This is kind of off topic in relation to the purpose of us reading this article, but Russolo's writing style gives me weird vibes about his personality. I keep imagining him being a conceited snob and kiss-up to "Pratella the futurist genius", which made reading the article a strange and slightly comical experience for me, and causing me to be distrustful of the validity of what he says in it.
At the beginning of the article, he's personifying and exaggerating the origin and history of sound, which made sense and was a pretty good description about the auditory aspects of life back in those days. Some distortion is there, but the general ideas seem accurate. Then, he begins to talk about how music (specifically classical music) has gotten boring and stupid. This is where it starts to get a little crazy.
"Meanwhile a repugnant mixture is concocted from monotonous sensations and the idiotic
religious emotion of listeners buddhistically drunk with repeating for the nth time their more or
less snobbish or second-hand ecstasy.
Away! Let us break out since we cannot much longer restrain our desire to create finally a new
musical reality, with a generous distribution of resonant slaps in the face, discarding violins,
pianos, double-basses and plainitive organs. Let us break out!"
His evangelical approach of discussing futurism is kind of annoying, although I have to agree that the idea is innovative and clearly relating to Project 4. When he begins to the list the kinds of sounds that futurists would use to create "music", it reminds me of something a teacher told us in high school. We were discussing the difference between abstract and concrete (figurative) visual artwork, and how the same two categories exist in sound as well. She said that abstract sound is every musical instrument note or noise that we hear in music, and if abstract noise didn't exist, we would all be listening to only natural sounds, like the sounds of waterfalls, wind, etc., pretty much the same examples that Russolo gave as the medium for futurist orchestras. So now I have categorized that futurists use "natural" sounds (also including industrial sounds that are seemingly natural to humans today because they are so commonplace) and regular musicians use "abstract" sounds.
He differentiates between noise and sound in that sound comes from natural things, and are quieter sounds that are not unpleasant to hear. Noise consists of sounds that are not natural, such as the hum of machinery, that are more likely than not unpleasant to hear.
ReplyDeleteThe only time he really discusses silence is when he talks about ancient life. Since the industrial revolution, silence seems impossible to come by in his eyes.
The state of current music to him is that it is boring and worn out. Futurists improve upon this by using unconventional sources of "sound" for music, some of which are "noise".