Luigi Russolo Futurist

“Luigi Russolo is increasingly being recognized as an important figure in 20th century art and music, and his work deserves to be better understood. Chessa’s archival research and readings of esoteric or otherwise little-known texts are impressive, and he offers a convincing account of the influence of the occult on Russolo and the Futurists in general. This book alters our conception of Russolo, Futurism, and the early artistic avant-garde.”—Christoph Cox, Hampshire College “This book is timely, and merits the attention of a wider audience. Luigi Russolo, futurista makes a compelling argument that radically revises our views on a major creative figure of the twentieth century. Luciano Chessa provides vast amounts of information on the ideas and trends that influenced the Futurists, and offers a wealth of insight and observations that point the way for further research on avant-garde music and art in the twentieth century.”—Paul DeMarinis, Department of Art and Art History, Stanford University

The second volume of this anthology of musical aesthetics proceeds from the rational, common-sense examination of the 18th-century artistic experience to the realm of 19th-century expressiveness. The rational foundation of aesthetics gave way to an emphasis on an art form's strength of feeling and expressive power, a purity of the creation and the creator. No longer confined to a restricted sense of beauty, music admitted the violent, the enormous and the ugly into its sphere of emotion, now the era of romanticism and Sturm und Drang. These developments are here detailed in the writings of Wackenroder, Herder, Thibaut, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kirkegaard, Wagner, Hanslick, Ambros, Nietzsche, Spencer, Gurney, and Haussegger. Through them we see the classical province of proportion, educated taste and contained expressiveness recede, and the emotional realism of music come to the fore.

The music and noise manifestos of the Italian Futurists formed a blueprint for sonic warfare waged against traditionalism, a radical new agenda played out with machines primed for maximal acoustic destruction and aimed at the negation of all existing value systems. THE ART OF NOISE collects together these and other writings for the first time in English, showing how the origins of modern noise music actually date from a century ago, forming an invaluable insight into Futurist thought and its most enduring and relevant legacies, and revealing how an understanding of noise-art is key to a complete comprehension of Futurist painting. THE ART OF NOISE collects five key Futurist manifestos: Luigi Russolo's The Art Of Noises and The Futurist Noise Machines, and Balilla Pratella's Manifesto Of Futurist Musicians, Technical Manifesto Of Futurist Music, and Destruction Of Quadrature; plus Carlo Carrà's related sensory manifesto The Painting Of Sounds, Noises And Smells; Bruno Corra's notes on Chromatic Music; Ferrucchio Busoni's visionary and influential Sketch For A New Aesthetic Of Sound Art; a historical introduction on Futurist music and its legacy; and a chronology of Futurist music and noise. This new expanded edition includes F.T. Marinetti's original 11-point Manifesto Of Futurism, first published in 1909. Marinetti, Russolo and Pratella are founding members of Italian Futurism, whose work has immense art-historical importance.

Founded in 1909 by the Italian writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Futurism was a radical art and social movement that glorified modernistic concepts of speed, destruction, noise, machines, cities and war. Marinetti's obsession with the future even extended to the abolition of libraries and museums, which he demanded be burned to the ground in a vortex of incendiary violence. Over 100 years later, Futurism stands as a key conceptual movement of the 20th century, one whose ideas are still ominously relevant in the age of rampant technological progress, suicide bombers and unmanned drone strikes. This special ebook volume in the Radical Manifesto series collects nine of the most challenging manifestos of the early Futurist Movement, from Marinetti's founding charter and subsequent calls to war to the seminal noise theories and machine music blueprints of Luigi Russolo and Balilla Pratella. It also contains as a bonus the first manifesto of Russian Futurism, written by Vladimir Mayakovsky and others.

February 21-September 1, 2014 The first comprehensive overview of Italian Futurism to be presented in the United States, this multidisciplinary exhibition examines the historical sweep of the movement from its inception with F.T. Marinetti's Futurist manifesto in 1909 through its demise at the end of World War II. Presenting over 300 works executed between 1909 and 1944, the chronological exhibition encompasses not only painting and sculpture, but also architecture, design, ceramics, fashion, film, photography, advertising, free-form poetry, publications, music, theater, and performance. To convey the myriad artistic languages employed by the Futurists as they evolved over a 35-year period, the exhibition integrates multiple disciplines in each section. Italian Futurism is organized by Vivien Greene, Curator, 19th- and Early 20th-Century Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. In addition, a distinguished international advisory committee has been assembled to provide expertise and guidance.

Incompletion is an essential condition of cultural history, and particularly the idea of the fragment became a central element of Romantic art which continued being of high relevance to the various strands of modernist and contemporary aesthetics.

Exploring literature, the visual and performing arts, photography, music, and film, the author uses the lens of European machine culture to elucidate the work of a broad set of artists and practitioners, including Censi, Depero, Marinetti, Munari, and Prampolini. The machine emerges here as an archaeology of technology in modernity: the time machine of futurism.