33. See chapter 9 for my comparison of Russolo’s and Leonardo’s instruments.
34. Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 192–93.
35. This would not have been the first time that musical instruments served as metaphors of the universe; consider, for example, the monochord, between Marin Mersenne and Robert Fludd. The concept is linked with the Pythagorean association of music and astronomy, famously stated at the closing of Plato’s Republic and echoed in Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis of De Republica. Music as a discipline of the quadrivium implied proportion of musical intervals corresponding to cosmological proportions and distances between planets. The assumption is that continuity (and infinity) of enharmonic space is related, allegorically or magically, with the continuity (and infinity) of cosmic space. Given that Leonardo was interested in the issue of continuity at various levels, surely he was also interested in continuity in time. Several instruments designed by Leonardo could sustain notes. Among these projects is that of the viola organista, a project that occupied Leonardo for many years, and an air chest bellow that can produce a continuous flux of air. “With this one, the flux of air will be continuous,” Leonardo wrote (quoted in Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 197).
36. Counterbalancing enharmonic and temperate systems bears some relationship with counterbalancing analog and digital systems.
37. Russolo had read Leonardo’s Il paragone.
38. Quoted in Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 164.
39. As in Mersenne’s monochord. In fact, the intonarumori were, from one point of view, a new type of monochord. On Mersenne, see note 35, above. See also Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, 73–79.
40. Marinetti, La grande Milano, 99. Marinetti described Russolo’s studio/laboratory in via Stoppani as follows: “I enter Russolo’s workshop with Boccioni and Armando Mazza. Yellow green red pink piling of futurist intonarumori. Buzzing, bursting, howling, whistling. The inventor oversees the cooking of a noise drumskin.—Stop! Leave the acid and motors alone! Tonight we will stage a very violent demonstration against Austria!” Marinetti e il futurismo and 8 anime in una bomba, in Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione futurista, 596, 878. This passage indicates the color scheme Russolo adopted for the intonarumori, but there is more. Russolo, without going into detail, also frequently wrote about his experimenting on custom-made chemical baths for his drumskins (he started calling them diaphragms as of the Lacerba article of July 1, 1913) to make them more resistant to stretching. Marinetti confirms that Russolo’s chemical baths involved dipping and cooking the drumskins in a latex-like paste. The use of latex (india rubber) was suggested to Russolo by Hermann L. F. Helmholtz, who, in his classic On the Sensation of Tone, mentions an experiment in which a “vulcanised india-rubber membrane” is used as a vibrating surface to test sympathetic vibrations; see Helmholtz, On the Sensation of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music (New York: Dover, 1954), 41–42. Helmoltz’s experiment with the vulcanized latex membrane constituted another way of illustrating the phenomena Chladni had discovered with his figures, which Helmholtz quotes in these very pages. Russolo mentions Chladni’s figures in the same chapter of The Art of Noises in which he quotes On the Sensation of Tone (see Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 169), which indicates that he could well have learned of Chladni’s plates from Helmholtz, and also that he may have begun experimenting with latex membranes after having read about them there.
41. Quoted in Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 178–79. The majority of the intonarumori are variations on this model. All of the intonarumori exhibited, each in its own way, continuity in time and space.
42. Russolo was also interested in continuity in time; in praising the ululatore (howler), he wrote with excitement about this instrument’s ability to hold “a long note, even a very long one, at will”; quoted in Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 169.
43. These words can be compared with the passage in which Leonardo described the continuity of painting in shades of “shadows and lights” (ombre e lumi) and in distances between points within the rules of perspective; Leonardo also discussed continuity of line. See Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician, 215–16, 221.
44. Quoted in Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 164–65. The argument against the “dinamismo frammentario” has Leonardine echoes and similarities with Boccioni’s attack on Balla’s frame-based breakdown of movement.
45. Franco Casavola stressed this point in an article on Russolo written for Mario Carli’s and Emilio Settimelli’s futurfascist newspaper L’Impero of June 2, 1925. In comparing the “whole enharmony” allowed by Russolo’s instruments—which Russolo called concezione totale—to the limitation of the division of tone into quarter tones that is called for in “Hába’s piano and Baglioni’s harmonium,” Casavola adds that in Russolo’s instruments, “the rigid, uneven, tough, and angular profile of the scale disappears to leave space for a smooth and harmonious [read: enharmonic] line”; quoted in Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 103. Russolo mentions the division into quarters and eighths of a tone in The Art of Noises; see Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 166.
46. Douglas Kahn explained the glissando in these terms in his Noise, Water, Meat, 83–84. Though Russolo is cited in this chapter, Kahn, primarily interested in issues related to timbre, does not mention Russolo in discussing the continuity of enharmonic space; rather, he quotes Russolo in relation to another principle of continuity that Russolo was concerned with: the principle that erases the distinction between sound and noise (Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, 80). Russolo often reminded his readers that the distinction between sound and noise is merely conventional, and that from an acoustics standpoint there is no difference between the two. The distinction is a cultural one. Likely guided by his research with the CRT oscilloscope, Russolo claims that an absolute distinction cannot be made because even though a noise usually generates a sound wave with a more complex shape than that of a musical tone, a dividing line (edge) between the two cannot be established. Both in fact occupy the same timbrai space, which is a continuous dimension. Because the distinction was subjectively and culturally determined, Russolo advocates the inclusion of noises into the palette of sounds used by the modern composer.
47. Kahn attributes the popularity of glissando among modernist composers, including Russolo, to Helmholtz’s sirens; see Kahn, Noise Water Meat, especially “Resident Noises,” 79, and “The Gloss of the Gliss,” 84.
48. In Comoedia (June 19, 1921), a Parisian music critic wrote that Ravel “has requested to observe all the instruments after the performance, one by one, and he has expressed the desire to employ some of them in one of his next scores.” Russolo repeated this quote in his article for L’Impero of January 11, 1927 (quoted in Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 214). Zanovello cites an article from the journal La Renaissance of July 2, 1921, in which a Parisian journalist reported Ravel’s interest in the enharmonic features (l’échelle de leur tonalité) of Russolo’s intonarumori; see Zanovello, Luigi Russolo, 59–60.
49. In Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 86; see also 79.
50. In Hugh Davies, “Maurice Ravel and the lutheal,” Experimental Musical Instruments 4, no. 2 (August 1988): 12. The flute à coulisse was designed specifically to produce glissandi; conceptually it is similar to Leonardo’s “glissando flute.”
51. Hugh Davies, “Maurice Ravel and the lutheal,” Experimental Musical Instruments 4, no. 2 (August 1988): 12. Davies likely deduced this from what Russolo claimed in his letter to Pratella, though Davies does not quote the letter, and though the letter does not directly mention L’enfant.
52. Many are the points in L’enfant in which Ravel re-creates the sound (mostly glissandi) of the intonarumori: the impressive duet of the cats (Durand edition, 126–31); the imitation of birdsong produced by the flute à coulisse (132); the equally impressive procession of rainettes (134–36 and 150–54
); the trees and the beasts (138–41 and 192). Although a detailed discussion of these passages is impossible here, it is worth noting that Ravel’s score evokes a supernatural atmosphere. Carolyn Abbate has discussed the disturbing side of this score, where inanimate objects and beings frightfully reanimate like the dead rising from their tombs, or like voices rising from a gramophone; see Abbate, “Outside Ravel’s Tomb,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 52, no. 3 (1999); henceforth Abbate, “Outside Ravel’s Tomb.” Abbate views both a tomb and a gramophone as means to preserve, shape, (re-)create something that is gone. The intonarumori certainly possess a quality of the uncanny, perhaps because Russolo intended them to be used as crucibles for (re-)creation.
CHAPTER 8
1. Quoted in Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 177.
2. Marinetti, “Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista,” in I manifesti del futurismo, 90–91.
3. Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 136.
4. Claudia Salaris, Il futurismo e la pubblicità: Dalla pubblicità dell’arte all’arte della pubblicità (Milan: Lupetti, 1986). On the basis of this poster, I can add the spirale Zum Zum Taratrà, whose curiously onomatopoeic title was most likely invented by Marinetti, to the list of lost Russolo scores, which had previously been limited to the four compositions premiered at the August 11, 1913, Milanese press concert: Réveil de capitale, Rendez-vous d’autos et d’aéroplanes, On dîne à la terrasse du casino, and Escarmouche dans l’oasis.
5. On the relationship between Buzzi’s novel L’ellisse e la spirale and alchemy, see Pignotti and Andreani, “Paolo Buzzi, ‘L’ellisse e la spirale,’ ” liv–lv. This novel (like other works by Buzzi, especially Cavalcata delle vertigini) includes references to Russolo’s musical research. See, for example, the chapter titled “La diana enarmonica,” in Buzzi, L’ellisse e la spirale (Florence: S.P.E.S., 1990), 213–49.
6. Quoted in MART, 42n104.
7. On the centripetal and centrifugal direction of movement, see Boccioni, Scritti, 119. Marinetti, in the manifesto “La distruzione della sintassi” of May 11, 1913, declared that he was tired of the shape of the spiral and preferred the shape of the straight line; see I manifesti del futurismo, 136. On the other hand, Carrà, in “Pittura dei suoni, rumori e odori” (August 11, 1913), included the spiral among the dynamic (and therefore higher-ranked) shapes; see I manifesti del futurismo, 155.
8. I have used the term re-creation intentionally, to pose Russolo’s operation of “re-creating” the world against Balla’s and Depero’s “reconstruction” of the universe. The term reconstruction suggests a process in which, once the abstract equivalents of the shapes found in the universe have been isolated, the universe can be reproduced in detail, via the sample, through a patient multiplication of the sample. This is different from the ambitious aim of re-creating the simultaneity of the entire universe through synthesis and again illustrates the opposition between Balla’s objective analysis and Boccioni’s subjective synthesis.
9. Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo, Balla, and Severini, “Prefazione al catalogo delle esposizioni di Parigi, Londra, Berlino,” in I manifesti del futurismo, 63. The writing technique “stream of consciousness” could be considered a literary parallel to this concept
10. “Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo, Balla, Severini, “Prefazione al catalogo delle esposizioni di Parigi, Londra, Berlino, [. . .],” in I manifesti del futurismo, 63.
11. For more on this subject, see Martin, Futurist Art and Theory, 91.
12. The reference to the painter as clairvoyant is mentioned in Boccioni. Altri scritti, 34.
13. Boccioni, Scritti, 180.
14. Boccioni, Scritti, 150. The intuited in the quote is a Bergsonian term for captured.
15. Boccioni, “Fondamento,” Lacerba (March 15, 1913).
16. Boccioni, Scritti, 176.
17. Boccioni, Altri inediti, 26. Though Carrà was no longer aligned with the aesthetic positions of futurism after 1915, he was, as late as 1958, still defending the spirituality of plastic dynamism; in his introduction to the Russolo retrospective at the Galleria Barbaroux in Milan, he declared: “Plastic dynamism was not the cinematographic reproduction of the physical phenomenon. [. . .] In other words, it was implicit in Luigi Russolo a mystical philosophy of nature charged of a psychic power.” Quoted by Gasparotto in MART, 90.
18. This self-generative process may very well be the ultimate sense of the futurists’ congenital complementarism.
19. On the relative and absolute motion of the object, see Boccioni, Scritti, 134.
20. Boccioni, Scritti, 149.
21. The counterposition is critically useful, but it should not be forgotten that Boccioni was Balla’s most important pupil, and both aesthetics were to a degree intertwined.
22. Calvesi, Fusione, 127, and Fagiolo dell’Arco, Compenetrazioni, 12. Admittedly, Calvesi’s polar opposition is a simplification of Boccioni’s and Balla’s thought; and though it is (like all deliberately weak theories) critically useful, it cannot take into account the diachronic development of their respective poetics (especially those of Balla, who was active for decades). Both of these artists occasionally departed from the positions described by the polar opposition.
23. In Boccioni’s writings, the notion of single form is also connected with the concept of congenital complementarism, which can be best understood as a sort of fusion of (apparent) opposites. Unity was a central concept for Busoni, whose interest in futurism started early; of the futurists, he connected most with Boccioni. His admiration for Boccioni (he bought some of his paintings, including the famous Città che sale) turned in the last year of Boccioni’s life into actual friendship, of which perhaps the most significant testimony is Boccioni’s vibrant 1916 portrait of Busoni, one of his last masterpieces.
24. Boccioni, Altri inediti, 14.
25. The idea of substitution is derived from Calvesi. He explained that whereas Pascoli’s onomatopoeiae were “imitative,” Marinetti’s were “substitutive” (sostitutive); see Calvesi, Fusione, 149, 151. It is also worth noting that Boccioni’s polymaterism and Marinetti’s onomatopoeiae (especially the abstract onomatopoeia) stand in close relation to Russolo’s art of noises.
26. There are occasional exceptions to the polar opposition of Boccioni and Balla. For example, Boccioni, in “Fondamento,” aspires to the “creation of autonomous organisms built with abstract elements of reality.” Subjective synthesis and objective analysis may on occasion start their process from the same point, with abstract elements of reality, though the former then re-creates reality by producing and reconciling the conflict among these elements and achieving the forma unica, whereas the latter patiently reconstructs reality through a series of samples.
27. For this reason Russolo could not accept the idea of “cacophony” (in fact, he did not have much respect for the word cacophonic); see Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 135. Because Boccioni was so close to Russolo (they were both living in Milan and in daily communication), it is sometimes impossible to determine with certainty which ideas were Boccioni’s and which Russolo’s. Beyond a certain point, it is in fact rather difficult to distinguish among Russolo’s, Marinetti’s, Carrà’s, Romani’s, and Boccioni’s ideas. With time, the majority of futurism’s ideas have unfortunately been attributed to the two most charismatic figures, Marinetti and Boccioni. (As Kahn recalls in Noise Water Meat, 138 and 393, the theories in The Art of Noises have often been attributed to Marinetti.) It is both necessary and useful, when at all possible, to try to attribute authorship of these ideas properly.
28. “Circolare di L. Russolo, A. Funi e F.T. Marinetti,” Archivi del futurismo, I, 383.
29. In “Circolare di L. Russolo, A. Funi e F.T. Marinetti,” Archivi del futurismo 1, 383. The term synthesis was to become a keyword in Russolo’s aesthetics in the early 1920s and according to Tagliapietra and Gasparotto, it aligned Russolo with the theoretical positions of the art critic and curator Margherita Sarf
atti. Synthesis was certainly central in the futurist manifesto “Contro tutti i ritorni in pittura,” which was signed by Dudreville, Funi, Russolo, and Sironi on January 11, 1920, though both Tagliapietra and Gasparotto have argued that it was mostly Russolo’s work; see MART, 45–48 and 59–67.
30. Modernolatria was a typically Boccionian term; see Boccioni, Scritti, 203.
31. Quoted in Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 176.
32. Boccioni noted the correspondence between these two levels; he described the enharmonic intonation of a single intonarumori using the categories of simultaneity and dynamism. (Boccioni, Scritti, 178.)
33. Edgar Varèse indirectly attacked The Art of Noises when he wrote: “Why do you Italian futurists merely reproduce from the flux of our everyday life what is superficial and annoying?”; see Varèse, “VERBE,” 391 5 (1917): 42. Over time, Varèse changed his mind, and toward the end of the 1920s, the two musicians became friends. On December 27, 1929, at the Russolo concert that accompanied the opening of the exhibit of futurist painting in Paris at Galerie 23, Varèse briefly introduced two of the instruments that Russolo had engineered, the noise harmonium and the enharmonic bow. (The poster for this event is reproduced in Maffina’s 1977 catalog, 66.) Russolo and Varèse remained in touch until at least 1934, as documented by letters, later published in Lista, 143–49.
Luigi Russolo, Futurist Page 34
