Culture Club by Craig Schuftan

Author:Craig Schuftan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2012-04-23T21:00:00+00:00

51. THE ART OF NOISES

How Luigi Russolo invented a cure for boredom in

the concert hall, and might just have invented Rock

and Roll too, had he owned an amplifier

Having woken painting out of its stupor, the Futurists turned their attention to the world of music, which, if anything, was in even worse shape. What was the point, wondered the painter Luigi Russolo, of twenty people sawing away at their violins when there was a symphony going on out there in the street? The Futurist had all the music he needed in the city’s ‘BACKFIRING MOTORS, CARRIAGES AND BAWLING CROWDS’. Compared with this, the stuffy boredom of the concert hall made Russolo sick:

Let us now enter one of these hospitals for anaemic sounds. There: the first bar brings the familiarity of boredom to your ear and anticipates the boredom of the bar to follow. Let us relish, from bar to bar, two or three varieties of genuine boredom…1

Clearly, music was in need of a shake-up. Would it be possible, Russolo wondered, in a letter to the composer Balilla Pratella, to bring the beautiful noise of the street into the concert hall?

What Russolo wanted was not to write orchestral music that imitated the noise of machines, as Mosolov would later do with his factory ballet; rather, he hoped to expand the palette of the existing orchestra to include all sound, including industrial noise, but also the sounds of the natural world. As with Futurist painting, Russolo was not about to use old techniques to represent the new; to him, the idea of an orchestra imitating a factory would be every bit as ridiculous as an artist trying to paint a car in the style of Rembrandt. The new music would need new instruments, devices capable of realising the rumbles, roars, creaks, whispers and tweetings that would constitute what Russolo called ‘The Art Of Noises’. But here, Futurist music ran into a serious snag. Russolo had built ingenious little boxes called Intonarumori which, when cranked by hand, produced noises. They were divided into types — the ‘bursters’ produced a sound a bit like a car engine, the ‘howlers’ were like sirens, and the ‘hissers’ sounded like rain. The problem was that in 1913 there was no such thing as amplification — apart from the kind where you attach a big cardboard cone to the hole where the sound comes out, and hope for the best. This is more or less what Russolo had to resort to, the result being that, in performance, the Intonarumori were almost completely drowned out by the orchestra. Those who could hear them complained that, for all of Russolo’s talk about the infinite variety of noises, all those little boxes seemed to produce the same, undifferentiated whooshing sound.2

‘Ahead of his time’ doesn’t begin to describe Russolo’s situation at this point. He had somehow hit on an idea that would inform virtually every important development in music over the coming century, including John Cage’s imprecation to listen in 4’33” but the

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