An artistic movement founded in 1909 by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) which, while initially Italian, was soon adopted by the Russian avant garde. An obsession with speed, machines and industry was coupled with an iconoclasm that revelled in violence: the combination of these factors in early 20th-century society and their impact on humanity were the identifying factors of activity which encompassed not only the visual arts, literature and music but also film, clothing design and cookery. The genres of manifesto and ‘artist's book’ were significantly developed by the Italian and Russian groups respectively; subversive performances which encouraged anarchic and violent reactions were common to both (see Italy, fig.18).
Marinetti acted as a catalyst for Italian futurist composers and ensured that a futurist music followed swiftly in the wake of the movement's initial achievements in other fields: he spoke rhetorically of futurists ‘singing’ of factories, locomotives, aeroplanes and cities at night, these having symbolic significance for the futurist as well as encapsulating the reality of the machine age. Francesco Balilla Pratella was the first composer to involve himself formally with the movement, but, with the exception of passages inserted by Marinetti, his three manifestos (of 1910, 1911 and 1912) display a greater concern with minor details of compositional technique than with the expounding of a musical means of expressing the futurist machine aesthetic. Despite an interest in quarter-tones and improvisation, the few futurist compositions he wrote are of little musical consequence (his Inno alla vita, originally titled Musica futurista, is a clumsy piece consisting largely of whole-tone scales, while L'aviatore Dro is futurist only in topic and by virtue of the inclusion of some of Russolo's instruments). It was most probably those phrases inserted by Marinetti into Pratella's Manifesto tecnico della musica futurista (exhorting the musician to ‘give musical animation to crowds, great industrial shipyards, trains, transatlantic steamers, battleships, automobiles and aeroplanes’) combined with theories of ‘words-in-freedom’ (suggesting an equivalent ‘sounds-in-freedom’) which inspired the painter Luigi Russolo (1885–1947) to formulate an ‘art of noises’. As Russolo acknowledged, his own lack of musical training gave him a freedom of approach that the musician Pratella was unable to attain.
Russolo's manifesto, L'arte dei rumori (1913), argued for the incorporation of all noises, both pleasant and unpleasant, into music. Despite citing the use of timbral dissonance by such composers as Richard Strauss as justification for his experiments, Russolo wanted to use noise not for onomatopoeic effect, but rather as raw material for composition. With an assistant, Ugo Piatti (1885–1953), he constructed a number of intonarumori (noise machines), which were demonstrated between 1913 and 1921 in Milan, London and Paris (see illustration). The only surviving fragment of a work by Russolo, written in his specially devised notation, apparently indicates sustained pitches in quarter-tones interspersed with glissandos. Later instruments devised by Russolo included the keyboard-operated rumorarmonio, or noise-harmonium, and the enharmonic bow, which produced metallic sounds from conventional string instruments. Russolo's instruments never met with the commercial success he envisaged; the intonarumori and rumorarmonio were ultimately used to accompany futurist plays and silent films respectively before being destroyed in Paris during World War II.
During the 1920s a younger generation of futurist musicians produced music which, although infused with the machine aesthetic, was frequently intended as incidental music for theatrical performances. Russolo's instruments and other machines were combined with conventional forces by Silvio Mix, Nuccio Fiorda (1897–1975), Franco Casavola (whose ballet La danza dell'elica featured an internal combustion engine) and Pannigi (whose Ballo meccanico of 1922 included two motorcycles). Russolo's arte dei rumori was later incorporated by futurist artists into their sculpture, scenography and costume design, and Fidele Azari, creator of the Futurist Aerial Theatre, collaborated with Russolo to create ‘flying intonarumori’ – aeroplanes whose engines had been modified so that the pitch, volume and sound quality could be controlled by the pilot. However, the most extreme extension of Russolo's theories came with Marinetti's Futurist Radiophonic Theatre of 1933, the first example of sound collage. Broadcasts consisted of non-hierarchical combinations of sound (musical and non-musical) and silence, both of specified duration.
Russian futurism organized itself differently from its Italian counterpart: comparatively exclusive groups sprang up in Moscow and St Petersburg, in many cases consisting simply of a few key figures (such as Vladimir Mayakovsky and the Burlyuk brothers in Moscow, and Aleksey Kruchyonïkh and Velemir [Viktor] Khlebnikov in St Petersburg). Like the Italians, the various Russian groups proclaimed their ideas in manifestos; these were public, absurd and spattered with iconoclastic posturing notwithstanding the futurists' arguable links with symbolism, the then moribund aesthetic of the fin de siècle. The essentially literary form of the manifesto was given a living artistic embodiment in the notorious tours made around provincial Russia which consisted of speeches, theatrical performances and carefully calculated outrages. Those Russian composers who were in some way linked to futurist circles – such as Lourié, Matyushin and Roslavets – stood mostly on the periphery of the movement rather than in the central or official position occupied by Russolo and Pratella. The attraction of amateur musicians to futurism was as evident in Russian circles; the one-time court violinist and later quasi-suprematist painter Mikhail Matyushin (1864–1933) became actively involved with the movement when he married the futurist poet Yelena Guro. He wrote music for the 1913 ‘opera’ Pobeda nad solntsem (‘Victory over the Sun’) which involved the combined efforts of Kruchyonïkh, Kazimir Malevich and Khlebnikov. The music consists of songs of a decidedly bouffe orientation reminiscent of Satie's take on cabaret song, along with bold gestures not so far removed from the naive bombastics of Pratella and, more significantly, passages notated in quarter-tones. Under the influence of the ‘mad army doctor’ Nikolay Kul'bin (1860–1923) Matyushin had investigated micro-intervals and published a brief treatise on performing quarter-tone music on the violin which influenced the experiments of Vïshnegradsky.
Kul'bin's salon in St Petersburg was also frequented by Artur Lourié, who claimed to have written a quarter-tone String Quartet as early as 1912 and whose early career and music mirrors the development and principal characteristics of the Russian futurist movement. He quickly abandoned his conservatory education and, after involvement with the manifesto Mï i zapad (‘We and the West’), which sought to wean Russian music from its dependence on European traditions, became an habitué of the notorious Brodyachyaya Sobaka (‘Stray Dog’) café frequented by the leading futurists. During these years he produced a series of experimental works of which the most famous, Formes en l'air, dedicated to Picasso, mirrors in its unconventional ‘discontinuity’ of staff layout the typographical experiments associated with Mayakovksy and Khlebnikov. Roslavets, who corresponded frequently with Matyushin and was a friend of Malevich, formulated a radically atonal compositional technique; although he never considered himself a futurist, this stance earned him a reputation as one. ‘Artists' books’ appeared containing futurist drawings and poetry alongside compositions by Roslavets and Lourié; such publications became the mainstay of Russian futurist activity until the Revolution.
Futurists enjoyed an unnaturally high prominence during the few years after the Revolution due to the influence of Anatoly Lunacharsky, the ‘Commissar of Enlightenment’. In 1917 Lourié was appointed head of the music section of Narkompros and in the same year set Mayakovsky's Nash marsh (‘Our March’) for mass outdoor performance, a creative act emblematic of this sudden politicization of the aesthetic. In this later period, the subjugation of individualism was inherent not only in the conductorless orchestra Persimfans but also in Komfuturizm, the Revolutionary manifestation of the artistic collectives of futurism; the application of futurist aesthetics to everyday life resulted in the constructivist textile and ceramic productions of Stepanova and Rodchenko. The era of the first five-year plans, in which communism assumed a materialist face, saw the appearance of a public art that aestheticized technology, epitomized in the cannonization of heavy industry in Mosolov's The Iron Foundry (part of the now lost ballet Stal), Meytus's suite On the Dnepr Dam celebrating the opening of a hydro-electric dam, and most spectacularly in Avraamov's Simfoniya gudkov (‘Symphony of Factory Sirens’). This last, which took to extremes Marinetti's passion for a rapport between music and machines, was audible over a considerable stretch of Azerbaijan when performed in 1923; it outdoes any of the intonarumori not merely in terms of volume and eccentric hyperbole, but also in its complete embracing of the would-be democratic, anti-art obsession with the modern that characterized futurist performance.
Futurism has had a wide-ranging influence on the music of composers who were in no way linked to the movement itself. Diaghilev's enthusiam for all aspects of futurist performance, and music in particular, brought Russolo in direct contact with composers such as Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Ravel, although plans involving these musicians and the intonarumori came to nothing. Admiration for futurist theories was expressed by Honegger, Antheil, Ornstein and Varèse, the last named being a friend of Russolo. In Russia, the atmosphere of experiment engendered by futurism permeated the 1920s; mechanistic atonal music, which reached its heyday in the late 1920s, was, by the 30s, described as a ‘gross formalist perversion’ and along with other modernist tendencies became outlawed by party decrees on the arts.
The influence of futurism on the general development of 20th-century music is both broad and inestimable; many facets of the lingua franca of the postwar era had their genesis in futurist experiments of the 1910s and 20s. The embracing of technology by the postwar avant garde as a means of musical production distinctly echoes the experiments of both Russolo and Lev Termen; likewise, the acceptance of any sound as compositional material by Cage and the proponents of musique concrète has direct parallels with the futurist position. The wide application of microtonal systems since the mid-1950s vindicates the investigations of both Russian and Italian innovators in this field. Other more specific stylistic features of late 20th-century music with origins in futurist experiments include prepared piano, total serialism, extended vocal technique, graphic notation, improvisation (within the context of concert music) and minimalism.
†
Eng. trans. in Music since 1900, ed. N. Slonimsky (New York, 4/1971)
F.B. Pratella: Manifesto del musicisti futuristi† (Milan, 1910)
F.B. Pratella: Manifesto tecnico della musica futurista† (Milan, 1911)
F.B. Pratella: La distruzione della quadratura (Bologna, 1912)
L. Russolo: L'arte dei rumori† (Milan, 1913; Eng. trans. 1967); enlarged (Milan, 1916; Eng. trans., 1986) [incl. writings by and about Russolo, and full list of his writings]
F.B. Pratella: Evoluzione della musica dal 1910 al 1917 (Milan, 1918–19) [incl. manifestos]
F. Casavola: ‘La musica futurista’, ‘Le atmosfere cromatiche della musica’, ‘Le versioni scenico plastiche della musica’, Il futurismo, no.10 (1924); ‘La musica futurista’ repr. in Discoteca alta fedeltà, xii/Jan–Feb (1971), 46
F. Casavola, A.G. Bragaglia and S.A. Luciani: ‘Le sintesi visive della musica’, Il futurismo no.10 (1924); also in Noi, 2nd ser., i/6–9 (1923–4), 12
F.B. Pratella: ‘Scritti futuristici’, Scritti vari di pensiero, di arte, di storia musicale (Bologna, 1933), 49–136 [incl. manifestos]
A. Giuntini and F.T. Marinetti: ‘Manifesto della aeromusica: sintetica, geometrica e curativa’†, Stile futurista, no.2 (1934), 14
L. Russolo: Al di là della materia (Milan, 1938, 2/1961)
N. Fiorda: ‘Musica e futurismo’, Mondo della musica, xiii/2 (1975), 29
Grove6 (J.C.G. Waterhouse) [incl. detailed list of writings by futurist musicians]
I. Pizzetti: ‘Musicisti futuristi?’, Nuova musica, xvi (1911), 3
G. Barini: ‘Musica futurista’, Nuova antologia, ccxlviii (1913), 152–4
F. Torrefranca: ‘Futurismo passatistico’, Il marzocco, xviii/28 (1913), 4
P. Mondrian: ‘De “bruiteurs futuristes italiens” en het nieuwe in de muziek’, De stijl, iv/8–9 (1921), 95–118, 130–6
L. Folgore: ‘La musica futurista’, ‘L'arte dei rumori’, Almanacco italiano, xxviii (1923), 225–6, 226–7
M. Mila: ‘Dall'intonarumori all'elettronica’, Cronache musicali 1955–1959 (Turin, 1959), 153–6
F.K. Prieberg: Musica ex machina (Berlin, 1960), 21ff
A. Gentilucci: ‘Il futurismo e lo sperimentalismo musicale d'oggi’, Convegno musicale, i (1964), 275–302
V. Markov: Russian Futurism: a History (Berkeley, 1968)
M. Kirby: Futurist Performance (New York, 1971)
J. Waterhouse: ‘Futurist Music in a Historical Perspective’, Futurismo 1909–1919, Hatton Gallery, U. of Newcastle upon Tyne, 4 Nov – 8 Dec 1972; Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 16 Dec 1972 – 14 Jan 1973 (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1972–3) [exhibition catalogue]
F. Escal: ‘Le futurisme et la musique’, Europe, no.551 (1975), 85–94
R. Payton: ‘The Music of Futurism: Concerts and Polemics’, MQ, lxii (1976), 25–45
G. Gori: ‘Il musico del futurismo’, Il piccolo [Trieste] (29 Nov 1977) [on Silvio Mix]
K. Fellerer: ‘Der Futurismus in der italienischen Musik’, Vlaamse Academie voor Wetenschappen, xxxix/3 (1977), 1–68
P. Hulten, ed.: Futurism & futurismi, Palazzo Grassi, Venice (Milan, 1986; Eng. trans., 1986) [exhibition catalogue]
N. Perloff: The Futurist Moment (Chicago, 1986)
P.-A. Castanet: ‘Micromégas futuristes: grands et petits moyens musicaux au service du futurisme’, Cahiers du CREM, nos.8–9 (1988), 37–51
G. Watkins: ‘The Music of Futurism’, Soundings: Music in the Twentieth Century (New York and London, 1988)
M. Radice: ‘Futurismo: its Origins, Context, Repertory and Influence’, MQ, lxxiii (1989), 1–17
M. Gordon: ‘Songs from the Museum of the Future: Russian Sound Creation (1910–1930)’, Wireless Imagination, ed. D. Kahn and G. Whitehead (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 197–243
H. Günther: ‘Futuristisches Welttheater: die Erstaufführung der futuristischen Oper Sieg über der Sonne’ [1913, St Petersburg], Welttheater, Mysterienspiel, rituelles Theater: ‘Vom Himmel durch die Welt zur Hölle: Salzburg 1991, ed. P. Csobádi (Salzburg, 1992), 381–94
D. Gojowy: Arthur Lourié und der russische Futurismus (Laaber, 1993)
M. Lobanova: ‘Nikolaj Roslawez und der russische Futurismus’, Glasba v tehnicnem svetu: musica ex machina (Ljubljana, 1994), 55–63 [festival brochure]
D. Lombardi: Il suono veloce (Milan and Lucca, 1996)
H. Günther: Futurist Theatre (London, 1998)
J. Powell: After Scriabin: Six Composers and the Development of Russian Music (diss., U. of Cambridge, 1999)
FLORA DENNIS, JONATHAN POWELL