Luigi Russolo, Futurist

by Luciano Chessa

  83. This is according to Elica Balla; see Fagiolo dell’Arco, Balla pre-futurista, 28.

  84. In Balla, Elica. Con Balla (1984), cited in Matitti, “Balla e la teosofia,” 43. Trasformazione forme spiriti is the title of a cycle of paintings that Balla produced between 1916 and 1918.

  85. Soffici and Balla were not the only futurists to participate in the group’s activities. Around 1910–14, before moving to Florence, Maria Crisi (later Ginanni) attended lectures by Besant and Steiner at Gruppo Roma’s center. Julius Evola collaborated intensively with the group from 1922 to 1927, and it is probable that futurists from the Roman area such as Depero, Bragaglia, and Prampolini, who gravitated into Balla’s orbit and were evidently interested in the occult, also had relationships with Gruppo Roma.

  86. Matitti, “Balla e la teosofia,” 44. Steiner frequently visited Italy. In 1912, he gave lectures on life after death and reincarnation in Milan.

  87. The swastika was associated with the cult of light among the Zoroastrians, so the origins of the symbol could be Indo-Iranian. The Indo-Iranians were a Sumerian-Akkadian people, originally from Iran, who in the Bronze Age (ca. 1700 to 1300 B.C.) migrated to India, where they mingled with the native population of Dravidian stock. In India the Sumerian-Akkadian language of the Indo-Iranians gave rise to Sanskrit; the origin of the term swastika, translatable as “lucky charm,” is in fact Sanskrit.

  88. Helena P. Blavatsky, The Theosophical Glossary (London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1892), 315.

  89. Illustration 35 in Matitti, “Balla e la teosofia,” 40. The disc with horizontally spread-out wings was one of the symbols of the sun. The Belgian religious archeologist and freemason Eugène Félicien Albert, Count Goblet d’Alviella, in his 1891 book La Migration des Symboles claims that both the gammadion-swastika and the circle with wings spreading out horizontally represent the sun as the supreme and almighty life force, the highest deity. For this, see Count [Eugène] Goblet d’Alviella, The Migration of Symbols (London, 1894), facsimile ed. (Wellingborough, UK: Aquarian Press, 1979); see esp. chapters 2 (On the Gammadion, or Swastika) and 6 (On the Winged Glove, the Caduceus, and the Trisula).

  90. I am not the first to have noted the importance of light in Balla’s works. Dell’Arco cites three works by Balla as examples of this interest: Il pertichino (1898), Fiera di Parigi (1900), and Lavoro (1902). See Fagiolo dell’Arco, Compenetrazioni, 13. See also Sergio Poggianella’s brief article “Okkulte Elemente und das Licht im Werk Ballas,” in Okkultismus und Avantgarde: Von Munch bis Mondrian 1900–1915 (Frankfurt: Schirn Kunsthalle, 1995), 459–65; henceforth Okkultismus. It should also be mentioned that the rising sun appearing in Previati and Pellizza had socialist associations, something that Balla and Boccioni surely absorbed.

  91. See Fagiolo dell’Arco, Balla pre-futurista, 24. Marinetti named one of his daughters Luce.

  92. On the chronology of these paintings, see Calvesi, Fusione, 98ff.

  93. On the victory of electric over natural light, see Calvesi, Fusione, 337n28.

  94. Calvesi, Fusione, 52.

  95. See Fagiolo dell’Arco, “Giacomo Balla verso il futurismo,” 23.

  96. Matitti, “Balla e la teosofia,” 42; Robert C. Williams, Artists in Revolution: Portraits of the Russian Avant-garde, 1905–1925 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 104.

  97. Bragaglia’s Forme e pensiero—visione spiritica is mentioned in Matitti, “Balla e la teosofia,” 41.

  98. A similar procedure can be found in one of Russolo’s self-portraits from 1912–13, Io dinamico.

  99. In Demolizione della casa di Balla of 1926, cited in Fagiolo dell’Arco, Compenetrazioni, 25.

  100. Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, Omaggio a Balla (Rome: Bulzoni, 1967), 62.

  101. Matitti, “Balla e la teosofia,” 43.

  102. Fagiolo dell’Arco, Compenetrazioni, 25.

  103. Balla’s pantheism and panpsychism is noted in Fagiolo dell’Arco, Compenetrazioni, 26. On Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s pantheism-inspired periodical La ruota, of which he was the editor, see Calvesi, Fusione, 111, 213–14. On Pratella and pantheism, see the next chapter.

  104. Calvesi, Fusione, 119.

  105. Calvesi, Fusione, 128.

  106. Alchemy was considered the preeminent hermetic science because it was believed during the Renaissance that Hermes Trismegistus was the founder of alchemy. I believe that Balla may have first become interested in alchemic creation because it was a metaphor for artistic creation—which, after all, is Romanticism’s perception of alchemy, all the way to Goethe’s Faust.

  107. Galbreath, “A Glossary of Spiritual and Related Terms,” 368.

  108. Leonardo, a sort of futurist ante litteram who occupied himself with science, alchemy, and art, became an important reference figure for several futurists. We know from a letter that Balla wrote to his mother, quoted in Fagiolo dell’Arco, Compenetrazioni, 13, that Balla had a book by Leonardo before him as a talisman while working on the first Compenetrazioni iridescenti. In the biographical note quoted above, Balla proclaimed himself a reincarnation of Leonardo.

  109. Cited in Fagiolo dell’Arco, “Giacomo Balla verso il futurismo,” 17.

  110. Fagiolo dell’Arco, Compenetrazioni, 13.

  111. Fagiolo dell’Arco, “Giacomo Balla verso il futurismo,” 23.

  112. Fagiolo dell’Arco, Compenetrazioni, 25.

  113. Matitti, “Balla e la teosofia,” 42. Flammarion was a member of the Theosophical Society. On Balla and astronomy, see Fagiolo dell’Arco, Compenetrazioni, 26.

  114. See the facsimile of the manifesto reproduced in Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, Balla: Ricostruzione futurista dell’universo; Scultura teatro cinema arredamento abbigliamento poesia visiva (Rome: Bulzoni, 1968); henceforth Fagiolo dell’Arco, Balla: Ricostruzione futurista dell’universo.

  115. See the facsimile of the manifesto in Fagiolo dell’Arco, Balla: Ricostruzione futurista dell’universo.

  116. Cangiullo was the first to call Balla a “magician”; see Fagiolo dell’Arco, Compenetrazioni, fig. 8.

  117. Fagiolo dell’Arco, Compenetrazioni, 34.

  CHAPTER 2

  1. Arnaldo and Bruno Ginanni Corradini used various pseudonyms, most often Arnaldo Ginna and Bruno Corra, which were coined by Giacomo Balla and inspired by gymnastics (ginnastic) and running (corsa), respectively. On Ginna’s and Corra’s precocious interest in the occult, see Mario Verdone, “Abstraktion, Futurismus und Okkultismus—Ginna, Corra und Rosà,” in Okkultismus, 477–97.

  2. Celant, “Futurismo esoterico,” 112. It is possible that the futurists of the Milanese group were familiar with occultism at first hand, through symbolism or scapigliatura. They may have known the same sources that the Corradini brothers knew.

  3. In Ginna and Corra, Scritti, 74, magnetism is distinguished from hypnosis. Russolo in Al di là della materia would later make the same distinction very clearly.

  4. Ginna and Corra, Scritti, 68. These concepts are also found in two Lacerba articles, Soffici’s “Raggio” and Boccioni’s “Fondamento.”

  5. Ginna and Corra, Scritti, 25.

  6. Opera d’arte dell’avvenire is the Italian title of Wagner’s Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft.

  7. Ginna and Corra, Scritti, 112.

  8. Ginna and Corra, Scritti, 106.

  9. Ginna and Corra, Scritti, 106.

  10. Ginna and Corra, Scritti, 108; epigraph on p. 105. The spiritually charged quote from Mazzini, which will disappear in the second edition of the pamphlet, suggests a further point of contact between the counts Ginanni Corradini and freemasonry. Mazzini was a freemason but also a theosophist and friend of Helena Blavatsky. On Mazzini and the occult see the chapter “Giuseppe Mazzini e la reincarnazione,” in Simona Cigliana, La seduta spiritica (Rome: Fazi, 2007), 223–32.

  11. Ginna and Corra, Scritti, 152. From here the next step would be Marinetti’s tattilismo.

  12. Daniele Lombardi, Il suono veloce: Futurismo e futurismi in musica (Lucca: LIM Ricordi, 1996), 16
2; henceforth Lombardi, Il suono veloce.

  13. In the same year as Musica cromatica (1912), Leonid Sabanejew’s famous article “Prometheus von Skrjabin” was published in Kandinsky’s and Marc’s almanac Der Blaue Reiter (Munich: Piper, 1912), 107–24.

  14. Ginna and Corra, Scritti, 161.

  15. It would go beyond the scope of this book to discuss in detail the many attempts throughout history to establish connections between colors and music, which include the coeval and theosophically inspired experiments of Kandinsky, Schoenberg, and Scriabin, as well as the earlier ones of Louis-Bertrand Castel, Isaac Newton, and Marin Cureau de la Chambre. For more information, see Cretien van Campen, The Hidden Sense: Synesthesia in Art and Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007) and Thomas Hankins and Robert Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).

  16. Ginna and Corra, Scritti, 187.

  17. Ginna and Corra, Scritti, 195.

  18. Ginna and Corra, Scritti, 202. In the original Italian, this last sentence—“Dipingo quindi non gli atteggiamenti di un umano, contorto dal dolore, ma la vibrazione della sua anima dolorante o il DOLORE STESSO”—reads like an echo of a passage in the technical manifesto of futurist painting of five years earlier: “The pain of a man is for us just as interesting as the one of an electric lamp, which suffers, and agonizes, and screams in excruciating expressions of pain” (Il dolore di un uomo è interessante, per noi, quanto quello di una lampada elettrica, che soffre, e spasima, e grida con le più strazianti espressioni di dolore); see “La pittura futurista: Manifesto tecnico,” in I manifesti del futurismo, 29.

  19. Ginna and Corra, Scritti, 197.

  20. Ginna and Corra, Scritti, 197. Compare this description with the passage in Boccioni’s 1911 Roman lecture where he evokes the image of the artist as gifted with “clairvoyant eyes” (occhi veggenti); Boccioni, Altri inediti, 29.

  21. Ginna and Corra, Scritti, 197.

  22. Ginna and Corra, Scritti, 202.

  23. Ginna and Corra, Scritti, 201. In the version of Pittura dell’avvenire published in installments in L’Italia Futurista in 1917, Ginna’s relationship with theosophy is more tense, perhaps because of Steiner’s split from the Theosophical Society. The issue of July 1, 1917, includes the strong statement: “I hope that the very old and superstitious theosophists, so old that they are falling apart, will stop preaching fear and digging into the rotten mummy that Indian philosophy is.” This attack on Indian philosophy is aligned with Steiner’s position at the time.

  24. This affinity was to remain problematic for Ginna for years to come. Many years later, in 1967, he signed an open letter titled “A proposito di ‘Arte dell’avvenire,’ ” in which he claims to have painted his first abstract painting in 1908, before being aware of Kandinsky’s work; see Ginna and Corra, Scritti, 268. For a relevant statement of 1959 by Giuseppe Sprovieri, the official gallery representative of the futurist painters in Rome, see Ginna and Corra, Scritti, 251–52. Sprovieri claims that Ginna was the first abstract painter in Italy to have been publicly shown at an exhibit in 1914. Interestingly, this exhibit also presented some of Kandinsky’s paintings.

  25. If Boccioni was indeed the target, Ginna’s attack was not entirely accurate. Although “states of mind” was a key concept in Boccioni’s aesthetics, he, like Russolo, was never interested in purely abstract painting.

  26. Ginna and Corra, Scritti, 203.

  27. Ginna and Corra, Scritti, 202.

  28. Ginna and Corra, Scritti, 217.

  29. Ginna and Corra, Scritti, 234.

  30. Ginna and Corra, Scritti, 234.

  31. Ginna and Corra, Scritti, 237. This quote is taken from the epigraph of Marinetti’s Futurismo e fascismo, where it appears directly below the dedication of the book to Mussolini; see Teoria e invenzione futurista, 489. Marinetti reused the quote in his 1929 Marinetti e il futurismo; there he introduced it by claiming that “among the many definitions of futurism, the one given by the theosophists is the one I prefer”; Teoria e invenzione futurista, 583. In none of these writings, however, is a source provided for the epigraph.

  32. Verdone, introduction to Ginna and Corra, Scritti, 8.

  33. Verdone, introduction to Ginna and Corra, Scritti, 9.

  34. Verdone, introduction to Ginna and Corra, Scritti, 12.

  35. Ginna and Corra, Scritti, 168.

  36. Ginna and Corra, Scritti, 265–67.

  37. Lista, Le futurisme: Création et avant-garde (Paris: Les Éditions de l’Amateur, 2001), 73; henceforth Lista, Futurisme. Boccioni must have known Kandinsky in 1913, because he attacks him in his book (see Calvesi, Fusione, 70).

  38. Maffina, Caro Pratella (Ravenna: Edizioni del Girasole, 1980), 27–29.

  39. Francesco Balilla Pratella, “Manifesto dei musicisti futuristi,” in I manifesti del futurismo, 43.

  40. See Luigi Rognoni’s essay in the 1980 CRAMPS double LP recording Antologia sonora: Musica Futurista. This recording has been rereleased on CD by the record label EDEL (CHSCD 046/047) with original artwork and the full reprint of Rognoni’s essay.

  41. Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 12.

  42. Rodney Johns Payton, “The Futurist Musicians: Francesco Balilla Pratella and Luigi Russolo” (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 1974), 51–52; henceforth Payton, “The Futurist Musicians.”

  43. Lombardi, Il suono veloce, 57.

  44. Pratella, Scritti Vari, 116–31. For an English translation of this essay, see Payton, “The Futurist Musicians,” 133–49, appendix 6.

  45. Compare this to the passages from Ginna’s Pittura dell’avvenire cited earlier in this chapter.

  46. I manifesti del futurismo, 48.

  47. Lacerba (February 28, 1915).

  48. Lombardi, Il suono veloce, 37.

  49. Pratella, Autobiografia (Milan: Pan editrice, 1971), 163.

  50. Pratella, Autobiografia, 164. The various stages of the ascension of the soul ought to be a clear reference to Plato’s Phaedrus.

  51. Payton, “The Futurist Musicians,” 86.

  52. These stage directions can be read both in the libretto (pages 8–11) and in the score (pages 1–53). I cite here from Pratella, Edizioni, scritti, manoscritti musicali e futuristi, ed. Domenico Tampieri (Ravenna: Longo, 1995), 458–59; henceforth Pratella, Edizioni.

  53. Corra and Ginna, who had already worked for a couple of years within these synesthetic coordinates, may have first encountered Prometheus through the above-mentioned article by Leonid Sabanejew (see note 13). It is very likely that Poem of Fire was a central topic of conversations between Pratella and the Corradinis.

  54. See Payton, “The Futurist Musicians,” appendix 6, 144–45.

  55. Payton, “The Futurist Musicians,” appendix 6, 139. The quoted letter from Marinetti to Pratella, of February 14, 1912, is found in Domenico Tampieri, “Catalogo cronologico degli scritti e delle trascrizioni musicali di F. B. Pratella editi dal 1900 al 1995,” in Pratella, Edizioni, 412–13.

  56. On Ricciardi’s relationship with the Pratella of Giallo pallido, see Lia Lapini, “Un musicista sulle scene futuriste,” in Pratella, Edizioni, 69.

  57. On futurism in Florence and its relationship with the occult, see Mario Verdone, “Abstraktion, Futurismus und Okkultismus—Ginna, Corra und Rosà,” in Okkultismus, 478–97.

  58. Bruno Corra, Sam Dunn è morto (Milan: Einaudi, 1970), 69.

  59. Ginna and Corra, Scritti, 208.

  60. This can be easily compared with the concept of unity expressed by Boccioni in his 1911 Rome lecture.

  61. Arnoldo Ginna, “Il coraggio nelle ricerche di occultismo,” in L’Italia Futurista, May 6, 1917.

  62. On panpsychism, see the expanded English version of Celant’s article “Futurismo esoterico” in Germano Celant, “Futurism and the Occult,” Artforum 19 (1981): 37. The article lists several scientists who were interested in occultism, including the psychiatrists and neurologists Lombroso, Morselli, Marzorati, Pappalardo, and Vassallo
, the scientists Richet, Crookes, La Fontaine, Maxwell, and Zollner, and the astronomers Schiapparelli and Flammarion.

  63. Her actual name was Maria Crisi. She adopted the second name Ginanni in the years that she was Arnaldo Ginna’s companion, and later she kept it as a pseudonym.

  64. Maria Ginanni, “Il gambo del mondo,” in Montagne trasparenti (Florence: Edizioni de L’Italia Futurista, 1917).

  65. Silvia Evangelisti, “Geometrien der Psyche im Werk Romolo Romanis,” in Okkultismus, 81–92.

  66. Martin, Futurist Art and Theory, 71.

  67. See Calvesi, Fusione, 214. See also a discussion of Leonardo’s experiment on radial propagation of vibrations (irradiation of waves) in sand on a flat surface when the surface is hit by a hammer, in Emanuel Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982), 111; henceforth Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician. According to Winternitz, this experiment by Leonardo anticipated Chladni’s experiment.

  68. Martin, Futurist Art and Theory, 71.

  69. I manifesti del futurismo, 154. The use of the verb intuire seems to point to Bergson’s notion of intuition.

  70. By defining all man-made mechanical products as il regno meccanico, Carrà considered the machine to be part of Nature.

  71. I manifesti del futurismo, 156.

  72. Compare this to Glauco Viazzi, ed., I poeti del futurismo (Milan: Longanesi, 1983), 307–13; henceforth Viazzi, I poeti del futurismo. Guerrapittura is available in facsimile, in an edition published by S.P.E.S. in Florence.

  73. Archivi del futurismo, 1:76ff.

  74. Archivi del futurismo, 1:210.

  75. Calvesi, Fusione, 95.

  76. Marinetti and Fillìa [Luigi Colombo, pseud.], “Manifesto dell’arte sacra futurista,” in I futuristi, ed. Francesco Grisi (Rome: Newton, 1990), 87.

  77. Celant, “Futurismo esoterico,” 112. On D’Annunzio’s séances, see Matitti, “Balla e la teosofia,” 44. (For more on Russolo’s séances, see chapters 3 and 11).

  78. Enrico Crispolti, “Giulio Evola” La Medusa 40 (1963).