi (1908) could have been inspired by practices of clairvoyance using a black mirror. As the subject of this painting is similar to that of the late painting Lo specchio della verità of 1944, this idea advances, albeit briefly, the hypothesis of a continuity between the occultist themes of Russolo’s first and last periods.24