The Art of Noises: Futurist Manifesto by Luigi Russolo (1913) | Translated from Italian

The Art of Noises (Italian: L'arte dei Rumori) is a Futurist manifesto written by Luigi Russolo in a 1913 letter to friend and Futurist composer Francesco Balilla Pratella. In it, Russolo argues that the human ear has become accustomed to the speed, energy, and noise of the urban industrial soundscape; furthermore, this new sonic palette requires a new approach to musical instrumentation and composition. He proposes a number of conclusions about how electronics and other technology will allow futurist musicians to "substitute for the limited variety of timbres that the orchestra possesses today the infinite variety of timbres in noises, reproduced with appropriate mechanisms".^[1]

The Art of Noises is considered by some authors to be one of the most important and influential texts in 20th-century musical aesthetics.

Musicians/Artists influenced by The Art of Noises
John Cage || Pierre Schaeffer || Pierre Henry || Art of Noise || Adam Ant || Einstürzende || Neubauten || Test Dept || DJ Spooky || Dywane Thomas, Jr. || Francisco López || R. Henry Nigl || Material || Jean-Luc Hervé Berthelot || Daft Punk

DOWNLOAD ART OF NOISES ABOVE

Luigi Russolo, Intonarumoris, 1913

Lisboa, Museu Coleção Berardo, 2012

The Original Noise Artist: Hear the Strange Experimental Sounds & Instruments of Italian Futurist, Luigi Russolo (1913) | by Josh Jones | Open Culture | 2018

When you hear the phrase Art of Noise, surely you think of the sample-based avant-garde synth outfit whose instrumental hit “Moments in Love” turned the sound of quiet storm adult contemporary into a hypnagogic chill-out anthem? And when you hear about “noise music," surely you think of the dramatic post-industrial cacophony of Einstürzende Neubautenor the deconstructed guitar rock of Lightning Bolt?

But long before “noise” became a term of art for rock critics, before the recording industry existed in any recognizably modern form, an Italian futurist painter and composer, Luigi Russolo, invented noise music, launching his creation in 1913 with a manifesto called The Art of Noises.

“In antiquity,” he writes (in Robert Filliou’s translation), “life was nothing but silence.” After presenting an almost comically brief history of sound and music coming into the world, Russolo then declares his thesis, in bold:

Noise was really not born before the 19th century, with the advent of machinery. Today noise reigns supreme over human sensibility…. Nowadays musical art aims at the shrillest, 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.

Not quite so radical as one might think, but bear in mind, this is 1913, the year Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” provoked a riot in Paris upon its debut. Russolo took an even more shocking swerve away from tradition. Pythagorean theory had stifled creativity, he alleged, “the Greeks… have limited the domain of music until now…. We must break at all cost from this restrictive circle of pure sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds.”

To accomplish his grand objective, the experimental artist created his own series of instruments, the Intonarumori, “acoustic noise generators,” writes Thereminvox, that could “create and control in dynamic and pitch several different types of noises.” Working long before digital samplers and the electronic gadgetry used by industrial and musique concrete composers, Russolo relied on purely mechanical devices, though he did make several recordings as well from 1913 to 1921. (Hear "Risveglio Di Una Città" from 1913 above, and many more original recordings as well as new Intonarumori compositions, at Ubuweb.)

Russolo's musical contraptions, 27 different varieties, were each named “according to the sound produced: howling, thunder, crackling, crumpling, exploding, gurgling, buzzing, hissing, and so on.” (Stravinsky was apparently an admirer.) You can see reconstructions at the top of the post in a 2012 exhibition at Lisbon’s Museu Coleção Berardo. Many of his own compositions feature string orchestras as well. Russolo introduced his new instrumental music over the course of a few years, debuting an “exploder” in Modena in 1913, staging concerts in Milan, Genoa, and London the following year, and in Paris in 1921.

One 1917 concert apparently provoked explosive violence, an effect Russolo seemed to anticipate and even welcome. The Art of Noise derived its influence from every sound of the industrial world, “and we must not forget the very new noises of Modern Warfare,” he writes, quoting futurist poet Marinetti’s joyful descriptions of the “violence, ferocity, regularity, pendulum game, fatality” of battle. His noise system, which he enumerates in the treatise, also consists of “human voices: shouts, moans, screams, laughter, rattlings, sobs….” It seems that if he didn’t supply these onstage, he was happy for the audience to do so.

After Russolo’s first Art of Noise concert in 1913, Marinetti violently defended the instruments against assaults from those whom the composer called “passé-ists.” Other receptions of the strange new form were more enthusiastically positive. Nonetheless, notes a 1967 “Great Bear Pamphlet” that reprints The Art of Noises, the effects aren’t exactly what Russolo intended: “Listening to the harmonized combined pitches of the bursters, the whistlers, and the gurglers, no one remembered autos, locomotives or running waters; one rather experienced an intense emotion of futurist art, absolutely unforeseen and like nothing but itself.” 

FULL ARTICLE: The Original Noise Artist: Hear the Strange Experimental Sounds & Instruments of Italian Futurist, Luigi Russolo (1913)

Art of Noises  by Luigi Russolo

22 min | reading + lecture by loopool  | NOV 2013

(Excerpt from "Come on, feel the noise" by Paul Hegarty - published on 11 Nov 2008  The Guardian)

In his 1913 book The Art of Noises, Luigi Russolo imagines a future dominated by noise. In this soundscape, noises are a colossal part of what drives culture. He wanted to incorporate the beauty of industrial noise into the properly aesthetic realm of music.

For this he devised noise-making machines that he called "intonarumori", which, through cranks, mechanical effects and the passage of air, would alter our idea of what sounds could be made into music. His growlers, cracklers and bursters (and many more) would form an orchestra that would first reflect the new world of the machine, then contribute to human development.

In the future seen from 1913, the noise-making machines are everywhere: orchestras and the old machines that hid noise from us, such as musical instruments, are redundant, part of pre-history. In a society ruled by noise, everything would begin again.

Industry is not only ever-present, it is noisier than ever, and the city becomes a perpetual symphony (for all his radical notions, ideas like "the symphony" still pre-occupied Russolo and his fellow futurists). Art and manufacturing offer a resonant dissonance (not, of course, harmony), and the noises from nature and human culture comprise a soundworld based on pistons, levers and hammers. This is a world that conjures the worst kind of noise, that of loud and unwanted sound, but for Russolo, this was just a matter of retraining and reworking our ears.

John Cage attempted something similar with his silent pieces, most famously in David Tudor's non-playing of a piano for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, known as 4'33", in 1952. In place of a concert the world intrudes, the world of all sound, something Cage tried to harness for music, so that the world could become musical.

Russolo and Cage, like Satie and Varëse, had included noises in their musical works, but these noises had been "musicalised", restructured so that the noise is dissipated.

We might want to think of noise music as a history of the use of noise (and reactions to this), going from Russolo (or Wagner, Schoenberg, etc) through the cut and pasting of the 1950s and 1960s, Iggy and the Velvets, industrial music, power electronics, and, finally, the outpouring of noise from Japan, especially in the 1990s.