Luigi Russolo, Futurist Read online

  LUIGI RUSSOLO, FUTURIST

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Ahmanson Foundation Humanities Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.

  LUIGI RUSSOLO, FUTURIST

  NOISE, VISUAL ARTS, AND THE OCCULT

  Luciano Chessa

  University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

  University of California Press

  Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

  University of California Press, Ltd.

  London, England

  © 2012 by The Regents of the University of California

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Chessa, Luciano, 1971–

  Luigi Russolo, futurist : noise, visual arts, and the occult / Luciano Chessa.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-520-27063-3 (cloth : alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-0-520-27064-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-0-520-95156-3 (ebook)

  1. Russolo, Luigi—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Futurism (Music). I. Title.

  ML410.R966C44 2012

  700.92—dc23

  2011046516

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on 50-pound Enterprise, a 30% post-consumer-waste, recycled, deinked fiber that is processed chlorine-free. It is acid-free and meets all ANSI/NISO (z 39.48) requirements.

  To Troy

  CONTENTS

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  PART ONE. Luigi Russolo from the Formative Years to 1913

  1. Futurism as a Metaphysical Science

  2. Occult Futurism

  3. Spotlight on Russolo

  4. Painting Noise: La musica

  5. Russolo and Synesthesia

  6. Russolo’s Metaphysics

  PART TWO. The Art of Noises and the Occult

  7. Intonarumori Unveiled

  8. The Spirali di Rumori

  9. The Arte dei “Romori”

  10. Controversial Leonardo

  11. Third Level

  Conclusion: Materialist Futurism?

  Notes

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  1. Luigi Russolo, Autoritratto con teschi (1908)

  2. Fillìa, title page of Arte fascista, December 1927

  3. Umberto Boccioni, Città che sale (1910–11)

  4. Giacomo Balla, Trasformazione forme spiriti (1918)

  5. Giacomo Balla, Mercurio passa davanti al Sole, visto da un cannocchiale (1914)

  6. Luigi Russolo, La musica (1911–12)

  7. Luigi Russolo, Autoritratto (1940)

  8. Luigi Russolo, Maschere (1907–08)

  9. Luigi Russolo, Autoritratto (con doppio eterico) (1910)

  10. Luigi Russolo, Autoritratto (con l’ombra) (1920)

  11. Luigi Russolo seduto in mezzo ai suoi rumorarmoni (1924–28)

  12. Luigi Russolo, Ricordi di una notte (1912)

  13. Luigi Russolo, Linee-forza della folgore (1912), central panel

  14. Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater, illustrations 22 and 23 from Thought-forms (1901)

  15. Luigi Russolo, Solidità nella nebbia (1912)

  16. Luigi Russolo, Compenetrazione di case + luce + cielo (1912)

  17. Umberto Boccioni, caricature of the futurist serata in Treviso on June 2, 1911

  18. Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater, plate W, “Wagner: Overture to Meistersingers [sic],” from Thought-forms (1901)

  19. The Three-Level Process

  20. Luigi Russolo, musical example from Risveglio di una città (1913)

  21. Paolo Buzzi, Pioggia nel pineto antidannunziana (1916)

  22. Luigi Russolo, Impressione di bombardamento shrapnels e granate (1926)

  23. Leonardo da Vinci, Codex Arundel 263, fol. 175r

  24. Luigi Russolo, drawing for the patent Intonatore dei rumori (1914)

  25. Luigi Russolo, drawing for the patent Descrizione della prima aggiunta al brevetto depositato l’8/10/1921

  26. Luigi Russolo, drawing for the patent Apparecchio acustico producente sotto l’azione di un rumore qualsiasi dei suoni la cui tonalità e il timbro sono definiti (1921)

  27. Luigi Russolo, drawing for the patent Instrument de musique (1931)

  28. Leonardo da Vinci, sketch of the viola organista, Madrid MS II, fol. 76r

  29. Adolfo De Carolis, header for Il Leonardo (1903)

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Like every work that aspires to be scientific, this book is not the result of a solitary effort; rather, it is the product of a multifaceted dialogue. My thanks therefore go first to Mary Francis for having encouraged me from the inception of this dialogue, for her constant and enthusiastic support, and for guiding me through the treacherous traps that accompany all publications.

  Other key participants in the dialogue were Barbara Moroncini, who gave this work its first edit; Julie Brand, who provided a thorough final edit; and Rose Vekony, the project editor. Their help was crucial in making this book speak to you as it does.

  The dialogue started while I was in graduate school at the University of California in Davis, and this book follows on the completion in 2004 of my PhD dissertation, “Luigi Russolo and The Occult.” I should like to thank my dissertation committee, David Nutter, Douglas Kahn, D. Kern Holoman, Pablo Ortiz, and Margherita Heyer-Caput, for their trust, generous exchange of ideas, and advice. I wrote the dissertation in Italian. It was translated by Tamsin Nutter, and her translation was revised by Beth Levy, Marit MacArthur, and Ramón Sender Barayón: I thank them all for their time and help.

  Justin Urcis, Mark Gallay, Nathan Kroms Davis, and Beverly Wilcox read this manuscript and gave me their feedback. Ellen Fullman, Gregory Moore, and Theresa Wong discussed specific sections of it with me. I am grateful to them all.

  Thanks go to my family—my father and mother, and my sister and brother and their families—without whom I would not have been able to accomplish this. Thanks also to Troy Boyd for his unwavering support throughout the entire process and beyond. This book is dedicated to him.

  A version of chapter 9 appeared twice as an article: “L’arte dei romori: Leonardine Devotion in Luigi Russolo’s Oeuvre,” Leonardo 41, no. 1 (February 2008); and “L’arte dei romori: Del culto leonardesco nell’opera di Luigi Russolo,” in Musica e arti figurative: Rinascimento e novecento, ed. Gerhard Wolf and Mario Ruffini (Venice: Marsilio, 2008). Both articles were based on chapter 11 of my dissertation, and it is on this version that I have based the material presented here.

  I was able to improve the section on the mechanisms of the intonarumori with the help of a commission I received from RoseLee Goldberg of the New York–based Biennale of the Arts Performa to direct the first reconstruction project of Russolo’s earliest intonarumori orchestra. Together with Esa Nickle, I curated a concert program that featured music specifically commissioned for this orchestra, which the New York Times hailed as one of the best events in the arts in 2009, and which subsequently toured internationally.

  My thanks go also to Mary Ellen Poole and John Spitzer at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and to Tom Welsh from the Cleveland Museum of
Art for their indirect and direct support. Finally, thanks to Margaret Fisher who upon reading my “Luigi Russolo and the Occult” first convinced me to revise and submit the work for publication.

  Introduction

  To enrich means to add, not to substitute or to abolish.

  —Luigi Russolo, The Enharmonic Bow

  On a summer evening the Russolos were entertaining a guest, when Russolo, pleading fatigue and sleepiness, went to bed. The lady and the guest continued chatting for a little longer, until she, the good nights said, retired. While ascending the internal staircase, her gaze was attracted upward: something that had never happened to her. It was then that she saw a kind of white ghost appearing at the banister of the landing, and quickly recognized its familiar face: it was Russolo, leaning on the banister, all illuminated by the full moon.

  His wife gazed at him amazed and asked what he was doing and why he was standing there so calmly, and wrapped up in his white nightshirt. He did not respond, nor did he move. Alarmed by his silence, Madame Russolo descended the few steps to call on the guest so that she could be reassured that this was not an illusion. But at their return the white vision had disappeared. She felt humiliated and almost offended by the teasing of her guest, who treated her as a visionary. They quickly entered Russolo’s room and found him deeply asleep, calm, breathing very regularly. In silence, they left. Later, rethinking the incident, the wife was not able to convince herself that it had been a hallucination.

  The morning after the event Madame Russolo recounted the scene to her husband, who, with evident satisfaction, asked: “Ah! Do you really say? You saw me, actually me in that state? But then I have finally succeeded! I have obtained the doubling of my body. That which you saw, you really saw it: it was my etheric body, perhaps coming to see you go up to your room, while my physical body lay inert in bed. Good! Good! I am more than happy about this. But I pray you: don’t tell this story to anyone now; the reasons for silence are obvious and you understand them by yourself.”

  The preceding paragraphs are a verbatim translation of an anecdote that Maria Zanovello, the widow of the futurist Luigi Russolo, recounted in the third person in the biography of her husband that she published after his death.1 Her experience can confidently be dated in the late 1930s, years the Russolos spent in Cerro di Laveno, a small and idyllic northern Italian town on the shores of Lago Maggiore. Surprising as it may seem, this anecdote was not the result of Russolo’s wife’s fevered imagination; rather, it can be directly linked to Russolo’s writing (and practices) at the time, as the following passage from his 1938 book Al di là della materia exemplifies:

  By continuing the process of magnetizing a subject, once the phase of exteriorization of sensibility has begun, the layers of sensibility around the subject becomes larger and larger in concentric layers that gradually condense in two masses: one on the left, colored in orange, and one on the right, colored in blue. These two masses soon connect, as they are attracted one by the other—the right one, usually passing from behind the subject, reunites with the left one. These two masses, now joined, take a shape vaguely resembling a human body a little bigger than the subject’s body, and that stays, at least at first, on its left. This form is connected to the body of the subject via a special tube or vapor-like cord about a finger in thickness, departing from the stomach region (solar plexus) and joining this vaporous mass at the same point. This is a true ghost or, as occultists call it, an etheric double.

  To follow the phases of this phenomenon, it is necessary that clairvoyants be present, or that a subject in somnambulic state sees and describes the unfolding of the phenomenon. Other experimental tests have been run to ascertain the presence of this double. A screen of calcium sulfide becomes brilliant and luminous if this double, which one can also cause to move to a nearby room, passes over or near the screen. It is possible to cause this double to execute actions like moving light objects: it is, in short, something resembling the apparitions of ectoplasm that occur and have been photographed in séances such as those done by Crookes.2

  At this time in his life Russolo had set aside musical research and was almost exclusively writing about spirituality and the occult, as well as practicing meditation and yoga. Most scholars familiar with Russolo’s late writings consider them to indicate a departure in his thinking; some have been quick to follow Adorno and label them regressive, arguing that by abandoning the technologically inspired modernity of futurism for esoteric gymnastics, Russolo had de facto “abdicated”—as one Hegelian critic put it—from following the “spirit of the avant-garde.”3

  This view makes sense: nothing would seem to be conceptually further from futurism than outlandish stories such as the one that opens this chapter. Yet this reading is troubling. If spirituality constituted a late but entirely new course for Russolo, what happened to change his trajectory so radically? To my great surprise I discovered in the course of my research that throughout his active years not much changed in the way that Russolo viewed the world.

  Luigi Russolo (1885–1947)—painter, composer, builder of musical instruments, and a member of the Italian futurist movement from its inception—represents a crucial moment in the evolution of twentieth-century musical aesthetics. He is generally considered the father of the first systematic poetics of noise and by some even the creator of the synthesizer, and his influence on the likes of Edgar Varèse, Pierre Schaeffer, and John Cage is well documented.4

  Notwithstanding the increasing interest surrounding his activity, very few studies have been dedicated to Russolo. Apart from the above-mentioned—rather hagiographic—biography published by his wife, Maria Zanovello, in 1958, there are only a few scholarly studies, principal among them an edition of Russolo’s musical writings with an introduction by Gian Franco Maffina that appeared in 1978; both Zanovello and Maffina contain useful bibliographic and documentary information but both are slight from a hermeneutical point of view. Besides these two sources there are four pamphlets on Russolo and the visual arts by Maffina (1977), Ethel Piselli (1990), Diego Collovini (1997), and Franco Tagliapietra (2000), respectively.

  Of these writers all but Zanovello are art historians; they have focused on Russolo’s connections to the visual arts, and their discussions of sound are limited. This is also true of the most recent publication on Russolo, Luigi Russolo: Vita e opere di un futurista, the catalog of a retrospective of Russolo’s painting and printmaking hosted by the Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto (MART) in 2006. This catalog presents an updated chronology of Russolo’s artworks by Franco Tagliapietra, but it, too, includes hardly any discussion of Russolo’s musical contributions.

  This state of the affairs is all the more curious given Russolo’s current reputation among musically literate audiences and the importance that Russolo gave to sound investigations. Yet little is available on Russolo’s musical activities apart from introductions to various editions of Russolo’s 1916 key book, L’arte dei rumori; among these are one in French by Giovanni Lista (1975), which was translated into Italian and revised in 2009, and one in English by Barclay Brown (1986), as well as a handful of articles, master’s theses and book chapters, which are for the most part concerned with repeating much of the information found in Lista, Maffina, and Brown rather than engaging in reexaminations of primary sources.

  None of these writings is more than one hundred pages in length, and most of them focus on Russolo’s futurist period. Even so, likely because of a common view that futurism was a movement devoid of spiritual concerns, these contributions pay little or no attention to Russolo’s occult interests. My research began when I came to realize that these interests are crucial for a full understanding of his futurist aesthetics.5 In 2004 my “Luigi Russolo and the Occult,” which focused on the importance of Russolo’s interests in spirituality—the present book constitutes an expansion of that earlier work—inaugurated a shift in Russolo scholarship.6 The present book intends to continue this shift.

  The
premise of my work is that the theosophical phase of his late period—what is often considered his regressive change of direction—was linked to his longtime interest in the occult arts. This interest is already evident in his formative years and, more important, it profoundly influenced what was possibly Russolo’s most significant futurist achievement: the concept of an art of noises.

  My focus is on Russolo’s first phase of futurist musical activity: from 1913, the year of his Manifesto on the Art of Noises, to 1921. The year 1913, when he formulated the art of noises and began the construction of instruments to realize it, the intonarumori (noise intoners), constituted the beginning of Russolo’s public involvement with music, whereas 1921 was the year of the intonarumori’s last patent, the year of Russolo’s last intonarumori concert, and the year in which he decided to direct his energies toward the construction of another instrument, the rumorarmonio (noise harmonium).7 Given the fundamental continuity of Russolo’s intellectual activities, my study is not entirely confined to this chronological period but also takes into account both earlier and subsequent manifestations of his interests in the occult arts. Diachronical referencing to Russolo’s occult beliefs was not only essential for my research but should also provide a useful tool for future research on other periods of Russolo’s life.

  Until the publication of my “Luigi Russolo and the Occult,” Russolo scholars accepted several unfounded claims made by earlier writers. In her biography Maria Zanovello wrote: “In Paris Russolo met an Italian scholar of occult arts and every artistic activity was thereafter absorbed by a science that was for him still something new.”8 Maffina, repeating that claim, again stressed the novelty: “As he had done with painting, now he immediately abandoned his musical activities, throwing himself body and soul into a new and fascinating experience.” A bit later Maffina adds, “With the rise of the new passion, the psychological change is evident in him. This asceticism seems even more absurd if we think that this is the same Russolo who took an active role in futurist activities, activities that are very distant from those of the new experience.”9