Luigi Russolo, Futurist

by Luciano Chessa

  WHICH MUSIC?

  The “flexible blue ribbon,” the undulating band, is the only image in the painting that can be considered a sound-form; it follows the principles illustrated in the sound plates included in Thought-forms.33 Thus La musica perfectly exemplifies futurism’s interest in synesthesia as it connects with the theory of correspondence between different senses derived from the study of vibrations—vibrations either of waves in the ether, of sound waves, or of different types of electromagnetic waves (radio, light, X-ray). In this sense Russolo’s work can be placed alongside the investigation of waves that Romani pursued in his La campana and La goccia che cade nell’acqua.

  Russolo studied the theory of waves attentively, perhaps more so than the other futurists, and he was with all certainty convinced of the spiritual correspondence between sound and electromagnetic waves. This explains the evolution of Russolo’s research, from the study of light and of X-rays, which he conducted in his laboratory on via Stoppani, to his studies on acoustics. The theory of waves links Russolo’s interests in light, astronomy, occult arts, and acoustics.

  Russolo also devoted time to studying acoustics in depth and focused on how this science connects with the visual arts. Buzzi has maintained that Russolo’s work was always “nourished from essential Pythagorean sources.”34 In L’arte dei rumori, Russolo does in fact cite Pythagoras and Zarlino, the experiments of Helmholtz, and Chladni’s often quoted research on Klang-figuren, the geometrical figures produced on sand by means of bowing on the metal plates that support the sand.35 According to Lista, Russolo may have derived the idea of studying noises from Helmholtz, whom he cited in his 1913 manifesto, and whose ideas he probably read in popularizing publications.36 Chladni’s experiment is cited in Thought-forms and mentioned in the first paragraph of the chapter on sound in Leadbeater’s The Hidden Side of Things.37 Russolo, who most likely knew Leonardo da Vinci’s writings on acoustics, would probably also have known the precedent for Chladni’s experiment: a study by Leonardo on the regular figures produced in dust by the shockwave generated by a hammer striking a dust-covered table.38

  In La musica, sound is visually represented by a blue wave that expands in almost spiral-like fashion. Both the spiral and the undulating line were received positively by the futurists, because, as Carrà indicated in his manifesto “La pittura dei suoni, rumori e odori,” these shapes suggest dynamism. Russolo christened all the works he composed in 1913–14 for concerts of intonarumori spirali di rumori (spirals of noises).39 In combining the visual (spiral) and the auditory (noises), this expression, which is, as we shall soon see, spiritually charged, evokes a synesthetic aspect that points directly to La musica. Buzzi was referring to the synesthesia in La musica when he wrote of the “thin, electric Russolo living in our plane, who painted blue concentric atmospheres of music using elusive flashes of the paintbrush.”40 The flexible, spiral-like continuity of the undulating band reproduces the essence of futurist enarmonia: a slide among the infinite frequencies contained between two different pitches. Wrapping the concept in spiritual robes, Russolo defined it in The Art of Noises as “dynamic continuity” (continuità dinamica).41

  If the undulating band is a transcription of a sound-form, a question remains: what kind of music is Russolo portraying? Presumably the discordant choral sum of the various spiritualistic states of mind produces a variety of complementary expressions in the masks. The music in La musica is therefore first a deafening rumorista chaos, and second a spiral of noises (spirale di rumori) that synthesizes this chaos into the sinuous blue band of the enharmonic (i.e., microtonal) continuity. It is thus already an art of noises, a subjective synthesis of all the complementary acoustic vibrations of the universe superimposed according to the futurist aesthetic of simultaneity and dynamism. Russolo’s ambition here was not simply to imitate or represent nature but to create, that is provide the spiritual conditions and the spiritual fuel for the creation of a new reality through Artifice. Russolo’s musical research had begun.

  CHAPTER 5

  Russolo and Synesthesia

  La nostra sensibilità moltiplicata, dopo essersi conquistata degli occhi futuristi avrà finalmente delle orecchie futuriste.

  —Luigi Russolo, “L’arte dei rumori: Manifesto futurista” (1913)

  An in-depth analysis of La musica is essential to understanding Russolo’s research in the transition years immediately preceding his manifesto of March 11, 1913, “L’arte dei rumori: Manifesto futurista,” and fully to contextualize the art of noises that the manifesto inaugurated. Read in this context, the painting can be seen to set out a clear and well-conceived poetics of music, and to exhibit the profound spiritual notions that in the brief span of a year had brought Russolo to sound.

  The continuity of Russolo’s theoretical journey cannot be sufficiently emphasized: his embarking upon full-time musical investigations should not be read as a sudden change in direction. In fact, the music that Russolo imagined and produced in 1913 was not radically different from the music he had painted in the preceding years.

  But how did his transition to sound take place? To formulate a convincing hypothesis on the nature of Russolo’s activity circa 1912–13, it is useful to sketch his research profile, substantiating it with all the available evidence.

  INGENIOUS INGENUOUSNESS

  The mantra of Russolo’s ingenious ingenuousness, so frequently repeated in the available biographical sketches written about him, implies that his intellectual journey suffered from a lack of technique and, consequently, a lack of continuity, organicness, and deliberation. It suggests that, as engraver and painter, as well as in the field of music, Russolo was a dilettante.

  Unlike Balla or Carrà, he was self-taught. And although, as Maffina has emphasized, Russolo’s early works were prints (principally etchings), which require considerable technical ability, many have said that Russolo was technically the least accomplished of the five signatories of the technical manifesto of futurist painting.1

  The cliché of Russolo’s ingenuousness is rooted in a legitimate critical opinion, according to which his technical weakness (amply compensated for, it is occasionally recognized, by his theoretical strength) both explains his lack of critical success and, at the same time, constituted one of the primary reasons for his aesthetic originality. As Martin has written, “Russolo’s technical innocence may have given him the freedom of a most original interpretation of the revolutionary precepts of the technical manifesto, influencing his colleagues and setting a precedent for the surrealists.”2

  However, this putative ingenuousness is thought to have allowed him to abandon painting, change direction, and undertake full-time musical activity. How could this have happened by chance? Maffina, in describing the sequence of Russolo’s diverse interests in painting, music, and the occult arts, judged that among them “no link can be found.”3 This critical model may be partly defensible, but the portrait of Russolo as an ingenuous dilettante, leaping randomly from one discipline to another, fails to convince because it ignores the coherence of his intellectual development.

  Russolo never earned a conservatory diploma. It must have annoyed the official musician of the futurist movement, Balilla Pratella, when Russolo invaded his own field, notwithstanding that Pratella, in his first manifesto, had railed against the institutional obsolescence of the regii conservatori di musica. Pratella never made his uneasiness explicit, and relations between Pratella and Russolo always appeared to be harmonious. But to avert problems Marinetti decided to carve a separate space for Russolo’s art of noises—which in any case had no connections with Pratella’s futurist music—within the futurist movement.

  Russolo was obviously wary of the fiery Pratella, for at the end of his manifesto he wrote what sounds like a disclaimer: “I am not a musician by profession, and therefore I have neither acoustical predilections, nor works to defend. [. . .] Thus, more temerarious than a professional musician could be, not worried about my apparent incompetence, and convinced that a
udacity has all rights and all possibilities, I was able to intuit the great renewal of music through the Art of Noises.”4

  Critics often cite this passage to confirm the idea of Russolo’s ingenuousness. But I would suggest that he is actually boldly claiming a space for himself: he raises the issue of incompetence, but note his use of the adjective apparent. Russolo had long been interested in music, and through his synesthetic investigations he had probably already devoted intense hours of study to the theory of vibrations, acoustic science, and the theosophical theories about the forms produced by music, all of which is evidenced by La musica.

  Russolo was a futurist who could easily be seen as an outsider within the movement. His eclectic development, and his omnivorous curiosity, kept him from crystallizing his interests into a single means of expression, and this in turn allowed him to explore outside of the conventions of any one discipline. He enjoyed being able to cross, almost unobserved, the fences separating the arts, and he thus succeeded better than the other futurists in applying those ideals of synesthesia that the movement in theory continually promoted.

  Russolo was aware of his particular circumstances, and he knew how to exploit them to promote his artistic growth. Because he was considered the perfect example of the dilettante he never was, his work did not receive the attention it merited during his lifetime. Russolo’s study of the occult arts resulted in a multiplicity of interests, yet that multiplicity was never the byproduct of charlatanism nor the consequence of ingenuousness.

  RUSSOLO’S SYNESTHETIC IDEA

  Russolo’s investigations were driven by the synesthetic ideas of the symbolists and scapigliati: thus they were framed by occultist theories. The perception of all the arts as secretly linked by the theory of vibrations allowed Russolo to move freely between them, without threatening the cardinal ideas of his poetics and consequently having to renounce them.

  Paolo Buzzi acutely defined the different phases that constitute Russolo’s course of inquiry within a sort of “vibrational poetics.” On the subject of the theoretical and philosophical phase of Russolo’s late years, Buzzi wrote: “Indeed, Russolo, while engaged in painting and subsequently music, was already directed toward poetry. And poetry was everything during the last years of his life. A poetry, I would say, that was nourished by the Pythagorean and Aristotelian essentials; the two Hellenic thinkers were in fact well aware of the phenomenon of sound vibrations.”5

  Russolo’s intellectual life, in the course of which he moved easily among different sensory fields, was a realization of the synesthetic credo expressed by the theory of vibrations, which he must have learned from theosophical texts. Having demonstrated his interest in synesthesia in a number of his pictorial works, he undertook his musical investigation as if it were a further stage of spiritual growth—a continuation of his visual research in another field—and he applied to music the same aesthetic principles, derived predominantly from the readings of occultist texts that had earlier driven his visual activity.

  The combination of interests that constituted Russolo’s metaphysical views returns at every creative moment of his life, as well as occasionally surfacing in his writings. Russolo, in harmony with the principles of theosophy, derived his metaphysical ideas from the research methods of experimental science, and he adopted laboratory tests and proofs in his research.6

  I have addressed the apparent contradiction between science and the occult in preceding chapters. Like other intellectuals (many of Symbolist background) who at the beginning of the twentieth century felt that their culture needed radical renewal, Russolo expressed himself extremely polemically, attacking positivism and materialism in all of their forms. These two philosophies were, he felt, responsible for every sort of societal evil—making society increasingly bourgeois, “museumified,” and mummified—and he saw in theosophical teaching the antidote to these evils.

  Russolo dedicated himself with passion and the rigor of a scientist to the investigations in the physics of light, sound, waves, acoustics, magnetism, spiritualism, and metaphysics. His investigations, which he often referred to in his personal documents and which were frequently mentioned in the accounts of others, were in full agreement with theosophical orthodoxy, according to which the only possible model of science is of a science in contact with the spiritual world. Whether this means that Russolo was attracted by metaphysical rationality, or scientific irrationality, is merely a semantic exercise. The fact remains that he never wanted to compromise his work with anything he thought was shallow or materialistic.

  Russolo often engaged in a polemic against materialism, and the spirituality of his approach to research was so crucial to his entire career as to confer upon it a strong poetic unity. In fact, Russolo aspired to an art that would re-create the spiritual side of the world instead of merely imitating it impressionistically. He was after an art that would reflect reality by re-creating its spirit, its essence; an art that would dare to dig into the heart of things and reach their deepest spiritual level.

  ANECDOTES

  A number of primary sources document superficial, perhaps lesser, aspects of Russolo’s personality. Though these aspects may be considered marginal, they are important for me, and not only because of the scarcity of sources. These marginal aspects are valuable for sketching a character endowed with a strong spiritual conception and so immersed in occult and synesthetic practices that typical occultist external traits come to the surface.

  Russolo took an eclectic and encyclopedic-comparativist approach to research, which was pedantic and almost obsessive in its intellectual breadth. In a propagandistic article published in installments in the Gazzetta dello sport and dealing with the deeds of the futurists at the front during World War I, Marinetti reported that, while such futurist soldiers as Boccioni, Piatti, and himself were busy preparing dinners, lighting fires, or taking turns drawing water, Russolo was “studying the noises of the war and drawing from them improvements for his intonarumori.”7

  In his book Le serate futuriste, the futurist poet Francesco Cangiullo portrayed Russolo as a pedant, absorbed in his studies to the point of refusing romantic opportunities: “Russolo had no romantic yearnings: he is a hero, and he pays no attention except exclusively to the intonarumori.”8

  Russolo’s pedantic temperament did not change over the years; in Al di là della materia, he boasted of having seen all the Titians in the collections of all the most important European galleries.9 Zanovello’s biography offers a further example of his tendency toward pursuing subjects obsessively. After an evening with friends who at dinner talked about dairy, a subject of which Russolo knew nothing, he went out the next morning and bought two Hoepli manuals on cheese making.10 The “encyclopedicity” of this approach is no different from that practiced by other occultist figures within futurism (Ginna is the best example), but it also mirrors the encyclopedicity of theosophical texts.

  Zanovello introduces a second, anecdotal manifestation of Russolo’s occult persuasions by relating that he was on several occasions described as a “magician.” In one of these instances, she writes, “Russolo’s studio came to be defined by Marinetti and his companions as the house of the Magician; and that was no hyperbole.”11 Elsewhere Marinetti described Russolo as a “skeletal sorcerer.”12

  A third manifestation of Russolo’s occultist tendencies is his peculiar interest in improvising music, which for Russolo, at least according to how he chose to represent it in La musica, was mediumistic music. By all accounts, Russolo was an inspired improviser. On one occasion he reported to his wife that the audience had responded enthusiastically to his successful improvisation on the noise harmonium in a concert in Paris at the École des Autes Études Sociales of the Sorbonne on June 30, 1927.13

  RUSSOLO THE INATTUALE

  In a volume published posthumously under the title La grande Milano tradizionale e futurista, Marinetti dedicated a brief passage to describing the construction of Russolo’s intonarumori. Maffina considered this piece of evid
ence to be of little interest, criticizing its “generality of references” and noting that its lyricism was “of little use in documentarily rendering the terms of discussion of real events.” Yet once the reader knows how to separate style—certainly not devoid of emphases—from content, the following passage is revealing:14

  I mean by poetry also the temerarious leap of the investigating spirit and it is poetic my friendship with Luigi Russolo, with his thin inattuale face and his ingenuous kindness outside time space

  Ecstatic and vibrating afternoons in his laboratory where I assist in the construction of the intonarumori and the noise harmonium

  Certainly attentive to our dormer window of mechanical chemistry is the sun, setting while the tormented scientist Russolo bends his head over the immeasurable vacuum tube in the night and here are stars forerunners of electric discharges

  In the flooding fluorescence we free ourselves again and outside of ourselves we can contemplate exposed plates and calculate the irradiations

  In descending—to help the sun—the twisting slimy dark stairs, Russolo shouts with his red goatee

  —Glory to your name Roentgen and glory to the futurist rumorismo15

  This passage is rich in elements that deserve comment. First, the term inattuale is the Italian word traditionally used to translate Nietzsche’s unzeitgemäße; indeed, it was possibly coined specifically to translate that German word.16 The term, which can be roughly rendered in English as asynchronous, refers to the subversive position that Nietzsche believed a modern intellectual, a superman, should always occupy within the society of his time, so as to constantly to push the envelope. This asynchronicity is a position of outsiderness that the intellectual carries as a cross, but also as a badge of honor. The inattualità of Russolo, an intellectual and a scientist “outside time space,” rendered him in Marinetti’s eyes the perfect prototype of the futurist artist. Marinetti surely saw Nietzsche’s inattualità as the measure of genius.