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.

Harry Partch: Music Studio

Short Films | 17 min | 1957 | Directed by Madeline Tourtelot

Harry Partch has been dubbed the “hobo composer” on account of his youthful wanderings during the Great Depression when he rode the railroads with other jobless Americans and found precarious work harvesting fruit. In this short 1958 documentary, though, Partch guides us through his Chicago home full of self-built musical inventions. Perhaps nodding to his itinerant past, a Japanese calligraphic inscription on the studio wall declares “though homeless, you make a shrine wherever you are”. Partch says that his version of shrines are his instruments, “unusual in size, shape and philosophic purpose,” adding “I am a philosophic music man, long ago seduced into musical carpentry.”

Along with esoteric spiritual impulses, it was a quest for different scales and micro-tonal intervals that led Partch to create such outlandish machines as the Diamond Marimba and The Gourd Tree. Sonically these metal and glass contraptions recall the tuned percussion and metallophonic instruments of Indonesian gamelan. But Partch’s actual inspiration came from the Ancient Greeks. His Chromolodeon works with the Greek enharmonic scale, while the 72-stringed Kithara is a drastic expansion upon a lyre used in Antiquity for dances and recitations of epic verse.

For the actual material out of which he fashioned his creations, though, Partch ransacked the modern world. He turned cloud-chamber bowls from the scientific laboratory into bells and repurposed brass artillery casings for an instrument he named The Spoils of Wars. Building these striking-looking and sui generis sound-machines was just the start of the artistic process for Partch, though. His compositions typically were one element in performances involving dance, costume, and mime-like theatre (see Delusion of the Fury, a 72 min film ). Like so many modernists, Partch’s true goal was to go back: to reinvent the holistic audio-visual art forms of the Ancient world, in which “sight and sound unite for a single dramatic purpose”.

HARRY PARTCH - Instrument Demos (Voice Overs by Harry)

I believe in many things; in an intonation as just as I am capable of making it, in musical instruments on stage, dynamic in form, visually exciting. I believe in dramatic lighting, replete with gels, to enhance them. I believe in musicians who are total constituents of the moment, irreplaceable, who may sing, shout, whistle, stamp their feet. I believe in players in costume, or perhaps half-naked, and I do not care which half; perhaps only with headpieces, but something, just something, that will remove them from the pedestrian, the city-street, the beloved- and-dutiful-son or daughter, the white-shirt-and-tie or evening- gown syndrome.

I believe in Bass Marimbists with footwork as beautiful as that of skilled boxers, in kitharists who move the trunks of their bodies like athletes. I believe in all sounds of the human voice, free from the bel-canto straitjacket. Finally, I believe in a total integration of factors, not as separate and sealed specialties in the artificially divorced departments of universities, but not sound and sight, the visually dynamic and dramatic, all channeled into a single, wholly fused, and purposeful direction. All.

—Harry Partch, Statement, 1960 

DELIVERABLES for FRI 4/17 MID-REVIEW

• PROJECT NAME
• PROJECT STATEMENT
• MATERIAL LIST
• 1 PARTCH PRECEDENT
• 2 PRECEDENTS
• CONCEPT SKETCHES + DOODLES
• PROTOTYPE 1 DESIGN CONCEPT
• w/ dimension, labels, color, materials, texture
• HOW TO PLAY STORYBOARD w/labels
• SOUND + VISUAL MANIFESTO
• SPATIAL ACOUSTICS
• RESEARCH SLIDES

**upload to projects tab  -> *DOCUMENTATION*

VISUAL + AUDIO MANIFESTO PART 2

DUE @ 1PM WED 4/15

PARTCH WROTE MUSIC THAT FOLLOWED THE SPEECH PATTERNS OF EVERYDAY AMERICAN LIFE, PARTICULARLY REFLECTING HIS LONG STRETCHES DURING WHICH HE LIVED AMONG HOBOS AND STREET PEOPLE.

AS A WAY TO DELIVER YOUR MANIFESTOS, YOU WILL PERFORM YOUR MANIFESTO IN THE FORM OF A VISUAL RECORDING. TO EMPHASIZE THE FULL THEATRICAL ETHOS OF YOUR SOUND MANIFESTO, CREATE A THEATRICAL VISUAL EXPERIENCE. THE VISUAL MANIFESTOS WILL BE A PERFORMATIVE READING OF YOUR MANIFESTO (SPOKEN WORD, RAPPING, SINGING, ETC.) WITH VISUALS.

• YOUR STAGE IS YOUR ZOOM WINDOW YOUR VIDEO SHOULD INCORPORATE THE FOLLOWING ELEMENTS:
  • ORAL DELIVERY OF SOUND MANIFESTO
  • VISUALS SHOULD RELATE TO THE WORDS, EMOTIONS, AND MOODS YOU HAVE EXPRESSED IN YOUR MANIFESTOS.
  • VIDEOS SHOULD HAVE A INTRO TITLE.
  • USE 2-3 SOUND CLIPS FROM YOUR SPATIAL ACOUSTIC RECORDINGS ASSIGNMENT 2 (OR RECORD NEW CLIPS) AS THE BACKGROUND SOUNDS.

RESOURCES

MANIFESTO PART 2 RESOURCES

RESOURCES TAB

SPATIAL ACOUSTICS

Marina Pokorny

NuVuX

April 13, 2020

Manifesto

I see with my ears and hear with my eyes. Sounds come to me visually and audibly. Today it was water and the wind. Water came to me in many ways, creating various noises. From rain hitting a window, waves crashing at the beach, and even the tiniest leak of a pipe, those sounds you are hearing without also seeing them, that’s all water. The wind has infinite sounds too. Rustles in trees to blows into a trumpet, all these sounds come from wind. Today, I heard the rain and wind.

I couldn’t see the rain hitting the roof or the wind rustling the trees, but when I closed my eyes, I saw the sounds. I paid attention to every individual raindrop, and I observed each one bouncing off the rooftop. While I watched the sounds of the rain in my mind, I realize that each drop has a different pitch, tone, and depth, and I could see the differences. I notice as some fall hard and splat on the roof, while others sprinkle in groups. Every drop I see produces its pitch depending on its weight and how it hits the roof. When I think about it, you listen to the rainfall, knowing it’s rain by the music it makes, and with this, you can see the rain in your head. It works the other way, too. If you are deaf but have heard rainfall before, when looking at the rain splat on the pavement, you can listen to it pitter-patter once it touches the ground. 

Today, I also heard and saw the sound of the wind, rustling the trees. I saw the wind forcefully push the trees back and forth. I saw the trees stop fighting and surrender to the wind, knowing if they don’t, their branches will brake. I saw the strong, sturdy branches thrash around while the weaker ones fell to the ground. Even with my eyes closed this whole time, I saw these sounds.