Luigi Russolo (1885–1947)—painter, composer, builder of musical instruments, and first-hour member of the Italian Futurist movement—was a crucial figure in the evolution of twentieth-century ...aesthetics. As creator of the first systematic poetics of noise and inventor of what has been considered the first mechanical sound synthesizer, Russolo looms large in the development of twentieth-century music. In the first English language study of Russolo, Luciano Chessa emphasizes the futurist's interest in the occult, showing it to be a leitmotif for his life and a foundation for his art of noises. Chessa shows that Russolo's aesthetics of noise, and the machines he called the intonarumori, were intended to boost practitioners into higher states of spiritual consciousness. His analysis reveals a multifaceted man in whom the drive to keep up with the latest scientific trends coexisted with an embrace of the irrational, and a critique of materialism and positivism.
Russolo, Luigi Noller, Joachim
MGG Online,
11/2016
Reference
*7. Mai 1885 in Portogruaro (Veneto), †4. Febr. 1947 in Cerro di Lavena (am Lago Maggiore), Maler, Klangforscher und Instrumentenbauer. Russolo zeigte schon früh musikalische Neigungen – der Vater ...war...
In the early twentieth century, the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo made a set of instruments called Intonarumori. In each, sound was generated inside a box with a horn, by means such as a wheel ...scraping on a string, controlled by a crank and one or more levers. The original instruments were all destroyed during the Second World War. This paper describes reconstructions using digital controllers attached to a lever and crank and sound generated by a physical modelling paradigm to mimic the original construction of wheel, string, box and horn. This allows for a kind of 'preservation' of the original instruments whereby their original enactive properties are recreated.
RETHINKING RUSSOLO Venn, Edward
Tempo (London),
01/2010, Letnik:
64, Številka:
251
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
One of the more telling indicators of Luigi Russolo's (1885–1947) Anglo-American reception is his description in Grove as an ‘Italian inventor, painter and composer’. Within this lurks the ...devaluation of his composing efforts in comparison to his work as the maker of intonarumori (noise instruments), his authoring of new aesthetic ideas, and his activities as a painter. There is little, perhaps, to argue with in this assessment, for (somewhat ironically) Russolo's music of the future has been consigned irrevocably to the music of the past; Raymond Fearn has suggested that ‘the musical remnants from this period have remained to a large extent in the realm of musical archaeology’. The only material traces available for musical archaeologists are the opening seven bars of the score of Il risveglio di una città (The Awakening of the City; 1913–14): the machines that were to play it were destroyed during the Second World War. The loss of Russolo's compositions has inevitably distorted our understanding of his work and has served to throw attention onto those progressive, and sometimes speculative, theoretical and mechanical aspects of it that have survived in written accounts, at the expense of those elements that are of a more traditional or pragmatic nature. Study of the remaining fragments of Il risveglio di una città, leavened with necessary doses of circumspection and speculation, forms a vital and hitherto under-utilized component to any assessment of Russolo's career.
Lee chronicles how artist Luigi Russolo and one of the early members of the Futurist movement, applied futurism to music just as easily as to the visual arts. Russolo wrote a long letter to his ...friend, the composer Francesco Balilla Pratella, explaining his thoughts on the subject. Later published in book form as L'arte dei rumori (The Art of Noises), this began with a survey of musical history that rested on the distinction between noise and sound. As such, sounds were considered sacred and reserved for acts of worship. Russolo was determined to lead by example, shortly after penning L'Arte dei rumori, he set himself to designing and building a large number of noise-generating machines called intonarumori.
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