Futurist Manifesto - 1913 Letter by Luigi Russolo
Ancient Life was all silence. Noise came into existence as the result of 19th century machines. With the exception of storms, waterfalls and tectonic activity, the noise that did punctuate the silence were not loud, prolonged or varied. “This is why man was thoroughly amazed by the first sounds he obtained out of a hole in reeds or a stretched string.”
Primitive people attributed to sound a divine origin. Thus was developed the conception of sound as something apart, different from and independent of life. The result of this was music, a fantastic world superimposed upon reality, an inviolable and sacred world.
Thus we are approaching noise-sound. This revolution of music is paralleled by the increasing proliferation of machinery sharing in human labor. In the pounding atmosphere of great cities as well as in the formerly silent countryside, machines create today such a large number of varied noises that pure sound, with its littleness and its monotony, now fails to arouse any emotion.
The most complicated orchestra can be reduced to four or five categories of instruments with different sound tones: rubbed string instruments, pinched string instruments, metallic wind instruments, wooden wind instruments, and percussion instruments. Music marks time in this small circle and vainly tries to create a new variety of tones. We must break at all cost from this restrictive circle of pure sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds.
It is hardly possible to consider the enormous mobilization of energy that a modern orchestra represents without concluding that the acoustic results are pitiful. Is there any, thing more ridiculous in the world than twenty men slaving to increase the plaintive meeowing of violins?
After visiting a staid concert
Let’s get out quickly, for I can’t repress much longer the intense desire to create a true musical reality finally by distributing big loud slaps right and left, stepping and pushing over violins and pianos, bassoons and moaning organs! Let’s go out!
Noise accompanies every manifestation of our life. Noise is familiar to us. Noise has the power to bring us back to life. On the other hand, sound, foreign to life, always a musical, outside thing, an occasional element, has come to strike our ears no more than an overly familiar face does our eye. Noise, gushing confusely and irregularly out of life, is never totally revealed to us and it keeps in store innumerable surprises for our benefit. We feel certain that in selecting and coordinating all noises we will enrich men with a voluptuousness they did not suspect
Music has reached a point that it no longer has the power to excite or inspire. Even when new, it sounds old and familiar.
On Luigi Russolo
None of his intoning instruments have survived: some were destroyed in World War II; while others have been lost.
Intonarumori are experimental musical instruments he invented and created.
These instruments used enharmonic properties to create sounds that glided from one note to the next, like the sound of a police siren