Luigi Russolo, Futurist

by Luciano Chessa

  Pratella seemed to understand quite well the spiritual implications of Russolo’s work and their distance from impressionism. He wrote: “As one very well sees, the intonarumori produce practically every sense of objective reality; they move from an objective reality, immediately distancing themselves from it, and come to constitute a new abstract reality—an expressive, abstract element of a state of mind.”8

  Futurists criticized impressionism for favoring the empirical at the expense of the spiritual, and this rejection overlapped with their rejection of materialism. Russolo, like other futurists, was violently opposed to materialism as a philosophical hypothesis and modus vivendi, so much so that this critical position gradually became the center of his interests. His substantial book Al di là della materia: Alla ricerca del vero, Alla ricerca del bello, Alla ricerca del bene (Beyond matter: In search of Truth, in search of Beauty, in search of Good) of 1938, legible even in its title as a treatise on spiritual education, includes a severe critique of materialism as the negative tendency, caused by a lack of spirituality, that dominates society.

  Since the true scope of every action is the comprehension of the higher essential unity that resides beyond the material world, material and spiritual levels (the spiritual here intended being the state in which the essential unity of the world is manifest) exist on two parallel planes; their relations are strictly regulated by the theory of correspondences, which dictates their hierarchies and provides the initiated with the keys to the higher level. Russolo incorporated the theory of correspondences—one of the most important beliefs in the occultist tradition—in his personal blend of platonic inspiration filtered through neoplatonism, Ficinian hermeticism, and the thinking of Swedenborg, Bergson, and Steiner.

  In this blend of beliefs, man becomes, by means of his incessant spiritual search, the arbiter of the relationship between the material and the spiritual. Carrà formulated this point of view—yet another manifestation of the individualistic aspect of the early (Marinettian) futurist movement and one of futurism’s most embarrassing debts to the aesthetics of romanticism—as the concept of “individuation,” where the plastic world is “rendered through the individuality of the artist.” Carrá believed that individuation was “the only creative force of aesthetic truths”9 and that, by harnessing the force of intuition (a term dear to Bergson), the futurist artist could “identify himself with the center of things.”10

  Man’s central position (in the equation that opposes the material and the spiritual) was at the foundation of Steiner’s anthroposophy. The futurist artist is an initiate or, as Boccioni wrote, a clairvoyant: he has the key to that spiritual level where things appear as they really are, in their essential unity. The artist, who is able to see the multiplicity of reality can reproduce (re-create) in his work the spiritual essence implicit in all things.

  Besant’s and Leadbeater’s theory of thought-forms was central to Russolo’s formulation of his aesthetics; thoughts produce forms and project or irradiate them into the surrounding aura, thereby enveloping the body. The forms are visible to subjects in a particular state of trance, and they can be indirectly perceived by all whose auras are sufficiently near to the aura of the emitting individual.

  As Leadbeater and Besant claim in Thought-forms—and Leadbetter further expands in his The Hidden Side of Things—sounds and noises, too, create forms visible to sensitive individuals.11 From this perspective music can be considered a sort of “spiritual painting.” The point is important, not only because it provides a way to understand Russolo’s eclecticism and his easy, synesthetic transition from painting to music but also because the theory of sound (and noise) forms leads naturally to a reinterpretation of the art of noises as a spiritual operation. Such reinterpretation unveils the occult function of the intonarumori—machines that intone noises and above all permit enharmonic fluctuations, thus enabling the spiritualization and sanctification of brute matter (noise) that is being carried out by the energy of the artist-initiate.

  SPIRITUALIZING MATTER

  The futurist believed that the mind of the artist-initiate cannot create out of nothing; rather, in line with the alchemical doctrine, the mind must work through a process of transformation. Infusing his own spirit into bare matter, the artist transforms it via the (mechanical) instruments that allow him to give it life: the artist thus creates the only real art, that of a higher spiritual reality. Whether it be a series of noises or a colored canvas mounted on wooden boards, the end of the creative process brings not merely an inanimate material object, a faded copy of the world, but a sort of re-creation, through an artificious mechanism, of life in vitro.

  The poetics of the futurists, Russolo included, do not aim for “creation” in a metaphorical sense—that is, creation of material and inanimate art objects, simple metaphors of creation, by means of a process of conceptualization whereby something is realized through effort and passion—but rather real, true, spiritual creation, creation of life. Once the image is created, the possessed artist can make it materialize (as if it were a phenomenon of condensation), and into it, as suggested by the theory of thought-forms, he can instill spirit.12

  When the creation of the work of art becomes the creation of spiritual reality, such poetics come frighteningly near to black magic. The consequent sin of hubris—from having appropriated the faculty of creating life, which is the prerogative of the divine alone—is inevitable. The heretical belief that the artist was privileged to have been conceded the power to create and instill life (admittedly through artifice, the science of art), circulated widely within the futurist movement. Most futurists, let us not forget, were violently anticlerical and engaged in extreme polemics against Catholicism.

  The influence of the occult arts imbued Russolo’s poetics with meaning that went beyond a mere postromantic theory of the creative process. Traces of this poetics can be perceived in other futurist writings. One example among many is Balla’s and Depero’s 1915 manifesto “La ricostruzione futurista dell’universo,” which succinctly summarized the futurist position on the creation of works of art.

  Although alchemical and theosophical notions led Balla and Depero to a poetics of creation that use a deductive process of objective analysis (it is thus antithetical to the poetics of Boccioni and Russolo), they cited Boccioni’s conquests of plastic dynamism and Russolo’s art of noises as fundamental guiding experiences. Theorizing a work of art that reconstructs life through artifice and science, they wrote in this 1915 manifesto:

  The lyric valuation of the universe, by means of the Words in Freedom of Marinetti and the Art of Noises of Russolo, fuses itself with plastic dynamism to give a dynamic, simultaneous, plastic, noisy expression of the universal vibration.

  [. . .] We will give skeleton and flesh to the invisible, the impalpable, the imponderable, the imperceptible. We will find the abstract equivalents of all the forms and of all the elements of the universe, then we will combine them together, according to the caprices of our inspiration, to form plastic complexes that we will put in motion.13

  Throughout his life, Russolo in his writings espoused the concept of art as the result of a process (carried out by an inspired artist) of transformation of vile matter (be it color or sound) into spiritual reality and life. In an essay published in Lacerba on November 1, 1913, and republished in The Art of Noises in 1916, Russolo claims: “We finally have the noise-sound material capable of assuming without any exception all the forms that the futurist artist may wish and know how to give them.”14

  The theme of the artist-demiurge molding matter is expanded in the final chapter of The Art of Noises. The passage below is the most complete (and the most misunderstood) statement of Russolo’s poetics. In a messianic tone, Russolo exhorted his readers:

  Make first the senses vibrate, and you will also make vibrate the brain! Make the senses vibrate with the unexpected, the mysterious, the unknown, and you will truly move the soul, intensely and profoundly!

  Here lies the fated and
absolute necessity of drawing the timbres of sounds directly from the timbres of the noises of life. Here—sole salvation in the deep misery of orchestral timbres—lays the unbounded richness of the timbres of noises.

  But it is necessary that these noise timbres become abstract matter for works of art to be shaped from them. As they come to us from [everyday] life, in fact, noises immediately remind us of life itself, making us think of the [triviality of the] objects that produce the noises that we are hearing. This reminder of life has the character of an impressionistic and fragmentary episode of life itself. And as I conceive it, the Art of Noises would certainly not limit itself to an impressionistic and fragmentary reproduction of the noises of life.

  The ear cannot relate to the confused and fragmentary noises of everyday life. It is necessary that the ear will perceive these noises as dominated, enslaved, mastered completely, conquered, and constrained to become elements of art. (This is the continual battle of the artist against matter.)

  Noise must become a prime element to mold into the work of art. That is, it has to lose its character of accidentality and become an element sufficiently abstract to achieve the necessary transformation of any natural prime element of art into every abstract element of art.

  And so, although the resemblance of timbre with natural noises may be attained by my noise instruments even to the point of deceiving the ear, the noise, as soon as it is heard to change in pitch, loses its episodic, solely imitative character. Noise therefore loses entirely its character of result and effect, which is bound to the causes that produced it (motive energy, percussion, friction through speed, bumping, etc.), causes resulting from and inherent in the purpose of the machine or object that produces the noise.

  And since we dominate the noise—which we freed, as described from the necessities that produce it—by deliberately transforming its pitch, intensity, and rhythm, we hear it suddenly become autonomous and malleable matter, ready to be molded by the will of the artist, who transforms it into an element of emotion and, finally, a work of art.15

  This passage, where Russolo synthesized his creative ambitions, is important, for it contributes to the process of revealing the occult function of the intonarumori.

  The concept that requires noises to become “abstract matter” is related to Marinetti’s treatment of onomatopoeia in his “Lo splendore geometrico e meccanico e la sensibilità numerica” (The geometric and mechanical splendor and the numerical sensitivity) of 1914, which Russolo cites in the chapter “The Noises of Language” in The Art of Noises. In point 8c of his manifesto, for example, Marinetti writes about what he called “abstract onomatopoeia, the noisy and unconscious expression of the most complex and mysterious motions of our sensitivity. (Example: in my poem DUNE, the abstract onomatopoeia ran ran ran corresponds to no noise of nature or machine but expresses a state of mind).”16

  A tendency toward abstraction, and the consequent negation of materiality, can easily lead to occult persuasions. Marinetti’s treatment of abstraction, which Russolo eventually incorporated into his sound aesthetics, reflects, as did the aesthetics of Kandinsky and Ginna, occult interests. The connection between Marinetti and Ginna is not incidental: the principle of the onomatopoeic psychic chord that Marinetti espoused in point 8d of his manifesto echoes themes in Ginna’s 1909 painting Accordo cromatico and the theories of the image chord set out in Ginna’s and Corra’s Arte dell’avvenire. Marinetti knew both sources.

  Similar themes are developed and coherently reinforced in Russolo’s late writings. In Al di là della materia Russolo declared that the artist must point “beyond technique toward the higher spiritual necessities.”17 He goes on to address sound and noise, which, though both are abstract elements and thus perceived as spiritual, can also be seen as matter awaiting to be spiritualized by the artist:

  Music apparently has no need of a universal ideality, nor of any kind of spiritual ideality, because thanks to its fundamentally abstract language, neither narrative nor speculative, it escapes the contingencies of the collective idealities of each work. But sound, let us not forget, is the matter of this abstract language, as the word is for poetry and color is for painting. Let us not confuse the abstraction of this matter with the spirituality to which all matter from which the arts are molded must take us. Music must make the same effort as the plastic arts: music must spiritualize its matter, as the plastic arts must spiritualize theirs. And whereas the plastic arts, when they do not succeed in this, remain either solely descriptive or banally and impressionistically documentary and fragmentary, music, when it does not succeed in this, remains abstractly amorphous. Music must move away from an abstract indefinite, which is the characteristic of its language, and of the matter that it uses, to arrive at a spiritual infinite.

  Russolo’s approach, as he formulated it here, had not changed much since the time he conceived the art of noises. In the eulogy he held in 1944, on the occasion of Marinetti’s funeral, Russolo returned to the theme of the artist-demiurge struggling to spiritualize the materiality of sound, word, and color. Recalling Marinetti’s role as guide to the futurist movement, Russolo declared: “I must now say what a marvelous, untiring guiding spirit you were for all of us when discouraged by that greater, deeper, and more difficult struggle: the struggle the artist experiences for the realization of the work of art, that is, the intimate struggle to subjugate matter (be it word, sound, color, clay, or marble) and thereby express the creations of the spirit.”18

  Russolo repeatedly stressed art’s need for a spiritual life of its own, as conferred upon it by the artist in the act of wresting it away from materiality. In his Conferenza sull’architettura, which he presented at the Galleria Borromini di Como in 1944, he wrote that “the harmony of forms finds correspondence in our spirit, which is equivalent with saying that harmony spiritualizes it. In this process of spiritualization of forms, [our spirit] is the genesis of works of art, it is the reason for their indestructible vitality.”19 In the catalog of his one-man show for the same venue in 1945, Russolo wrote that technique is the “indispensable means for bending matter to the expressions of the spirit.”20

  Russolo returned to the concept yet again in his last writing, L’eterno e il transitorio nell’arte of 1947, the text for a lecture written a few weeks before his death:

  When the work of art has overcome the phenomenology of the moment represented by taste, expression, the whole of things or of beings, or the actions of those beings, it is no longer a moment, contingency, event determined by chance, or transitory or variable effectuality; when all this has become essence, understood as the eternity of being absorbed or transformed into eternity and a condition that has overcome space and overcome time, then the work of art has truly overcome the human, its transitoriness, and the ephemeral that is the human characteristic, linked and deeply embedded in the necessities of life itself; it has overcome living and life to the state of “being” as power, cause, origin-demiurge—a being that for itself has no cause or necessity; then the work of art has arrived at the eternal and delivers us, raises us up, sends us into ecstasy. Then the work of art truly is.

  Then the work of art is pure spirit and lives outside even of its own material body, eternally young even though its body, which is matter, is aged, blackened, cracked as is happening to Leonardo’s Last Supper, which became in its pictorial materiality a nebulous and evanescent breath without having lost anything of its supreme spiritual life.21

  SPIRITS

  To spiritualize matter, the artist-initiate can invoke the spirits fluctuating in the astral plane he has reached; he can then communicate with them and obtain (as if under their dictation, in a state of trance) the energy for the spiritualizing process.

  Russolo believed that these spirits may have been those of the dead awaiting reincarnation. On October 26 and 27 of 1912, Rudolf Steiner gave two lectures in Milan, parts 1 and 2 of “Investigations into Life between Death and Rebirth.”22 Russolo may well have attended these lectures. S
teiner illustrated the various phases of the soul’s journey after the death of the body in preparation for its reincarnation. In the first phase, the period immediately after the separation from the dying body (a subject Russolo had portrayed earlier in his Uomo che muore), the spirits of the dead fluctuate in areas not far from the places they inhabited in life. At this moment it is important that they maintain communication with loved ones who still live. This is the only phase in which the living can enter into contact with the souls of the dead. In theosophical thought, the protocol for such communication is strictly and scientifically regulated.23 In part 2 of his lecture, Steiner declared:

  Only when those who remain on earth seek us with their souls can a link with them be created. [. . .] A person who has died before us and whom we completely forget, finds it difficult to reach us here in earthly life. The love, the constant sympathy we feel for the dead, creates a path on which a connection with earthly life is established. During the early stages after death those who have passed on can live with us only out of this connection. It is surprising to what extent the cult of the commemoration of the dead is confirmed in its deeper significance by occultism. Those who have passed on can reach us most easily if they can find thoughts and feelings directed towards them from the earth.24

  Immediately after death, the souls live “in an objective world that can be compared to that of the initiate,” because after death they can no longer perceive things through the senses but only “by the way of visions.”25 Initiates who are on this same plane can communicate with them and in turn be influenced by them. Subsequently, during the various phases of getting away from and re-approaching the sensory world that guide them to rebirth, souls increasingly distance themselves from the earth (in terms of both physical and spiritual distance) until communication becomes impossible. In theosophical thought, communication between spirits occurs by way of waves that travel through the ether, like a radio wave, and the signal weakens as the distance between emitter and receiver increases.