by Ferruccio Busoni and others (Music 780.904 Art)
When one thinks of early 20th century art movements, perhaps “I should look in the music library” isn’t the first phrase that comes into your mind, but in fact these early art movements involved artists from all kinds of disciplines, including painting, sculpture, poetry, fiction, theater, and yes, music! And these early art movements — I’m thinking in particular of Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism — laid the groundwork for much of the art of the 20th Century, and continue to influence modern art and music today. The first of these movements was Futurism, which is officially noted as starting in 1909 in Italy with the publication of F. T. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto. The Futurists produced lots of manifestos, and many of them pertain specifically to music. I remember first coming across them in the early days of the public internet, around the mid-1990s, which seemed fitting considering the Futurists’ categorical embrace of evolving technology and the hustle and bustle of modern cities. And most of them pertaining to music have been gathered together in a book called The Art of Noise, which you can borrow from the Polley Music Library.
To begin, let’s address this book’s
subtitle, which is “Destruction of Music by Futurist Machines.” That’s
a pretty provocative title to get someone to open a book, isn’t it? I think
that it may be overstating the case that one will find in these essays, and to
be fair, this is one of those books that isn’t itself particularly scholarly in
nature: it’s basically reprinting those same translations of the manifestos
that have floated around the internet since its early days, along with an
introduction by Danielle Lombardi that first appeared in Art Forum magazine.
Outside of Lombardi’s introduction, you won’t really find any analysis of these
manifestos and writings here, just the source documents themselves. But
Lombardi’s article is a good choice for introducing new readers to the ideas
found in Futurism, particularly in music. And one of the first observations
that she makes addresses the subtitle of this book: while Futurists are often
remembered as being pro-technology, pro-industrial age, celebrating machines
and war and the rejection of tradition, the writings of their first major
musical figure, Ferruccio Busoni, take a more moderate position that embraces
both new and old ideas. In reality, much of the music of the Futurists
continued to use traditional musical principles, while attempting to add new
ideas, and brainstorm new possibilities. In this sense, the Futurists aren’t
really that different from any other generations, with new ideas continuing to
supplement the old.
In part, this misunderstanding is
related to the tumultuous history of Italy in the early part of the 20th
Century. While the Futurists got their start in 1909 (and perhaps a little
earlier, considering some of Busoni’s writings dating back to 1906), Italy
eventually turned to fascism after WWI, at which point much of the Futurist
movement was suppressed publicly, replaced with nationalistic art much like
what happened in Germany at the same time. Some of the Futurists, such as
founder Marinetti, became fascists themselves, finding that some aspects of
early Futurism like an admiration of war and the notion of establishing a new
national identity translated well enough to the new regime. But most of the
music written by futurists was lost, and only the manifestos, which had
circulated around Europe in earlier years, survive. Even the legendary
“intonarumori,” or “noise machines,” invented by Futurist musician Luigi
Russolo around 1910, only survive in photos.
So what shall we make of these
manifestos? One thing to bear in mind is that manifestos are historically done
in a provocative style—their authors are generally compelled to write them to
shake things up, socially, politically, artistically, or all of the above. But
before anything gets shaken, you have to have readers! So some of the bravado
and bluster of these writings can be taken with a grain of salt—on some level,
they are attempting to capture readers and stimulate discussions, a more
difficult feat back in the days before the internet, television, or even radio.
The beginning of Francesco Pratella’s 1910 “Manifesto of Futurist Musicians” is
a great example of this: his opening, “I appeal to the young,” is kind of the
radio DJ “shock jock” rhetoric of over 100 years ago. He goes on to discuss
what he feels is a kind of traditionalist mediocrity in Italian music of the
era, comparing Italy’s scene to composers from various other countries (whom he
amusingly praises and criticizes simultaneously). Like many manifestos, he
eventually reaches a list of demands, such as abandoning the universities and
conservatories, ignoring the music press, stepping away from music
competitions, and “the liberation of individual musical sensibility from all
imitation or influence of the past, feeling and singing with the spirit open to
the future, drawing inspiration and aesthetics from nature, through all the
human and extra-human phenomena present in it.” Regarding the latter, I find
this both inspirational and naïve: obviously most music and art over time have
taken inspiration from nature and humankind, so it’s a little silly to act as
though rejecting all previous traditions will somehow land one in a new place.
But he has some other interesting and more specific ideas that continued to
resonate over time, such as “the reign of the singer must end,” a notion that no
doubt influenced some of the intense symphonic writing of the early 20th C.
from many composers.
Just a year later, Pratella’s
“Technical Manifesto of Futurist Music” opens with a much softer and
historically realistic observation, simply that “All innovators have logically
been Futurists in relation to their time.” Indeed! There’s no such thing as a
totally new haircut, for example. What follows are some specific musical areas
of inquiry that are indeed very forward-thinking for their time, such as considering
the “chromatic atonal mode” for composing, an idea that had just begun to be
spread elsewhere with Schoenberg’s earliest 12-tone pieces dating around 1908.
He goes on to suggest looking into microtones, divisions of the octave even
smaller than half-steps. He proposes similar investigation into more complex
deployment of rhythms in music, and tempos that shift frequently. Just a couple
years later in 1912, he writes again with more detail regarding rhythmic
variation in music with his article “The Destruction of Quadrature,” which
proposes different ways of perceiving and notating rhythmic groups that can
take into account simultaneously-occurring rhythmic pulses, polyrhythms that
can shift like the internal rhythms of free verse.
Busoni and Pratella may have been
the foundational musical thinkers in the Futurist movement, but the most famous
is likely Luigi Russolo, for his intonarumori machines mentioned above, and his
manifesto describing their necessity and use, which was called “The Art of Noises”
and published in 1913. Starting around this point we get to my favorite parts
of this book, which place the work of the Futurists in a more purely creative,
out-of-the-box, sometimes even childlike light. “The Art of Noises” started
life as a letter from Russolo to Pratella, proposing that a family of “noises”
could be incorporated into music, reflecting both sounds from the natural world
and new sounds emanating from the hustle and bustle of then-modern cities.
Russolo came up with six “families” or groupings of noises that could be
conceptualized in a manner similar to the sections within an orchestra, and
composed for them using a variety of instrumentation including his new “noise
machines.” Russolo sent his letter to Pratella in March of 1913, and by June of
that year, Russolo wrote an article documenting a June 2 performance that
featured these new machines and ideas. There were machines produced for a
variety of noises: the “Roarer,” “Thunderer,” “Burster,” Bubbler,” and so on.
As mentioned earlier, sadly these instruments were lost over time, but we still
have a written score for “Awakening of a City,” one of Russolo’s pieces that
would have used these machines, featuring its own unique kind of graphic
notation. Even without hearing much of these instruments in action—only a tiny
fragment of recorded sound from the original machines survived—the ideas behind
these sounds have been influential throughout the last century. Works by
contemporaries like Arthur Honegger were influenced by Futurist ideas, as well
as post WWII composers like John Cage, and within pop music idioms, industrial
music and noise music in particular have embraced the Art of Noises in many
different ways. There’s even the pop band who took their name from this
document!
The remainder of this book falls
into an “appendix” section, though the material is still very much related.
Busoni’s 1906 article “Sketch for a New Aesthetic of Sound Art” is another
spirited investigation that looks at the fundamentals of sound and proposes
various new ways to expand musical resources. Just a few years before Futurism
became an official movement, Busoni was already considering the primal
implications of music’s emotional impact, questioning if present-day
instruments and notation systems were capable of expressing the full range of
these potential emotions, and proposing several ways to expand the
possibilities: He proposed a system of third-tones that could further parse the
octave even more than half-steps. He proposed several new ways to conceptualize
harmony, including largely abandoning it altogether. And he continued to try to
link these ideas to tangible emotional expression, which strikes me as an
interesting contrast to the fairly intellectual manner in which serialism in
music ultimately developed over subsequent decades.
Bruno Corra’s article about
“chromatic music” is here, too, and it’s a fascinating piece from 1912 that is
truly looking at the “chroma,” or “color” relationships that one could
potentially establish between music and color. It documents a two-year project
attempting to find useful, consistent connections between color and pitch, or
music and light, dividing colors across pitches, and different hues of colors
in different octaves. Futurist painter Carlo Carra’s essay closes out the book
on a related note: writing more from a visual artist’s perspective, he
challenges the reader to consider “The Painting of Sounds, Noises and Smells.”
All told, it feels like these
writings, and those of the Dada movement that followed soon after, led the
world to consider art from exciting new perspectives that many contemporary
artists still engage with every day. Reading these pieces, and discovering some
of the first times that these ideas were expressed during the beginnings of
modernism, can be inspiring, and cause one to think about their own
interactions with music, either as music makers or listeners, from new angles.
(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try The Music of Dada by Peter Dayan.)
Recommended
by Scott S.
Polley Music Library
Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?
New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!
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