The genre's earliest claim, the only Tier 1 form whose original instruments do not survive, and the oldest argument the catalogue has yet filed.
Italian Futurism's musical wing, properly called Bruitism in the Anglophone tradition (from the French bruit for noise), is the form of music that argued, as early as 1913, that the modern listener's ear had been transformed by industrial sound to the point where the orchestral instrument's nineteenth-century vocabulary was no longer adequate, that the proper material for new music was therefore noise rather than tone and that mechanical instruments to produce noise should be built. The argument was made thirty-five years before Schaeffer recorded a train; this is the form's editorial priority. It is also a form whose original instruments do not survive, whose complete works exist only in score and description and whose entire founding catalogue can be heard today only on a single 1921 phonograph recording made by the founder's brother. The Bureau files the form at F·03 because it was first; we file what remains of it honestly.
The founding event was the 11 March 1913 letter Russolo wrote from Milan to the Futurist composer Francesco Balilla Pratella, addressed in his capacity as a member of the Governing Group of the Futurist Movement and published shortly after as the manifesto L'arte dei rumori (The Art of Noises). The letter opens by referencing the 9 March 1913 Futurist concert at the Costanzi Theatre in Rome, where Pratella's Futurist music had been performed amid riots ("our bloody victory over four thousand passé-ists"); Russolo writes the letter two days after attending that concert, with the argument's intuitive flash framed as a logical consequence of Pratella's "marvelous innovations." Cross-filed at M·01 for the manifesto's full text and editorial treatment; the present file places the manifesto in its movement context.
Russolo (1885 to 1947) was a painter first, a composer second, an instrument-builder third. In the months following the manifesto he set himself, with the painter Ugo Piatti (1888 to 1953), to designing and building the noise-instruments he had proposed. They worked from a Milan studio. Each instrument was a large horn attached to a wooden box containing metal plates, gears, strings and a hand-crank mechanism; the mechanism produced a specific noise (the original Scoppiatore reproduced the spark-ignition engine of a motorcar), the crank controlled pitch across about two octaves and the horn projected the sound. Russolo gave each instrument a name describing its function: Scoppiatore (Burster), Crepitatore (Crackler), Ronzatore (Buzzer), Ululatore (Howler), Sibilatore (Whistler), Stropicciatore (Rubber), Gracidatore (Croaker), Gorgogliatore (Gurgler). The first instrument was completed in May 1913; by 1914 there were enough for an ensemble. Twenty-seven intonarumori were built across the next several years; all of them were destroyed during the Second World War.
The first public demonstration of an intonarumori took place at the Teatro Storchi in Modena on the evening of 2 June 1913. The instrument shown was the Scoppiatore, the original spark-ignition-engine simulator. Marinetti introduced the demonstration; the audience reaction, per a contemporary newspaper account, ranged from "Homeric laughter" to shouts of "to the asylum!" and "Open the box! You are imitators! You want us to appreciate an imitation, while we can easily enjoy the original!" The first proper concert of Futurist music with the full ensemble of intonarumori was held at the Coliseum Theatre in Milan on 21 April 1914, with Marinetti as compère. The programme listed four pieces: Risveglio di una città (The Awakening of a City), Convegno d'aeroplani e d'automobili (Meeting of Cars and Airplanes), Si pranza sulla terrazza dell'Hotel (Dining on a Hotel Terrace), and a fourth. The concert produced a riot; the police were called. The ensemble later performed at private and public events across Italy, France and England across the 1914 to 1921 period, with diminishing audience tolerance and accumulating press hostility.
Today noise reigns supreme over human sensibility. We must break out of the limited circle of musical sound and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds. Russolo, L'arte dei rumori, 11 March 1913, addressed to Pratella
The form's recording history is almost wholly absent. Only one contemporary phonograph recording of the intonarumori survives: a 1921 disc made by Antonio Russolo (Luigi's younger brother and a more conventionally trained Futurist composer) of two pieces titled Corale and Serenata, both of which combine conventional symphony orchestra with the noise machines as a kind of textural overlay. The recording is poor in audio quality (it is a 1921 acoustic-process disc), the works themselves are tonal rather than the radical noise compositions Russolo had originally proposed and the noise machines are audible only as background colour rather than as primary material. The Bureau notes the gap between what the form claimed it would do and what survives of it doing it; this gap is part of the form's editorial complexity.
The political context. Italian Futurism is structurally entangled with the rise of Italian Fascism, and the Bureau cannot honestly file the form without filing this fact. Marinetti, the movement's founder and Russolo's collaborator at the 1914 concert, co-authored the Fascist Manifesto in 1919 and supported Mussolini's regime through to Marinetti's death in 1944. Russolo himself was a more politically reserved figure, but his permanent return to Italy in 1933 (after a long-running abroad in Paris) coincided with his exhibitions being sponsored by the Mussolini government and his biographer Luciano Chessa argues that this signalled Russolo's allegiance to the regime. The form's musicological priority is independent of these associations; the form's downstream practitioners (most Schaeffer in 1948 and Cage from 1937 onward) cited Russolo without endorsing the politics. The Bureau's view is that the form's musicological argument must be filed because it was first; the political associations of the founders must be filed alongside, not under. Read this entry with that doubleness in view.
Russolo himself moved away from active musical work after the mid-1920s. Disillusioned by the limited audience reception, he returned to painting (his original profession), pursued an interest in occult and metaphysical subjects and eventually withdrew from the Futurist movement's political turn. He died in 1947 in Cerro di Laveno, age 61. None of his original intonarumori survived him: most were destroyed in Allied bombing of Milan during the Second World War; others were lost in storage or scrapped for materials. Modern reconstructions exist (the 1977 reconstruction by Pietro Verardo for a Venice Biennale exhibition is the most-cited; a 2009 Performa festival reconstruction by Luciano Chessa for a New York performance is the most recent), but the originals exist only in photographs, in Russolo's own descriptions and in the score-fragments he left behind.
The form's downstream propagation is almost entirely retrospective. Schaeffer himself did not cite Russolo in his 1948 journals; the futurism-as-ancestor claim was made later, by others, after both Schaeffer and Stockhausen had begun their work and after the post-war noise tradition had developed enough to want a deep historical pedigree. Schaeffer was reportedly aware of Russolo by the early 1950s and acknowledged him retrospectively but his own method derived from quite different concerns (radio-broadcasting practice, the practical question of what to do with a recording lathe). John Cage encountered the manifesto via the English translation in the late 1930s and explicitly cited it as foundational to his own thinking from Imaginary Field No. 1 (1939) onward. The post-1976 industrial tradition that this archive otherwise covers has cited Russolo continuously: Throbbing Gristle's Second Annual Report (1977) framed itself in part as the post-electronic continuation of the Futurist project and Cabaret Voltaire's name was chosen partly to invoke the Futurist-and-Dada urban-noise tradition.
What this file argues for, finally, is that Italian Futurism / Bruitism is the form's argumentative precursor rather than its technical precursor. The intonarumori were elaborate, mechanically complex, fragile and unsuccessful as a working musical infrastructure. The recordings that survive are inadequate to the original argument. The political associations of the founders are difficult. What survives is the manifesto itself and the manifesto is the form's central legacy: a 1913 argument for noise as musical material that every later form in this department and every artist file in the catalogue, has had to either accept, reject or quietly absorb. The argument was first. The instruments came second. The recordings barely came at all. The Bureau files the form at F·03 because the argument continues to do the work.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Edwardian era · last revised c. the Regency era