Luigi Russolo, Futurist
Page 37
Et écoute, écoute
Les convulsions du fer déchiré:
Et que le volant qui mugit soit pour toujours
Le ténor qui domine le concert!
Luigi, l’ululeur est l’oracle
Du Dieu qui t’inspire et te rendra justice.
L’abîme t’est reconnaissant, notre grand Parent.
J’entends les musiques uniques et vraies: celles
Qu’entendent les morts
Sur leurs têtes, sous nos pieds.
La Capitale future se réveille
Dans une explosion qui invite
À des bals masqués de force et de désir les cimetières!
11. A collection of poems with the title Les Médaillons does not appear in Viazzi’s catalog of Buzzi’s works; see Viazzi, ed., “I poeti del futurismo,” 23–24.
12. Reprinted in Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 125–26.
13. Russolo, quoted in Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 169.
14. I am indebted to Professor Pierina Demelas for first pointing out to me the influence of Baudelaire’s poetry on Buzzi.
15. References to thunder are found in both Russolo’s and Leadbeater’s work.
16. Russolo in Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 169. Russolo also claimed that the ululatore has “something that might remind you of the siren”; furthermore, Buzzi wrote in his 1912 “Inno alla Poesia Nuova”: “Today’s Lyre is the Machine. [. . .] a sound of a thousand sirens” (La Lira è la Macchina, oggi. [. . .] un anelito di mille sirene); in Marinetti, ed., I poeti futuristi, 107.
17. On Russolo séances at Madame Lazare’s, see Lista, “Russolo, peinture et bruitisme,” 28.
18. Buzzi, foreword to his Cavalcata delle vertigini.
19. Buzzi, Cavalcata delle vertigini, 81–86.
20. Leadbeater, The Hidden Side of Things, 88.
21. Belfiore’s Hoepli manual is cited in Celant, “Futurismo esoterico,” 111. Russolo’s passages on Mesmer are in Russolo, Al di là della materia, 45–51, 156. Russolo’s sections on Mesmer, the apostle of magnetism, and Charcot, the founder of hypnotism, seem directly to summarize notions learned from Belfiore’s manual, which was a best seller that went through four editions in fifteen years.
22. Ipnotismo e magnetismo is mentioned in Arte dell’avvenire, 1910; see Ginna and Corra, Scritti, 106. Russolo would have known either the first edition of 1898 or one of the popular and frequent reprintings.
23. Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione futurista, 239.
24. “La radia,” in Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione futurista, 206.
25. In Il futurismo a Verona (Florence: Electa, 2002) 65–67. The portion quoted here is the first half of the manifesto which is signed by Di Bosso. Scurto’s part 2 is on pages 68–70. I am indebted to Professor Marco Mancin for pointing me to this text.
26. In Il futurismo a Verona (Florence: Electa, 2002), 67.
27. Quoted in Antonio Latanza, “Al di là della Musica, al di là del Suono: L’accordatura dell’Universo, Magia naturale e umana,” in “i suoni, le onde” Rivista della Fondazione Isabella Scelsi 11 (semester 2, 2003): 18.
28. For a picture that testifies to this moment, see Marinetti, The Futurist Cookbook (San Francisco: Bedford Arts, 1989), 10.
29. “Fondazione e manifesto del futurismo,” in I manifesti del futurismo, 5.
30. For Ginna’s L’uomo futuro, see Ginna and Corra, Scritti, 234.
31. Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione futurista, 206.
32. Susan Wilson, “Futurismo e futuristi a Londra,” in Pratella, Edizioni, scritti, manoscritti musicali e futuristi, 90.
33. Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 80.
34. Here I use the word occult in its literal sense, as in “hidden from sight.” This choice, especially at this point of the book, is not coincidental. The term occult in its multifaceted acceptations encapsulates perfectly the connection between Russolo’s interest in occult art and futurists’ process of subconscious denial by which they hide traces of the past from sight—though not their occult interests!—thereby occulting them.
35. Russolo was reluctant to show the insides of the intonarumori. One could be tempted to read this reluctance as a manifestation of what Eco diagnosed and criticized as the mediatic “sale” of the image of technology as magic. In today’s society, users should not be distracted by the long chain of causes and effects that science, through its method of provando e riprovando (trying and retrying), ought to sort. Everything should happen magically, at the click of a mouse, and the inner workings should be disguised. See Umberto Eco, “Scienza, tecnologia e magia” in A passo di gambero: Guerre calde e populismo mediatico (Milan: Bompiani, 2007), 103–10. However, I doubt that Russolo was simply moved by a desire to protect his construction tricks for commercial exploitation. I prefer to think that his protective anxiety derived from the desire not to trivialize what he considered to be the metaphysical aims of the operation of his art of noises.
36. Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 30.
37. Lista, “Russolo, peinture et bruitisme,” 136.
38. In Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori, 184.
39. See, for instance Carolyn Abbate, “Outside Ravel’s Tomb.”
CONCLUSION
1. Lista, “Russolo, peinture et bruitisme,” 28. To be fair, Lista was commenting on Russolo’s activity after the 1930s—and it is debatable whether that phase was futurist or not. However, late occult themes (e.g., the etheric double, or a spirit abandoning the dead body) are distinct reprises of earlier, and even futurist, themes. This thematic coherence raises doubts about reading Russolo’s final activities as an abdication.
2. This history has not been concluded. Even though no longer enforced, the charge of apologia di fascismo is in fact still part of the Italian penal code.
3. Modernist critics would have been aware that the occult influence in futurism also spawned such unfortunate monsters as Ginna’s futurfascist homunculus. But although Russolo, too, eventually aligned his occult leanings with fascism, not all occult spirituality led the believers to reactionary, authoritarian regimes.
4. The 1912 breakthrough and subsequent subdivision of Marinetti’s aesthetics into two parts, before and after the Words in Freedom, is the premise of Leonardo Tondelli’s superb Futurista senza futuro: Marinetti ultimo mitografo (Florence: Le Lettere, 2009).
5. Marinetti acknowledged that contradictions have a role in the art/life process: “Create by living. Sometimes contradict yourself.” See Marinetti, Marinetti e il futurismo, in Teoria e invenzione futurista, 583.
6. The equation “Occult = Past” certainly would not have appealed to Marinetti and his companions. When they gave space to spiritual figures of the past (e.g., Leonardo), they did so in diaries and letters but not in their manifestos, and when they did it was only to claim the past as part of a lineage of progressive, futurist thought ante litteram, that is, as protofuturism.
7. Lista, “Russolo, peinture et bruitisme,” 12–13.
8. Barclay Brown claimed Russolo as the father of musical synthesis; see Brown, “The Noise Instruments of Luigi Russolo,” Perspectives of New Music 20 (1981–82): 48.
9. Russolo, Al di là della materia, 270.
10. Examples of this modernist partial portrait, focusing narrowly on technical novelty or lack thereof, include Gary Lachmann, “Ready to Rumble,” Wire (December 2003): 30–35, which celebrates Russolo as a “futurist too far ahead of his time”; and Edward Venn, “Rethinking Russolo,” Tempo 64, no. 251 (January 2010): 8–16, who just as modernistically complains that Russolo was not modern enough.
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