The Futurists
Umberto Boccioni, The Dynamism of a Cyclist
"Away! Let us break out since we cannot much
longer restrain our desire to create finally a new
musical reality, with a generous distribution of
resonant slaps in the face, discarding violins,
pianos, double-basses and plaintive organs. Let us
break out!"
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Luigi Russolo wrote these
incendiary words nearly 100
years ago in an iconoclastic
essay called “The Art of
Noises”
But what was he really
calling for?
Who were The Futurists?
How did they turn these
words into art?
F. T. Marinetti
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F. T. Marinetti was born
in 1876 in Alexandria,
Egypt
He was the son of a
wealthy Italian merchant
He took up writing in his
teens and in 1894 he
began studying law at
the University of Pavia
As he progressed, it
became clear that he
was more interested in
writing than in the law
F. T. Marinetti
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In 1898 Marinetti published his first poem
Shortly afterward, he won an award for his poetry,
and was subsequently published in many major
literary magazines
In 1901 Marinetti published his first book, The
Conquest of the Stars
The book was an allegorical epic about masculinity
overcoming femininity
But the symbols and the florid language were
stretched to the point of being deliberately ridiculous
In other words, Marinetti used language to push one
point so hard that the reader wasn't sure what he
F. T. Marinetti
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In Marinetti's next two collections of
poetry, he began using the imagery
that would distinguish his artistic
leadership as a whole
In Destruction and The Carnal City,
Marinetti deals with the experience
of the modern city and new
technology
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He treats the city/technology as
something that is both alluring and
simultaneously horrible
Almost all of Marinetti's work steers toward the violent and macabre
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At this point in his career, Marinetti was something of a celebrity
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He was obsessed with making a splash, and with poems that
blended beauty with fatality he wanted to shock his readers
The Second Industrial Revolution
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Marinetti was living at the tail
end of The Second Industrial
Revolution
The Second Industrial
Revolution is usually dated
from about 1860 until World
War I (1914)
This period saw rapid changes
in the way people lived in
Many real and life-altering advances in
technology
were
made
at
Europe
and the
United
States
this time
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Living standards and the purchasing power of money increased
greatly
This period saw the invention or expansion of world-shrinking
technologies such as railroads, telegraph, photography, electricity
and radio
The Second Industrial Revolution
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The period witnessed the
rise of great monopolies,
such as Carnegie Steel in
the United States
With the streamlining of
manufacturing and
transportation systems,
economies of scale began to
develop for the first time
The crowning achievement of the Second Industrial Revolution, and
perhaps the invention that most effected people in general and
Marinetti in particular, was the invention of the automobile
Automobiles and factories lent industrial cities an entirely new
attitude than they had in the first half of the 19th Century
This would have a profound influence on many artists, and Marinetti
was keenly aware of the power and appeal of the modern city
The Founding of The Futurists
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In 1908, Marinetti flipped his
car into a ditch, although
nobody was injured in the
accident, he claimed that the
event changed him
Shortly after the accident he
began work on “The Founding
and Manifesto of Futurism”
Later that year he made the
trip to Paris, where he called in
a favor from one of his father's
old cronies who happened to
own many shares in Paris's
largest newspaper
The next day, his manifesto
appeared on the front page!
The Founding and Manifesto
of Futurism
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“The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” starts with a mostly fictional
narrative about Marinetti flipping his car
It employs the same dark imagery as Marinetti's other works, describing
machines as beautiful living things and humans as inferior creations
I stopped short, and to my disgust rolled over into a ditch, with my wheels in the air. . . .
Oh! Maternal ditch, nearly full of muddy water! Fair factory drain! I gulped down your
bracing slime, which reminded me of the sacred black breast of my Sudanese nurse. . . . When
I climbed out, a filthy and stinking rag, from underneath the capsized car, I felt my heart—
deliciously—being slashed with the red-hot iron of joy!
A crowd of fishermen armed with hooks and naturalists stricken with gout formed a
thronging circle around the prodigy. With patient and meticulous attention, they rigged up a
derrick and enormous iron grapnels to fish out my car, stranded like a large shark. The car
slowly emerged from the ditch, leaving behind in the depths its heavy chassis of good sense
and its soft upholstery of comfort, like scales.
They thought it was dead, my beautiful shark, but one caress from me was enough to
revive it, and there it was again, once more alive, running on its powerful fins.
And so, our faces covered with the good factory slime—a mix of metallic scum, useless
sweat, heavenly soot—our arms bruised and bandaged, we, still fearless, have dictated our first
intentions to all the living men of the earth:
The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism
Then the manifesto breaks into a series of pronouncements that vaguely
detail an aesthetic agenda
3. Up to now literature has exalted contemplative stillness, ecstasy, and sleep. We
intend to exalt movement and aggression, feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the
mortal leap, the slap and the punch.
5. We intend to hymn man at the steering wheel, the ideal axis of which intersects
the earth, itself hurled ahead in its own race along the path of its orbit.
7. There is no beauty that does not consist of struggle. No work that lacks an
aggressive character can be considered a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a
violent assault launched against unknown forces to reduce them to submission under
man.
9. We intend to glorify war—the only hygiene of the world—militarism, patriotism, the
destructive gesture of anarchists, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and contempt for
woman.
10. We intend to destroy museums, libraries, academies of every sort, and to fight
against moralism, feminism, and every utilitarian or opportunistic cowardice.
Museums: cemeteries! Identical, really, in the horrible promiscuity of so many bodies
scarcely known to one another. Museums: public dormitories in which someone is put
to sleep forever alongside others he hated or didn’t know! Museums: absurd
slaughterhouses for painters and sculptors who go on thrashing each other with blows
of line and color along the disputed walls!
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The Growth of Futurism
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From 1908 until the first world
war, Futurism would expand and
encompass artists from many
backgrounds and disciplines
In 1910, Marinetti met three
painters who enthusiastically
joined the Futurist movement
These were Umberto Boccioni,
Carlo Carra and Luigi Russolo
The group immediately published two manifestos on Futurist painting
These manifestos expanded the technology-focused aesthetic from
literature and into the visual arts
The painters wanted to shift focus away from human subjects: “We declare,
for instance, that a portrait, in order to be a work of art, must not resemble the sitter,
and that the painter carries in himself the landscapes which he would fix upon his
canvas. To paint a human figure you must not paint it; you must render its
surrounding atmosphere.” (Boccioni, 1910)
The manifestos publicized the group and kept them in the spotlight between
shows
The Growth of Futurism
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1910 also saw Futurism's rise in the theaters
Through “variety theater,” the futurists created “performance art” with
abstract, free-form theater pieces that presaged the happenings of the
1960s and 1970s
It's important to remember that The Futurists were not musicians
They were almost entirely trained as writers and painters, with the exception
of Pratella, who studied with the Italian opera master Mascagni
This most productive period was marked with many speeches and
exhibitions where the Futurists instigated brawls with a rambunctious crowd
that was fueled by their incendiary speeches
In July Marinetti went with a small group of Futurists to Venice; they climbed to the top of the
clock tower that overlooks the piazza San Marco and proceeded to hurl thousands of leaflets
down on the city’s residents, damning the city as “a market for counterfeiting antiquarians” and
urging them to “fill in little reaking canals with the ruins from its leprous and crumbling
palaces,” all to be replaced with “the imposing geometry of metal bridges and factories plumed
with smoke” … [When they went back for another speech in August they ] “provoked a terrible
battle. . . . The passeists were beaten up. The Futurist painters Boccioni, Russolo, and Carra
punctuated the speech with resounding slaps. The fists of Armando Mazza, a Futurist poet who is
also an athlete, left an unforgettable impression.” Violence, once again. Nobody understood its
media appeal and power better than Marinetti.
(Rainey, Introduction, Futurism: An Anthology, 2008 10-11)
Umberto Boccioni, The Noise of the Street
Umberto Boccioni, Visioni Simultanee
The Art of Noises
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This is the atmosphere in which “The Art of Noises” was written
Marinetti was trying to break Italian arts from the shackles of the past by
literally beating it out of them
The musician Balilla Pratella had joined the movement in 1910, and
although he produced two manifestos, neither had the impact of the one
penned by the painter Russolo
In “The Art of Noises” Russolo wrote perhaps the most daring, iconoclastic
essay in the entire history of music
Russolo called for no less than the abolition of modern musical instruments
and ensembles
He wanted to replace these with ensembles of noise-making machines
First of all, musical art looked for the soft and limpid purity of sound. Then it
amalgamated different sounds, intent upon caressing the ear with suave harmonies.
Nowadays musical art aims at the shrilliest, strangest and most dissonant amalgams of
sound. Thus we are approaching noise-sound. This revolution of music is paralleled by
the increasing proliferation of machinery sharing in human labor. In the pounding
atmosphere of great cities as well as in the formerly silent countryside, machines
create today such a large number of varied noises that pure sound, with its littleness
and its monotony, now fails to arouse any emotion. To excite our sensibility, music has
developed into a search for a more complex polyphony and a greater variety of
instrumental tones and coloring. It has tried to obtain the most complex succession of
dissonant chords, thus preparing the ground for Musical Noise.
The Art of Noises
First of all, musical art looked for the soft and limpid purity of sound. Then it amalgamated
different sounds, intent upon caressing the ear with suave harmonies. Nowadays musical art
aims at the shrilliest, strangest and most dissonant amalgams of sound. Thus we are
approaching noise-sound. This revolution of music is paralleled by the increasing proliferation
of machinery sharing in human labor. In the pounding atmosphere of great cities as well as in
the formerly silent countryside, machines create today such a large number of varied noises
that pure sound, with its littleness and its monotony, now fails to arouse any emotion.
To excite our sensibility, music has developed into a search for a more complex polyphony and a
greater variety of instrumental tones and coloring. It has tried to obtain the most complex
succession of dissonant chords, thus preparing the ground for Musical Noise.
The most complicated orchestra can be reduced to four or five categories of instruments with
different sound tones: rubbed string instruments, pinched string instruments, metallic wind
instruments, wooden wind instruments, and percussion instruments. Music marks time in this
small circle and vainly tries to create a new variety of tones. We must break at all cost from this
restrictive circle of pure sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds.
Let's walk together through a great modern capital, with the ear more attentive than the eye, and
we will vary the pleasures of our sensibilities by distinguishing among the gurglings of water, air
and gas inside metallic pipes, the rumblings and rattlings of engines breathing with obvious
animal spirits, the rising and falling of pistons, the stridency of mechanical saws, the loud
jumping
of trolleys on their rails, the snapping of whips, the whipping of flags. We will have fun imagining
our orchestration of department stores' sliding doors, the hubbub of the crowds, the different
roars of railroad stations, iron foundries, textile mills, printing houses, power plants and subways.
And we must not forget the very new noises of Modern Warfare.
The Art of Noises
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Finally, Russolo listed his six families of noises
1. Rumbles, Thundering, Explosions, Crashes, Splashes, Booms
2. Whistles, Hisses, Snorts
3. Whispers, Murmurs, Mutters, Buzzes, Gurgles, Scuffles, etc.
4. Screeches, Creaking, Rustles, Throbs, Crackles
5. Noises made by percussion on metals, woods, skins, stones, terracotta
6. Voices of animals and people: Shouts, Screams, Groans, Howls, Wails,
Laughs, Wheezes, Sobs
Then he ended with a series of pronouncements
1. Futurist musicians must constantly enlarge and enrich the field of sound
2. Futurist musicians must replace the limited variety of timbres offered by
contemporary orchestral instruments with the infinite variety of the timbres
of noises, reproduced by suitable mechanisms.
6. It will not be through a succession of noises imitating those of life, but
through a fantastic combination of the various timbres and rhythms that the
new orchestra will achieve the newest and most complicated aural
emotions. For that purpose every instrument will have to offer the possibility
of varying its pitch, or will need a more or less extended range.
7. The variety of noises is infinite.
The Art of Noises
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It's unclear exactly how Russolo's manifesto was received
While it was one of the most forward-thinking of the manifestos, Marinetti
had published a lot of them by that point
Furthermore, the world could feel the encroaching war...
But Russolo himself definitely believed in the philosophy he espoused
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Three months after the
publication of his
manifesto, he
demonstrated the first of
his Intonarumori
These noise-intoners
were intended to
become the orchestra of
sounds envisioned by
Russolo
But most of the music
that was created with
them was very modest
Futurist Music
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Not much actual music was created with the intonarumori, and what little
was created barely followed Russolo's creed
Balilla Pratella incorporated the intonarumori into a few of his orchestral
works, but they were used more as sound effects, much like Beethoven
used cannons in his Ode to Joy nearly 100 years prior
On April 21, 1914, Luigi Russolo offered a concert of nine musicians
playing the intonarumori in Milan at the Teatro del Verme
Apparently they played music for the intonarumori by Russolo and music
for mixed ensemble by Pratella
Inevitably, Marinetti and the other Futurists started a fistfight in the middle
of the concert
Russolo and Pratella offered a handful of other concerts in for the
intonarumori – mostly in Italy, but with occasional excursions to other parts
of Europe (6 total)
They also offered many private demonstrations of the instruments for
famous composers such as Stravinsky
Unfortunately, we can only speculate about these concerts – they were
scantily documented, and the reviews are vague
The instruments themselves were destroyed in WWII
All of Russolo's scores have been lost to history
Only a handful of Pratella scores remain, and in these, the sound-makers
take a secondary role to the traditional instruments
Intonarumori Reconstructions
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Modern scholars have attempted to reconstruct
Luigi Russolo's visionary ensemble
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYYkMux6Dgw
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbbmPD7NuDY
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kERwOEHJ4yI
Dada
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In many ways, the Dada movement was very similar to the Futurist
movement – but in other ways, the movements were worlds apart
In terms of their impact on music, they achieved similar ends, but the way
in which they achieved them was quite different
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Nonetheless, the story of Dada begins
once again with F. T. Marinetti
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In 1914 Marinetti published the “words
in freedom” piece Zang Tumb Tumb
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This book is a demonstration of futurist
typography that illustrates the Battle of
Adrianople, which he witnessed as a
war correspondent
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The book utilizes creative typesetting
and onomatopoeic words to paint a sort
of text-based multimedia picture of the
events
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This book was seized upon by Hugo
Ball and others throughout Europe
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1Yl
d7wGWEI
World War I
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As the first world war
approached in 1913 and 1914,
the world thought that a war
couldn't possibly last more than
a few months
People widely believed that the
economic interests of the time
would exert such pressure to
keep business flowing that war
couldn't possibly persist
So when the bitter trench
warfare set in after only weeks
of battle, people and
governments were disillusioned
Governments cracked down on
artists
European artists fled to Zurich,
in neutral Switzerland
Cabaret Voltaire
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In 1915, Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings were
two such artists
Ball was disillusioned by the war
And Hennings was wanted for forging
passports to help artists avoid serving in the
military
Under assumed names, the pair fled to Zurich
Penniless, they fell back on their skills as
artists and entertainers and convinced a local
bar owner to let them use his space for a
cabaret of the sort they left in Germany
They subsequently posted this notice in the local
paper
Cabaret Voltaire. Under this name a group of young
artists and writers has been formed whose aim is to
create a center for artistic entertainment. The idea
of the cabaret will be that guest artists will come and
give musical performances and readings at the daily
meetings. The young artists of Zurich, whatever
their orientation, are invited to come along with
suggestions and contributions of all kinds.
Cabaret Voltaire
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The cabaret thus became a beacon of new art creation during World War I
Many artists immediately joined up with Ball and Hennings, including
Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco, Georges Janco, Richard Huelsenbeck and
Hans Arp
Nights at the Cabaret evolved into wild happenings of simultaneous art
They read poetry, performed plays, sang songs and performed on all sorts
of musical instruments – often at the same time
The variety was immense, and the members were open to all sorts of
expressive work
Tzara and Ball began working on publications
while the group developed a nihilist, anarchist
anti-war stance
Although the group was not as monolithic as The
Futurists – they didn't have an iron-fisted
Marinetti to lead them – they generally created
art that ridiculed modern society and pointed out
the pointlessness of it all
Unfortunately, it's hard to maintain a successful
business based on the patronage of refugee
artists...
Dada Diaspora
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Cabaret Voltaire lasted for only 6 months, but the Dada movement that was
forged there proved to be quite resilient
As artists left Zurich, they took Dada with them, and formed Dada offshoots
in other countries
One of the major new forms of art that emerged from Cabaret Voltaire was
sound-poetry
Influenced by Marinetti's ground-breaking work, the Dadaists developed
sound poetry into and early form of multimedia art (text and sound)
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While at the Cabaret Voltaire, Hugo Ball wrote
and performed a sound poem called Karawane
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVpjIJ8a9cA
Sound poetry was the only way that these
refugee artists could break into the nascent field
of sound art envisioned by Russolo, Marinetti and
Pratella
The artists couldn't afford to build the magnificent
intonarumori ensemble that was funded by
Marinetti's fortune
Kurt Schwitters
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Richard Huelsenbeck and Hans
Arp took Dada to Berlin, where
they met a prominent young artist
named Kurt Schwitters
Schwitters was well known as a
painter and visual artist
Unfortunately, he worked at a
factory in Germany during the
war, and he was associated with
the Expressionist school of
painting, which was ridiculed by
the Dadaists
So when he applied to join the
Berlin Dada movement after the
war, he was turned down by
Huelsenbeck and Arp
One reason that I like Schwitters
is that, after he was turned down,
he started a fantastic art
movement called “Merz”
Kurt Schwitters
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Despite being rejected by the Dadaists, he participated in Dada events, and
lectured on Dada
He even formed his own Dada off-shoot in Holland
The reason Schwitters is remembered by musicians today is that he left
behind a wonderful, large-scale sound poem called Ursonate
The Ursonate was written using musical structures such as a Rondo and
Cadenza
But instead of using musical notes, Schwitters used written syllables
Thus, Ursonate, and the other sound poems, become the first notated
sound art that has survived
In fact, Schwitters left us both a
score, and a magnificent
recording of his own performance
of the poem
(The performance might strike
modern ears as humorous, but
please restrain your laughter so
that we can all listen)
The Legacy of
The Futurists and Dada
It's difficult to overstate the iconoclastic nature of these groups
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Their work presaged much of the electroacoustic and tape music that was
to be made in the coming century
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Russolo's manifesto in particular is vividly descriptive of the Musique
Concrete movement that would be initiated by Pierre Schaeffer in the late
1940s
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Also, Russolo seemed to describe modern synthesizers and recording
software when he described his sound-making ensemble
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Writing in the 1950s, Igor Stravinsky summarized the musical careers of the
futurists
On one of my Milanese visits Marinetti and Russolo, a genial quiet man but with
wild hair and beard, and Pratella, another noisemaker, put me through a
demonstration of their "futurist music." Five phonographs standing on five tables
in a large and otherwise empty room emitted digestive noises, static, etc., remarkably like the musique concrete of seven or eight years ago (so perhaps they
were futurists after all; or perhaps futurisms aren't progressive enough). I pretended to be enthusiastic and told them that sets of five phonographs with such
music, mass produced, would surely sell like Steinway Grand Pianos.
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The Legacy of
The Futurists and Dada
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“Dada is the groundwork to abstract art and sound
poetry, a starting point for performance art, a prelude
to postmodernism, an influence on pop art, a
celebration of antiart to be later embraced for
anarcho-political uses in the 1960s and the
movement that lay the foundation for Surrealism.”
—Marc Lowenthal, translator's introduction to Francis Picabia's I Am a Beautiful
Monster: Poetry, Prose, And Provocation
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The Futurists and the Dadaists created the
artistic and theoretic basis that flowered into
20th Century electroacoustic music!
Bibliography and Further Reading
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Futurism: An Anthology, Edited by Lawrence
Rainey
Payton, Rodney J. “The Music of Futurism:
Concerts and Polemics,” The Musical Quarterly
62:1, Jan. 1976. 25-45.
http://www.dada-companion.com/
Dennis, Flora. Powell, Jonathan. “Futurism,”
Oxford Music Online. Accessed on 9/26/2011.