Luigi Russolo, Futurist
Page 26
This concise portrait effectively summarizes many of the characteristics discussed in the course of this book—and in much the same order. As in the self-portraits, this image of Russolo is surrounded by an aura (halo, aureole), which spiritualizes and transfigures it. Russolo, a true “skeletal sorcerer,” is gifted with special powers, a form of energy that builds a protective halo around him.4 Buzzi portrays Russolo almost as an antenna, or lightning rod, electrified and galvanized by sparks of the energy he both attracts and returns. His most ambitious painting, La musica, is evoked in Buzzi’s passage through its most indelible traits: the concentric aura around the central figure of the canvas and the enharmonic, ineffable continuity of the blue band, a sinuous sound-form.
In its literal sense, the last phrase of Buzzi’s description quoted above depicts Russolo in the act of developing spiritualistic features while conducting the orchestra of intonarumori. But if one reads the text in its simultaneity, without paying too much attention to its syntactic links and focusing instead on the chain of analogies typical of Words-in-Freedom, one can enter the experience of the intonarumori as a conjuring essence. The gestures Russolo makes in conducting the spirali di rumori are here even compared to those Swedenborg made in invoking his “Spirits.”
Although Buzzi’s description does not address the way the art of noises operates, it unquestionably shows how the art of noises was perceived by Russolo, his closest futurist comrades, and the audience of “initiates” (to quote commendator Amann in Cameroni’s trial) who followed Russolo’s gestures on the podium; as they saw it, Russolo, through the orchestra of intonarumori, invoked and communicated with spirits.
Given the comparisons with Swedenborg, I should explain that he believed that angels communicate with human beings using a language that differs from human language in only one aspect: that angels can express in one minute what men cannot express in half an hour, and with few words they express what would take many pages to describe. It seems as if Swedenborg’s angelic language possessed characteristics uncannily similar to futurist simultaneity and synthesis.
THE CITY AWAKES
The energy from the spirits that the artist-creator gathers through the intonarumori produces both thought-forms and sound-forms, radiating vibrations that influence the aura of all persons within their field of action.5 Besant’s and Leadbeater’s Thought-forms defines “externalized” thought-forms as abstract and reproducing states of mind that can also assume the contours of material objects and bodies.6 According to Leadbeater’s The Hidden Side of Things, these objects or bodies can materialize by drawing around themselves a veil of physical matter, whereupon they can incarnate.7
Boccioni, in referencing such processes, used the expression materializzazione medianica (mediumistic materialization), whereas Marinetti employed the equivalent term esteriorizzazione della volontà (exteriorization of will).8 In Al di là della materia, Russolo adopted the expression esteriorizzazione della sensibilità to describe the process whereby the etheric double materialized. He had been interested in the subject since at least 1910, the year of the Autoritratto (con doppio eterico).9 It follows that, for Russolo, when sufficient spirit energy was developed during the occult process of the intonarumori, the spirits could materialize and become incarnate.
A last and decisive example shows that the art of noises can legitimately be interpreted as an occult operation. Buzzi’s poem “Russolo” reinforces the hypotheses of this book and at the same offers an interpretation of the title of Russolo’s most famous spirale di rumori, Risveglio di una città, which is in line with these hypotheses. The poem reveals the occult meaning of awakening as materialization and incarnation.
RUSSOLO
Hero sharpened by the whirled anguish
Of every moment, you, seek
The newest acoustic buzz
In the clash of the noises. You, watch
With the eyes of the mental basilisk
The magnificent scenery of hurricanes
And listen, listen
To the mystical orchestral pits of thunders and rains:
And you descend, with quick pupils of yellow amber,
To the orchestras of the factories and the shipyards:
And listen, listen
To the convulsions of tormented iron:
May the wheel that rumbles always be
The tenor that dominates the concert!
Luigi, the ululatore is the oracle
Of the God who inspires you and who will render you justice.
The abyss, our illustrious Relative, is grateful to you.
I hear the only true musics: those
That the dead hear,
Over their heads, under our feet.
The future City awakens
In an explosion that invites
The cemeteries to masked balls of power and desire!10
SETTING THE RECORD
This poem, in French, appeared for the first time in 1950 in an issue of Cahiers d’art dedicated to Italian art of the first half of the twentieth century, primarily futurism. In this issue, the poem is presented as part of Buzzi’s Les médaillons, a mysterious collection that the author dated 1909 and for which no other information exists.11 The poem was subsequently reprinted in Zanovello’s biography, following Buzzi’s preface, but without a date or information about its provenance. Maffina, who also reprinted the poem, considered 1909 to be improbable, but he did not suggest an alternative.12
Although it may not be possible to date the poem definitively, it is important at least to restrict the range of possible dates. The poem mentions one of Russolo’s intonarumori, the ululatore, a term that made its first appearance in the article “Grafia enarmonica per gl’intonarumori futuristi,” published in the Lacerba issue of March 1, 1914. Presumably, therefore, Buzzi wrote his poem after this date; thus 1909 could not be the date of creation.
But the poem cannot have been written later than 1921, for in that year Russolo renounced the attempt to perfect individual intonarumori, and he occupied himself thereafter almost exclusively with merging the various timbres (and constructive principles) of the intonarumori into a single instrument, the rumorarmonio.
In an uncanny poetic leap, Buzzi compared an intonarumori (the wheel that rumbles) to a tenor soloist, and he wished the instrument triumph in concert performances to come. Assuming that Buzzi’s phrase the “wheel that rumbles” refers to the ululatore mentioned in the following verses, the comparison is appropriate, for Russolo considered the ululatore to be the most “musical” of the intonarumori because it produced a ululation that he thought “almost human.”13
It is unlikely that the pieces for mixed orchestra that were performed in the 1921 Paris concerts featured the ululatore in the preponderant role it must have had in the spirali di rumori of 1913-14 (it also had a principal role in the Risveglio di una città fragment). Therefore it can safely be concluded that Buzzi’s poem was written in the years immediately following the Great War, a period when Russolo (and Buzzi) still hoped that the intonarumori would be successful.
The same issue of Cahiers d’art that published the Russolo poem also published a second poem by Buzzi, also identified as belonging to the collection Les médaillons and dedicated to Boccioni, who died during World War I after falling from a horse. The poem includes vivid references to horses, and images of death and rebirth, which would indicate that it was written after Boccioni’s death.
This suggests that Les médaillons was a commemorative diptych written after 1916, and perhaps in 1918 at the conclusion of World War I, to honor the heroism of two futurist soldiers who had been particularly close to Buzzi: one fallen and the other severely wounded. Considering the similarities of theme and style (let alone title) with Buzzi’s text “Russolo ferito,” I propose that the date of composition of “Russolo” was either 1918 or 1919.
Stylistic Reverberations
The style of Buzzi’s poem is indebted to symbolist poetry, from which Buzzi never entirely
freed himself. In the frequently repeated “Écoute, écoute,” followed by the liquid reference to rain, we hear D’Annunzio’s repetitio of the word ascolta in his “La pioggia nel pineto” (1902) but also a distinct echo of the opening lines of Aloysius Bertrand’s poem “Ondine,” from his posthumous prose ballad collection Gaspard de la nuit (1842).
Born in Piedmont as Louis-Jacques-Napoléon Bertrand, Aloysius Bertrand died of tuberculosis in Paris in 1841 in relative obscurity. His prose poems, filled with fantastic themes and open rebellion against the tyranny of classic French alexandrine verses, were rediscovered by and deeply influenced symbolist poets, above all Baudelaire and Mallarmé.
Buzzi would have been familiar with Aloysius Bertrand via Baudelaire, but also via Ravel. The poem “Ondine” was reprinted in its entirety as an epigraph to the movement of the same title that opens the original Durand edition of Ravel’s piano triptych Gaspard de la nuit (1909). Ravel’s triptych derived its title and soul from Bertrand’s seminal ballad collection. Each of the three movements of the piano composition closely follow the corresponding ballads from Bertrand’s book. Even an apparently exterior means such as the much celebrated (and imitated) piano virtuosity of Ravel’s work, ranging between velocity and fear and reaching melting-point temperatures to sublimate into the supernatural, bring the prophetic, presymbolist quality of Bertrand’s literary vision into full focus.
Buzzi’s indirect reference to Ravel the sorcier and his sortilèges—Russolo finally ended up meeting Ravel in person in 1921—through one of Bertrand’s most symbolist, uncanny works resounds all the more appropriately for being part of a poem dedicated to Russolo, who would not have missed the reference.
Along with references to Baudelaire’s sources, Buzzi also makes prominent references to Baudelaire’s poetry. In 1921 Buzzi published his Italian translation of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal for the Istituto Editoriale Italiano, and it is plausible that he might have been working on the translation at the time he wrote his poem to Russolo. Buzzi’s immersion in the world of Baudelaire (a world that was already well known to him) had to have left visible traces in his writing, particularly in a poem written in the French language. The poem “Russolo” is fully under the visionary influence of Fleurs du mal and also echoes Le crépuscule du soir and Le crépuscule du matin, of the Tableaux Parisiens, as well as Danse macabre. This influence is concentrated in Buzzi’s use of charged words, of indisputably Baudelairian provenance, such as abîme.14
Hermeneutic Oracle
With “Russolo,” Buzzi summarized and interpreted Russolo’s musical activity in an occult key. I should like to return to the poem and emphasize with italics the passages that overlap with the various aspects I have discussed in this book.
RUSSOLO
Hero sharpened by the whirled anguish
Of every moment, you, seek
The newest acoustic buzz
In the clash of the noises. You, watch
With the eyes of the mental basilisk
The magnificent scenery of hurricanes
And listen, listen
To the mystical orchestral pits of thunders and rains:
And you descend, with quick pupils of yellow amber,
To the orchestras of the factories and the shipyards:
And listen, listen
To the convulsions of tormented iron:
May the wheel that rumbles always be
The tenor that dominates the concert!
Luigi, the ululatore is the oracle
Of the God who inspires you and who will render you justice.
The abyss, our great Relative, is grateful to you.
I hear the only true musics: those
That the dead hear,
Over their heads, under our feet.
The future City awakens
In an explosion that invites
The cemeteries to masked balls of power and desire!
The poem opens by presenting the dedicatee, Russolo, the restless hero with the fatal basilisk gaze, involved in exploring the profundity of sound. Next, the poem evokes nature as spectacle (décor, Golfes mystiques). The Wagnerian expression “Golfes mystiques” (a chain of metonymies: mystic gulf = orchestral pit = orchestra = sound and noise) associated with peals of thunder and rain confirms the central proposition of The Art of Noises: a revaluation of noise as sound and therefore as material suited for music.
Considered more carefully, this section of the poem is imbued with occult themes. First, it brings the reader back to the pantheistic atmosphere of Linee-forza della folgore. Second, the sinuosity of line that the image of the gulf suggests, united to the adjective mystic, goes back to the theory of sound waves as vibrations that potently manifest in the grandiose spectacle of natural forces, of which thunder is the primary expression.15
Even more charged are the lines Luigi, l’ululeur est l’oracle / Du Dieu qui t’inspire, which describe the intonarumori as a true portal to the beyond, through which communication between the artist and the spirits can be instituted, be these, as theosophy claimed, spirits of nature, or spirits of the dead awaiting reincarnation. The term oracle comes from the Latin oraculum, which derives from the verb orare and therefore etymologically refers to a mysterious voice of supernatural origin providing responses about unknown events. This passage is even more appropriate to Russolo, because the intonarumori in question is the ululatore, which Russolo described as a “mysterious, suggestive instrument” that, just like the spirits conjured up by Swedenborg, emits “an ululation” that is “almost human.”16
Russolo believed firmly in the possibilities of communicating with the dead and expressed himself on the subject apertis verbis many times, beginning with the letter to Margherita Sarfatti of August 22, 1916, in which he claimed to be in mediumistic contact with the spirit of the recently deceased Boccioni. His interest in spiritism continued throughout the 1920s, and in his late Parisian years he participated in the séances of the medium Madame Lazare on rue des Mathurins, near the Madeleine church. Finally, from the 1930s until his death, spiritism was a focus of his studies.17
If the intonarumori could become the oracle that spoke through the mouths of the spirits, then the art of noises was the privileged base on which to construct communication between the world of the living and the beyond. According to Buzzi, Russolo’s musiche uniche e vere were expressions coming from the beyond that only the enlightened among the living, the artists-clairvoyants, could understand: noises transfigured by transferring vital energy and re-creating spiritual life that for the living anticipated the beyond, and for the dead recalled and promised life.
The re-creation of spiritual life carried out by the intonarumori was the path that, as the final consequence of the materialization of thought-forms, conducted the dead toward reincarnation. The life created by the intonarumori can, then, be considered the life of spirits incarnating from the beyond. In the end, Buzzi’s poem reveals exactly that: the energy created by an orchestra of intonarumori could produce an explosion so powerful as to bring cemeteries back to life.
This was the occult side of Risveglio di una città, a Romeroesque Dawn of the Dead, in which a city of the dead is reanimated by energy that is channeled by machines producing an explosion of noise. This explosion of energy, coming from the force and desire of the spirits for incarnation, generates that overflowing and disturbing “artificial” (biomechanic?) multiplicity—represented by the procession of masks to restage the notorious trope of the Danse Macabre—that finds its synthesis in the cosmogonic unity of the City of the Future.
FUTURIST VERTIGOES
In 1924 Buzzi consolidated the position expressed in his poem “Russolo” by stretching the poem into a novel, Cavalcata delle vertigini (Ride of the vertigoes), in which the war hero, aptly named Marzio, is a literary transposition of Russolo. In the preface, Buzzi wrote: “Having found a marvelous specimen, given to me by the war among my great friends in art (must I say it? Luigi Russolo), I made him the chrysalis of an
imaginary cocoon that would have needed to be as luminous as a halo.”18
In the book, essentially a fantastic and philosophical novel with occasional incursions into the erotic, Marzio represents a total artist who has constructed and conducts, under the effect of a mediumistic trance, an orchestra of intonarumori. A bullet implanted in his brain blesses him with exceptionally powerful spiritual gifts and at the same time kills him periodically; as a result he cyclically reincarnates in almost every chapter.
Cavalcata delle vertigini lingers on descriptions of mediumistic phenomena, galvanization, spirit materialization, and reincarnation. Chapter 5, for instance, bears the emblematic title “Musica e metempsicosi” (Music and metempsychosis). Chapter 16, “La novissima orchestra” (The all-new orchestra), is worth recounting for the connections to the present discussion.19
On the snowy peak of the Monte Bianco—described as the ultimate symbol of spiritual elevation and supreme summit of “an orography of spirits,” where “one lives a life at the same time divinely carnal and humanly astral”—Marzio/Russolo conducts his own creation, the orchestra of intonarumori, in “full consciousness of his hyperdynamic force.”
The inspired orchestra conductor is described as “a bundle of nerves galvanized by an electrical current of one hundred thousand ampères.” He is an antenna elevated on “a majestic podium,” picking up energy “from the direct light of the stars” and instilling it into the orchestra, which appears to be “operated by electrical forces.” In this process of possession, Marzio/Russolo is transfigured. He is no longer “the man of bone, nerves, and flesh.” He becomes “the man-battery. A bundle of electric wires passed through by all the most mysterious and complex intersections of thousands and thousands of volts.”