A painter, a letter and the moment noise was filed under music.
Luigi Russolo was a second-rank Futurist painter. The Bureau states this as fact, not slight. In the Futurist hierarchy of 1913, Boccioni was the genius painter, Marinetti was the genius polemicist, Pratella was the genius musician on paper and Russolo was the second-rank painter who happened, in a six-thousand-word letter to a friend, to come up with the only Futurist idea anyone outside Italy still uses.
The story is nearly a sitcom. On 9 March 1913, the Costanzi Theatre in Rome hosted the orchestral premiere of Pratella's Musica Futurista. Russolo attended, sat in the audience, watched the orchestra perform an aggressively forward-looking but, by Russolo's lights, conventional piece of orchestral music and went home convinced that Pratella was on the right track and on the wrong train. Two days later, on the eleventh of March, Russolo wrote the letter that became this manifesto. It was published in the Futurist journal Lacerba later in the same year. Russolo expanded the argument into a small book, also titled L'Arte dei Rumori, in 1916. The letter remains the more-quoted text. The book is more thorough; the letter is more useful.
The argument is straightforward and remains, after a hundred and thirteen years, startling. Music has always been organised sound. Noise is sound that has not been organised. Therefore noise is not music. Therefore, says Russolo, let us organise noise as music, with instruments specifically built to produce it, classified into families, played by trained noise-musicians, in concert halls, on programmes, alongside the existing repertoire. The Bureau notes that no link in this chain is original to Russolo. What was new was the seriousness of the proposal. Earlier composers had used noise as colour or as effect; Russolo proposed noise as the substance of an entire new orchestra. He then went home and built it.
By the end of summer 1913, Russolo and his assistant Ugo Piatti, working out of a studio in Milan, had built the first three or four intonarumori, the noise-instruments. By spring 1914 there were enough for an orchestra. The first private concert, at Marinetti's house in Milan, was a success on the terms by which the Futurists measured success: it produced a fistfight. The first public concert, at the Teatro dal Verme in Milan on 21 April 1914, was, also by Futurist standards, a success: the audience threw vegetables, an actual policeman intervened and one section of the crowd attacked another section that had defended the orchestra. Three of the Futurists, including Marinetti and Boccioni, were arrested. The reviews next day, in Corriere della Sera and elsewhere, were unanimous in their disapproval and unanimously detailed in their description, which was the desired result.
The orchestra toured. London, June 1914, the Coliseum: less rioting, more sustained heckling, smaller turn-out than in Italy. Paris, May 1916, with Stravinsky and Diaghilev attending: the audience applauded. By that point the war was on, the Futurists had volunteered en masse, Russolo was wounded in the head at Mount Grappa in October 1917 and the project entered the long second phase the Bureau characterises as diminishing returns.
The diminishing returns lasted thirty years. Russolo recovered slowly from the head wound, drifted into mysticism and theosophy, lived in Spain, lived in Paris, painted indifferent paintings, gave occasional concerts on the surviving instruments and stopped building new ones in the late 1920s. The Paris archive of the original intonarumori, stored in a warehouse during the German occupation of France, was destroyed by Allied bombing in 1942 or 1943; the exact date is disputed but the outcome is not. Russolo died on 4 February 1947, in a small village called Cerro di Laveno on Lake Maggiore, in obscurity. He had not made a noise instrument in twenty years. The argument, however, was filed.
The Bureau files him as Manifesto Nº 01 because every later entry in this department either argues with Russolo or quietly assumes him. Pratella's own Manifesto of Futurist Musicians (1910) is filed at M·00, the slot reserved for prior art the Bureau acknowledges but does not own. Cage's 4'33", in 1952, is the inverse argument: where Russolo proposed organising noise into music, Cage proposed letting noise into the place where music had been. The Industrial Records founding prospectus of 1976 (M·03) repeats Russolo's argument with the volume turned up and the references changed. Throbbing Gristle's The Mission Is Terminated (M·05) is the first manifesto to argue with the entire tradition Russolo started. Yamanouchi's Art Is Over (M·07), in 1985, argues with the tradition Russolo started by being so much briefer than him: five lines against six thousand words, both about the same thing, both, in the Bureau's reading, correct.
One more note before the document itself. Russolo classified the noise-world into six families, and he did so with the seriousness of a working zoologist. The classification is rendered below in its original Italian, with the Bureau's translation alongside. It remains a workable taxonomy. Almost any sound the genre this archive covers has produced in the last fifty years can be assigned a family number from Russolo's table without violence. The Bureau treats this fact as the manifesto's most durable contribution. The instruments rotted; the argument got photocopied; the taxonomy turned out to describe a world Russolo did not live to see.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. Classical Antiquity · last revised c. the Late Stone Age