Luigi Russolo, Futurist

by Luciano Chessa

  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, as soon as it is heard to change in pitch, the noise loses its episodic, solely imitative character. Noise therefore loses entirely its character of result and of 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 produced 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.14

  Reading the passage metaphorically places Russolo within romantic aesthetics. But the occult meaning of his words is paradoxically revealed when they are read in their literal sense. The intonarumori is an artificious mechanism, or rather, is a medium for spiritualizing matter and, from it, re-creating life. Russolo believed that this spiritualization was possible because when the intonarumori transformed the noise it had produced by rendering it free to exist in what he called enharmonic space. In this way noise loses its materiality: it transforms itself, becomes abstract, and spiritualizes itself.

  ENHARMONY

  In changing pitch, the intonarumori was not limited to the tempered chromatic scale. Since it is necessary, when creating a spiritual reality, to re-create the same properties encountered in nature and life, and to enslave those properties, the intonation of the noise must use the infinite spectrum of pitches available through the “enharmony” we experience in the everyday world. In Russolo’s words: “The infinite ways in which noise is produced in nature, in life, and above all in machines, offer a large field for the study of these different ways of producing noise vibrations; these ways had to be translated so as to make possible variation of tones, semitones, and all the enharmonic passages that other musical instruments do not have but that are so often found in noises of nature and life.”15

  The term enharmony is key to the art of noises, but the reader should be aware that, as used by the futurists, it deviates from the common meaning. As used by them (including Russolo), enharmony designates a microtonal musical system that adopts as its compositional material not only every pitch present in the chromatic scale but also all the microtones generated by dividing the octave (and therefore the tone) into infinite parts.

  Pratella was the first futurist to use the word with this precise meaning in his “La musica futurista: Manifesto tecnico” of March 29, 1911.

  We futurists proclaim that the search for and the realization of the enharmonic mode is a progress and represent the victory of the future over the chromatic atonal mode. Whereas chromaticism only takes advantage of the sounds contained in a scale divided by minor and major [sic] semitones, enharmony, by contemplating also the slightest subdivisions of the tone, not only offers our renewed sensitivity the greatest number of determinable and combinable sounds but also provides us with new and more varied relations of chords and timbres.

  But above all enharmony grants us the natural and instinctive intonation and modulation of the enharmonic intervals, presently unproducible given the affectedness of our tempered system-based scale, which we wish to overcome. We futurists have long loved these enharmonic intervals that we find only in the off-key notes of the orchestra, when the instruments play in different tunings, and in the spontaneous songs of the people, when they are intoned without preoccupations of art.16

  The term enharmony derives from ancient Greek musical theory. In its original meaning, the term enharmonic designated one of the three systems of Greek music—the other two being the diatonic and the chromatic. The enharmonic system was based on a scale obtained from the union of two descending enharmonic tetrachords. Because an enharmonic tetrachord contains a central interval smaller than a semitone, Pratella extended the meaning of enharmonic to designate a musical system in which all of the infinite microtonal pitches could be used.17

  Russolo took up the term in its Pratellian meaning in The Art of Noises. In the chapter “La conquista dell’enarmonismo” (“The Conquest of Enharmony”), he elaborated upon Pratella’s conception, even citing part of his “Manifesto tecnico della musica futurista.”18 Russolo began by attacking the tempered system, the adoption of which, he argued, had not only caused the richer, Greek meaning of the term enharmonic to disappear but also reduced the term exclusively to define the relationship of the homophony between two notes that carry different names (e.g., C-sharp and D-flat). The greatest fault he found in this system was not a matter of terminology, however: “Dividing the octave into only twelve equal fractions and adopting this temperate scale in all of the instruments, has lead to a considerable limitation of the number of available sounds and made strangely artificial the few that are available. [. . .] Temperament, with its homophony, has in a sense torn the notes apart from each other, taking away the most subtle bond that joins them together, i.e., the fractions of a tone smaller than the present—artificial and monotonous—semitone.”19

  Russolo contrasts the equal-temperament system with the enharmonic one he realized in the intonarumori, by means of which he was able finally to “overcome the stupid barriers of the semitone” and which allowed sustained notes to change pitch “by enharmonic gradations” instead of by leap.20 The noises emitted by the intonarumori in fact move from one pitch to the next in glissandi, like sirens, showcasing both their conferred enharmonic properties and the theory upon which these properties are based.21

  ENHARMONY’S SPIRITUAL PROPERTIES

  Natura non facit saltus.

  —Linnaeus, Philosophia botanica

  To explain how noise can become spiritual, that is, explain the connection between enharmony and spirituality, I must introduce the philosophical (and theosophical) notion of continuity. The futurists believed that the term continuity designated the continuity of ether, the matter that composes both bodies and the spaces between bodies, and vibrates in waves of varying intensity. This conception, which theosophy endorsed and popularized, was strongly rooted in early twentieth-century spirituality. As Linda Henderson has observed, the principle of “continuity as embodied in the fiction of the ether, [. . .] although displaced for scientists by Einstein’s special theory of relativity after 1905, continued to play a key role in popular conceptions of reality for several decades.”22 Henderson believes that Boccioni’s sculpture Forme uniche nella continuità dello spazio was a testimony to this conception.

  In their writings, the futurists consistently opposed the positive notion of continuity against the negative one of fragmentation. Boccioni, in Lacerba, wrote that “the distances between one object and another are not empty spaces but continuities of matter with different intensity.”23 The understanding of continuity is an exposition of the theosophical doctrine of vibrations.

  Advocating for a representation of reality as a continuous blur or wave, instead of the still images he deplored in cubist painting, or the overlapping frames he criticized in Bragaglia and Balla, Boccioni considered the principle of continuity to be part of the spiritual mission of futurist art: “We do not subdivide visual images, we search for a shape, or, better, a single form [forma unica] that would substitute the new concept of continuity for the old concept of (sub)division. Just as every subdivision of matter is completely arbitrary, so is every subdivision of motion.” In support of these claims, he concluded with a quote from Bergson: “Every division of matter in independent bodies that have absolutely determined surroundings is an artificial division.”24

  Similarly, Soffici in “Raggio” claimed that “the entire universe therefore is a single whole without interruption of continuity,” and that “the world is not a molecular aggregate but a flux of energy with varied rhythms, from granite to thought.”25 Soffici did not necessarily take this concept from Bergson; in fact, the title adopted for the reprint o
f this article is a direct reference to theosophy.26 After all, the early history of the concept is illustrious and was established long before Bergson’s elaborations.

  A view of the universe filled continuously with matter is presented in book 4 of Aristotle’s Physics, where the philosopher denied the Democritean existence of a void that contains no substance. In Metaphysics (6, 1, 2), Aristotle differentiated between continuous and discontinuous quantities; later, in Logic (5a), he expanded the distinction, explaining that time, space, and geometric line belong to the class of continuous quantities—the class of quantities that have “a common boundary at which their parts join.” Aristotle contrasted time, space, and the geometrical line with Poetry, which he considered a discipline dealing with discontinuous quantities, “for its parts have no common boundary” (Logic 4b32).27

  Leonardo da Vinci derived a hierarchy from Aristotle’s principle of continuous quantities. In Il paragone, a section of his Trattato della pittura with which both Boccioni and Russolo were familiar, Leonardo elaborated on what Aristotle had only implied, stating that continuous quantities are superior to discontinuous ones because they are infinitely divisible.28 The concept of continuous quantities (among these Leonardo included, as Aristotle had done before him, space, time, and the geometric line) refers to the infiniteness—and therefore perfection—of the divine; because of this reference to divine perfection, continuous quantities confer a high metaphysical status to their correlated scientie mentali (i.e., Painting for space and Music for time).

  In this passage from Il paragone, Leonardo explained: “If you [the Musician] say that only the nonmechanical [physical, bodily, material] sciences [liberal arts] are concerned with the mind and that, just as Music and Geometry deal with the proportions of the continuous quantities, and Arithmetic with the proportions of the discontinuous quantities, [so] Painting deals with all the continuous quantities and also with the qualities of the proportions [degrees] of shades and lights and, thanks to perspective, distances as well.”29

  The Leonardo scholar Emanuel Winternitz believed that the continuity of musical flow refers exclusively to the horizontal motion of a melody unfolding in time, moving from one note to the next through the continuum.30 This continuum is infinitely divisible, exactly as the portion of time in between two instants is infinitely divisible. But for Leonardo, Music could not be continuous only in time, because that would not suffice to explain music’s higher status than a discipline such as Poetry, which also unfolds in time. Leonardo believed that thanks to the continuity of Music’s spectrum of pitches, that is, pitch-space, Music was continuous not only in time but also—like Painting—in space; Winternitz did not realize this.31 Whereas Leonardo considered Poetry, although unfolding in time, to be inferior because it lacked a harmonic (polyphonic) dimension (i.e., continuity in pitch space), Painting was for Leonardo continuous in space through perspective, and Music was continuous in the acoustic pitch-space continuum; Leonardo likely derived this comparative ranking from Aristotle. The full exploitation of continuity granted to Painting and Music the power to bombard the viewer or listener with polyphonic, simultaneous harmony, “in uno medesimo tempo” (at the same time).32

  Music is also associated with continuous quantities because it can inhabit pitch space, which, like the space of perspective, is continuous. In the above-cited passage from Trattato 31 C, Leonardo implied the notion of the (infinite) divisibility of a musical interval into infinite pitches. Leonardo was interested in this phenomenon for a long time, and he designed a series of instruments (including many variable-pitch percussion instruments) that could produce infinite pitch divisions. Leonardo’s instruments had features that Russolo would have described as enharmonic, and this may be the reason why Russolo drew on them for his own constructive principles.33

  Winternitz does not know how to place Leonardo’s variable-pitch instruments and thus wonders, for example, about the reason for what he calls the “glissando flute,” one of the projects outlined in Leonardo’s Atlantic Codex. Because Winternitz did not think that this instrument could have had a place in any instrumental group known during Leonardo’s time, he considers it a bizarrerie invented to “amuse the ladies and gentlemen at the court of Lodovico Sforza” and thus an unfortunate example of the “useless researches” Leonardo was occasionally obliged to perform.34 What Winternitz did not consider is that by fully displaying the principle of continuity not only in pitch space but also in time, these instruments (and with them their creator) projected philosophical, metaphysical, spiritual, and occult ambitions.35

  The continuous pitch space or, as it can be called, the pitch-space continuum, is equivalent to the futurists’ enharmonic space. By reconnecting Aristotle, Leonardo, and Bergson with occult and theosophical thought, the enharmonic system—especially if contrasted with the discontinuity of the tempered system—enacts the spiritual idea of continuity.36 Enharmony is a spiritual property: being continuous and therefore infinitely divisible, enharmonic space recalls the infiniteness of divine perfection.

  The principle of continuity with which the intonarumori spiritualized noise was musically realized on two levels (exactly as Leonardo envisioned it four hundred years earlier, which points to the fact that Russolo drew his inspiration from Leonardo’s writings).37 The intonarumori manifest continuity in time because the noise was held, sustained, and therefore continuous; more important, it is continuous in the infinite pitch-space continuum because the “liberated” noise, intoned enharmonically, could inhabit the continuous and infinite space of all microtonal pitches, and in this space occupy any position within the range of the instrument. It is no surprise that Russolo gave the essence of enharmony the Leonardine name dynamic continuity.38

  The metaphysical superiority of continuous quantities depends on their being infinitely divisible, and thus, as we have seen, perfectly divine. Russolo felt that continuous quantities evoke the perfection of every work of the spirit, be it a divine work (natura) or the work of man (vita). Russolo believed that to create a spiritual reality it was necessary not only to reproduce or imitate the noise from nature and life but also, by means of the intonarumori, to infuse the noise with that spiritual property—continuity—that is present in nature and in life. Continuity in time and enharmonic pitch space is a spiritual property because in both it re-creates the perfection of the natural world—broadly understood, the work of man included—and with it, re-creates its spirituality.

  Music created according to a “discontinuous” system such as the tempered system can, in Russolo’s opinion, only offer a superficial portrait of nature. The art of noises, on the other hand, lives in a continuous pitch space and is thus able to avoid superficial, impressionist imitations. When the noise is intoned enharmonically and changes pitch continuously, it is spiritualized and subjugated as the raw material for a compositional process controlled by the spirits conjured by the artist, a process that dominates, transforms, models, and re-creates.

  Like Leonardo’s instruments, the intonarumori was not so much a musical instrument as a philosophical-metaphysical one—an instrument endowed with the entirely cosmological ambition of re-creating the continuous structure of the world.39 Considering that Russolo always took great interest in the science of astronomy, it is not surprising that this cosmological ambition, philosophically promised by the single intonarumori, would correspond with the cosmogonic idea that drove Russolo’s spirali di rumori.

  The intonarumori moved between the literal and the allegorical. Though it may seem hazardous to associate instruments made of humble materials such as twine, chemically treated skins, wood, and even cardboard with lofty philosophical language, this would not have been the first time. The typically Marinettian “simultaneous portrait” of Russolo’s constructing the intonarumori in La grande Milano, for example, synthesizes with lucid juxtapositions the spiritual import of Russolo’s experiment:

  Luigi Russolo inventor of philosophical systems motors artificial skins musical instrumen
ts and first intonarumori

  In his dormer window he amazes me by boiling paste to replace the latex on the wheels40

  Marinetti described the intonarumori as a necessary part of a biomechanical or mechano-philosophical experiment. As a philosophical machine and alchemical experiment in which science and spirituality coexisted in a complex equilibrium, the intonarumori was legitimately positioned within theosophical thought, and it was part of the process of the spiritualization of noise also in its mechanical aspects.

  The intonarumori prototype was patented on January 11, 1914.41 One part of this instrument produced the noise; at this level the excitement of vibrating parts was continuous in time, since it resulted from a wheel put into motion by a crank, which, as in a hurdy-gurdy, could sustain the noise as long as desired.42 Even more important, though, was the part responsible for intoning the noise. Intonation occurred through a string attached to the membrane that produced and amplified the noise; this string was tightened (thereby stretching the membrane) and shortened at will by means of a movable bridge, by a lever that regulated its intonation. Next to the lever was a graduated scale, which, through a pointer linked to the lever, gave the operator the power to control the pitch of the sound at every moment and therefore to intone fourths or even eighths of a tone; the operator himself did not need to be able to recognize the pitch differences. Normally this mechanism could not produce intervals between pitches by leap but by only gliding. Instead of internal subdivision of the intervals between arrival points or stages inherent in the tempered system, Russolo favored enharmony’s essential feature—the glissando between various points of the pitch-space continuum that he called “dynamic continuity.” Using language and examples drawn from Leonardo, Russolo wrote: