With the start of the new year begins the adventure of GOLEM, a container of experiences and news from the world of music and art.
We will proceed by visiting you directly in the inbox of whoever wishes to support this project, offering ourselves as a place of exchange and dialogue with those who work in their own local realities or who feel the need to develop reflections on shared themes. Not a magazine, nor a fanzine, but rather an archive in the making of experiences past and present, reported by those who actively live our artistic and cultural fabric.
A project with which we will try to intercept and decipher the present, our “now”, but always with an attentive eye to a “before” that is richer than ever in lessons and food for thought. In fact, we believe that understanding what we live through every day also means retracing certain paths backwards, paths which, though already trodden in the past, allow us to observe with fresh eyes that ever-moving panorama that forms the backdrop to contemporaneity.
Well, as chance would have it, exactly 110 years ago, in Milan, the Futurist painter Luigi Russolo wrote a document that today sounds, precisely, prophetic, even stripped of its subversive and avant-garde charge: the manifesto of noise-ism “The Art of Noises”. Conceived in the form of a letter to the musician Francesco Balilla Pratella, the pamphlet set out to the Futurist artists and, today, to us readers a new conception of sound, no longer based on compositions that «immediately bring to the ear the boredom of the already heard», but rather on a new system that, thanks to technical innovation, gives the listener back the sensation of understanding the world in its complexity of sounds and noises, thus introducing him to a range of timbral and expressive solutions never heard until that moment.
In Russolo’s vision, what is particularly interesting is in fact the innovative composition of the Futurist ensemble. After specifying the families of instruments of the traditional orchestra, the author identifies the 6 categories of noises that will be combined with one another:
Now, despite the invention of the “Intonarumori” – instruments perfected by Russolo himself and exhibited in various concerts in Italy and Europe between 1913 and 1922 – it is clear to us, more than a century later, that we can see in the impetuousness of the manifesto an avant-garde spirit perhaps more inclined to a total break with traditions than to a practical realization in the strictly musical sphere. Indeed, if Russolo himself already bears witness to the fact that the audience of pre-war Italy was absolutely unprepared for such manifestations\* , the technical difficulty of composing with this kind of instrument – which could indeed manage to tune the sound sources produced, but not to give that range of possibilities that a composite orchestra offers its author – soon became evident.
Beyond such difficulties of a material nature, however, Russolo’s discourse appears revolutionary and premonitory today above all when it sets itself the goal of «broadening and enriching ever more the field of sounds», such as environmental sounds and the noises produced by machines, since it seems to account for, well before the world wars, the upheaval that the art world would undergo in the second half of the twentieth century. “The Art of Noises” is thus not only a first reflection on noise-ism, but also a fertile reflection on how the art world was already changing drastically, introducing an enormous number of languages and ways of working until then unknown or ignored, in a manner similar to, but far bolder than, what Arnold Schönberg was doing in the same years .
From here too, in short, runs the path on which we walk today, sure of our means.
\* (from Russolo’s testimony: «The first public performance of the Intonarumori orchestra took place on the evening of April 21, 1914, at the Teatro Dal Verme in Milan. The public crowded, massed into the vast theater but did not want to listen. That immense crowd was already rioting, extremely noisily, half an hour before the performance began, and the first projectiles began to rain from the galleries onto the still-closed curtain... so that the audience heard nothing that evening, because the noises, untuned, it preferred to make itself!»)
English translation of the Italian original. Read the original →