Luigi Russolo, Futurist

by Luciano Chessa

  It is necessary to keep in mind that Enharmonicism, as a general system and as manifest in the intonarumori, has as its characteristic the possibility not only of fractionalizing into a given number of pitches the interval of a tone, but also of rendering precisely the becoming of a tone by another, the shading (so to speak) that one tone makes, to arrive at the tone immediately above or immediately below.

  This dynamic passage is not logically divisible, just as the shading of color from light to dark is indivisible.43 Stages or steps can be stabilized, that is, by quarters, eighths, etc. of a tone, but in doing so the pitch’s dynamic continuity will be broken.

  Dynamic continuity: here is the essence of Enharmonicism; here is that which differentiates it from music of the diatonic-chromatic system which one could instead call Intermittent dynamism or perhaps more exactly Fragmentary dynamism.

  Now, if a series of points has served very well to mark the stages and the steps of the sound in the diatonic system, what could represent the continuity of this sound if not the line?44

  Although Russolo, in describing the features of his enharmonic notation, mentioned a division of the tone into fourths or at the most eighths, it was through the glissando from one pitch to the next that the enharmonic properties could be fully showcased.45 This gliding motion, a blur of sound he opposed to pitch stillness and arbitrary pitch divisions, was Russolo’s musical equivalent for the dynamic, continuous blur we can see in his painting, or in Boccioni’s forma unica; fittingly, he notated it in the score with a continuous line. This line represents the glissando, that is, the dynamic continuity of sound in the pitch-space, whereas enharmony is the musical system that allow the continuity, the space in which this continuity can exist and operate. By way of their constructive morphology, the intonarumori celebrate enharmony, sliding from one pitch to the next, in a glissando that reveals the continuity of pitch space beyond all manufactured, structural restrictions, and surely with no regard for equal temperament.46

  Glissando is so prevalent a feature of twentieth-century music that Douglas Kahn has referred to it, endearingly, as “the modernist glissando.”47 The similarity between the sliding enharmonic properties of the intonarumori and the glissando in some orchestral works by Ravel is especially striking. In his orchestration of Gnomus from Mussorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition (1922), Ravel added glissandi in the strings (gestures not present in the original piano version) to imitate the sinister noise of doors creaking.

  A reference to Russolo’s intonarumori is even more evident in the score of Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges. Ravel had the opportunity to hear the intonarumori on June 17, 1921, on the occasion of the first of three concerts of the intonarumori with orchestra at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées in Paris; according to a Parisian music critic, Ravel examined the instruments attentively at the end of the concert and declared that he thought of including them in one of his scores.48

  In a letter from Russolo to Pratella of August 19, 1921, Russolo says about his gracidatori (croakers): “Above all, they are the instruments that enraptured Ravel, who as you know will put the intonarumori in his new compositions.”49 Russolo mentions no title, but it seems highly probable that one of the scores in question was that of L’enfant, which Ravel had just begun to sketch and that absorbed him from 1920 until 1924. In the final version of this score, Ravel used two unorthodox instruments: the lutheal, a sort of tack piano, and the flute à coulisse, which according to Hugh Davies made its debut in the world of orchestral textures in this work.50

  In an article dedicated to the lutheal, Davies maintains that Ravel originally considered including one of Russolo’s intonarumori, the gracidatore, as the third nonorthodox orchestral instrument in L’enfant.51 The gracidatore would have suited that score, which not only uses noises of mechanical objects and the cries of animals and insects but also includes a procession of rainettes (tree frogs). However, Ravel changed his mind. Davies thought that this was a loss. If Ravel had included the gracidatore in the score of L’enfant, this intonarumori at least would have escaped the fate of the others and there would still be hope of finding a surviving example in some opera house basement. As it was, all were destroyed, probably during World War II.

  Ravel may have decided not to include intonarumori in the score of L’enfant, but he reproduced not just their timbre but also their enharmonic articulation using the traditional orchestra. This may be the reason why the score of L’enfant features frequent glissandi. Thus though physically absent, the intonarumori animate Ravel’s score like ghosts, and they may well be partially or indirectly responsible for its unusual timbre and character.

  Given Ravel’s supreme ability as an orchestrator, his sound reconstructions may be considered a more faithful picture of the intonarumori than any gramophonic recording of the time. The only extant gramophone recording of the intonarumori is not a reliable document because of its primitive recording technique. Fortunately, some sections of Ravel’s score can be considered to be “recordings sui generis” of the intonarumori: in their own way, they now offer the best chance to hear what these instruments would have sounded like.52

  CHAPTER 8

  The Spirali di Rumori

  SPIRALS

  On November 1, 1913, Lacerba published Russolo’s article “Conquista totale dell’enarmonismo mediante gli intonarumori futuristi” (Total conquest of enharmonism through the futurist intonarumori). In it Russolo defines his first two works, Risveglio di Capitale and Convegno d’automobili e d’aeroplani, as reti (networks) of noises. A few months later, on March 1, 1914, Lacerba published his “Grafia enarmonica per gl’intonarumori futuristi” (Enharmonic notation for the futurist intonarumori), which includes the two famous pages taken from Risveglio di una città (notice the change in title); here, too, Russolo still called his composition a rete di rumori (network of noises) (fig. 20).

  The term réseaux, the French equivalent of reti, had made its first appearance in a September 1913 promotional article by Russolo that Marinetti had distributed to the French press. In this article, Russolo referred to the four compositions premiered in the preview concert for the press in Milan on August 11, 1913, as quatre premiers réseaux des bruits (four first networks of noises).1

  This use of the term derives from Marinetti. In his technical manifesto of futurist literature of May 11, 1912, Marinetti defined as “narrow networks” a series of images and analogies in which each is “condensed, collected into an essential word” and placed one after the other “to envelop and grasp all that is most fleeting and elusive in matter.” Marinetti here describes objects and the sum of sensations—the confused simultaneous whole of associations—that their motion produces in us.2

  FIGURE 20. Luigi Russolo, musical example from Risveglio di una città (1913), from the article “Grafia enarmonica per gl’intonarumori futuristi” Lacerba (March 1, 1914).

  Networks was an early designation. In his 1916 The Art of Noises, Russolo refers to his pieces as spirali di rumori (spirals of noises), without explaining why he had changed his terminology from reti to spirali.3 In truth, the designation spirali di rumori for Russolo’s compositions had appeared in 1913: on a poster designed for the Galleria Sprovieri in Rome, advertising that on December 27, 1913, “Russolo will perform the spiral Zum Zum Taratrà.”4

  Both terms—reti and spirali—refer to the chaotic and dynamic simultaneity of sonic events in Russolo’s compositions and thus imply a form of concentration of chaos into unity. But though they were used synonymously, the term spiral is more charged with occult and synesthetic allusions than network, and it immediately transports the hearer into the sinuous, enharmonic line of La musica. The term spiral was also rich with alchemical suggestions, as confirmed by its appearance in the novel L’ellisse e la spirale (1915) by Paolo Buzzi.5 Gino Severini even evoked it to portray Russolo’s manners, describing them as “subtle, almost spiralic.”6

  From a topological point of view, the spiral has two trajectories: in o
ne direction the line extends toward the infinite, in the other the infinite concentrates to a point.7 This first motion is centrifugal and seems to refer to the “exploded” shape of the world in its complex variety (think of a Big Bang); the second, centripetal, symbolizes a process of creation carried out with a concentration of energy from external forces into a single point.

  Nomen Omen: the spiralic sonic concentration achieved by an orchestra of intonarumori can be considered another level in the experiment of creating life through the intonarumori, a spiritual re-creation of the world first as simultaneous and multiform chaos, and then as substantial cosmological unity.8 During the execution of the spirali di rumori, an entire orchestra of intonarumori aimed at realizing the aesthetic/ontological ideals of simultaneity and dynamism to which futurism aspired.

  The concept of “simultaneity”—first introduced as simultaneity of states of mind by the futurist painters in the preface to the catalogue for the exhibitions of 1912—designated the overcoming of classical perspective through a multiplicity of perspectives overlapped in an optical-mnemonic synthesis “of what one remembers and what one sees.”9 The catalog states:

  Perspective as it is understood by the majority of painters has for us the same value that they attribute to a project of engineering.

  The simultaneity of states of mind in the work of art: here is the intoxicating aim of our art.

  Let us explain ourselves further through examples. When we paint a person on a balcony seen from within, we do not limit the scene to what the square of the window permits to be seen, but we force ourselves to give the complex of plastic sensations felt by the painter-standing-on-the-balcony: sunny swarm of the street, double line of houses which stretch to right and left, flowering balconies, etc., which signifies simultaneity of environment, and therefore dislocation and dismemberment of objects, scattering and fusion of details, freed from ordinary logic and independent one from the other.

  To make the spectator live at the center of the painting (to go with the expression of our manifesto) it is necessary that the painting be the synthesis of that which one remembers and that which one sees.

  Instead of the small excerpt of life, artificially confined as if within the flat scenery of a theater, it is for us necessary to render the unseen which agitates and lives beyond the thicknesses: that unseen which we have at our right, at left and behind us.10

  The futurists derived the concept of simultaneity from a web of closely linked influences. Scientific influences came from the theories of the fourth dimension and quantum physics, which speculated that parallel realities could exist simultaneously. A second collection of influences was Bergsonian and derived from the theories of psychic time and inner duration, according to which distant events and instants of time can overlap in human brain processes.11

  A third group of influences, linked to the other two, was occultist. Among the earliest examples of “occult simultaneity” is Russolo’s painting Ricordi di una notte, exhibited in the shows of 1912 together with Boccioni’s well-known example of simultaneity, his 1911 Visioni simultanee. Russolo’s Ricordi di una notte is a pictorial transcription of a metapsychic séance, in which life is re-created on the canvas as a hallucinatory simultaneity of images surfacing in the mind of a “clairvoyant painter.” The simultaneity shown reveals the essence of the universe first as monstrous, disordered chaos, then as synthesis carried out by the subject, who comprehends and reconciles the chaos in a process the futurists, as we know, also called congenital complementarism.12

  In an effort to reproduce reality, cubist painting had already realized a simultaneous superimposition of planes and perspectives from different angles. But cubist simultaneity, with its cold, analytical, objective, static dissection and dismemberment of reality, had nothing in common with futurist simultaneity, which they defined as simultaneity of states of mind and understood as an optical-mnemonic synthesis. Futurist painting responded to the analytic coldness of cubism by incorporating into the spatial equation of the super-imposition of planes the dimension of Bergson’s psychological time, the time of memory and sensation: “It is about uniting with the concept of space, to which cubism limits itself, the concept of time. It is about giving a plastic construction in which the two concepts of space and time balance in turn to resolve into emotion.”13

  Boccioni considered this the way to “approach the concept of a fourth dimension,” which was “not a measured and finite [i.e., cubist] fourth dimension [. . .], but a continuous projection of forces and forms that are intuited in their infinite unfolding. In fact, the single dynamic form [. . .] is but the suggestion of a form of motion that appears only for an instant before then losing itself in the infinite succession of its variety.”14 By adding to the category of experience the dimension of remembrance, memory, futurist painting acquired a dynamic element that cubist painting—in Boccioni’s words a “frozen fabrication of images,” simultaneous in space but not in time and therefore essentially static—did not have.15 Complementing simultaneity with the point of view of the perceiving subject imbued futurist simultaneity with that dynamism, which for them constituted the overcoming of cubism.

  Time brings simultaneity back to its cause: plastic dynamism. As Boccioni wrote, simultaneity was only “the effect of that great cause that is universal dynamism.”16 Dynamism puts in motion the static representation of simultaneous perspectives, adding the emotive and therefore dynamic element of the subject who grasps them. To illustrate this concept, apropos Carrà’s painting Il ciclista, Boccioni wrote: “It is the sensation of the race and not the racer that we want to render.”17 The world is therefore re-created by reproducing the synthesis of states of mind that it provokes. The subject is placed at the center of the painting, it is at the center of these movements, bombarded by complementary events, arbiter of a chaos that is the world, but that also very possibly he himself generated in the act of perception.18

  The system appears to be symmetrical; the subject generates the complementary multiplicity, and the subject reconciles it. Reality acquires meaning only when there is a subject to gather its dynamic manifestations (expressed in both the relative and the absolute motion of objects), to gather its unity, to sort the chaos into a cosmos.19 Time allows the subject—the possessed-artist—to reorder and comprehend reality in its dynamic and continuous unfolding.

  Though the term dynamism is already found in the technical manifesto La pittura futurista (1910), which Boccioni coauthored, it became so central to Boccioni’s personal evolution that he dedicated an entire chapter of his book to the concept and even featured the word in the subtitle (Dinamismo plastico). Lucidly, as always, Boccioni opened the chapter by defining the term:

  Dynamism is the simultaneous occurrence of the characteristic motion particular to the object (absolute motion) and the transformations that the object suffers in its changes of position in relation to the mobile or immobile environment (relative motion).

  Therefore, it is not true that to have dynamism, all we need is a breakdown of the forms of an object. Certainly, breakdown and deformation have in themselves the value of motion inasmuch as they break the continuity of the line, they break the silhouette-like rhythm, and augment the collisions and the indications, the possibilities, the directions of the forms. Still, this is not an example of futurist Plastic Dynamism, and the trajectory, the swinging of a pendulum, the change of position from point A to point B are not examples of it, either.

  Dynamism is the lyric conception of forms interpreted in the infinite manifesting of their relativity between absolute motion and relative motion, between environment and object, until they shape the apparition of a whole: environment + object. It is the creation of a new form, which renders the relativity between weight and expansion. Between motion of rotation and motion of revolution. In short, it is life itself grasped in the form that life creates in its infinite succession.20

  Balla would not have been in complete agreement with this definition of plastic dy
namism. In fact, the concept of plastic dynamism split the group of futurist painters into two divergent poetic camps, which Calvesi has summarized as being represented by the emblematic counterpoint of two opposite (but, I would add, absolutely complementary) figures—Boccioni and Balla.21 Calvesi described Boccioni’s poetics as a “subjective synthesis” in contrast to the “objective analysis of Balla.”22 Both positions were inspired by occult study and practices, but whereas synthesis turned to action, analysis turned toward contemplation.

  Boccioni believed that optical-mnemonic synthesis, which is carried out by the subject through plastic dynamism and simultaneity of states of mind (subjective synthesis), had the task of re-creating the world by achieving the essential unity of the whole in the forma unica (single form).23 The principle of unity, a constant in Boccioni’s Pittura e scultura futuriste, was already present in his Roman lecture of May 1911.24

  The re-creation of unity was first achieved by a chaotic and irrational mobilization of heterogeneous elements, as if under the influence of a philosophy of Marinettian-Nietzschean action. Boccioni’s painting style is in fact a chaotic, whirling, dynamic re-creation of reality, exhibited in such works of monumental, frescolike ambition as Città che sale (1910–11), Stati d’animo I: Gli addii (1911), and La risata (1911). Together with a central theme, which was typically made clear in the title of the work and consisted of a portrayal of visual stimuli, Boccioni’s paintings also portrayed his remembrances of earlier visual and emotive suggestions. These remembrances were sometimes clearly connected to the central theme by association, but sometimes the connection was freeform, stream-of-consciousness, chaotic in appearance but actually organized by the subjectivity of the possessed artist. Boccioni believed that the chaos of the world, dynamic both in time and space, can be reordered by an artist-initiate into a single form, a unity that substitutes itself for universal unity, obtained with audacious fusion.25