The long wave of “The Art of Noises”, Luigi Russolo’s noise-ist manifesto, naturally reached Russia as well, where the budetljany, the ‘men of the future’, imagined new ways of staging the arts.
There was no shortage of clashes and differences between the Russian and the Italian movement, which had already arisen when, in 1914, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti gave a series of lectures in what was still the Tsarist Empire. Although the Eastern avant-gardists claimed a more independent and contestatory spirit than their Italian epigones, there was certainly a thread linking the group led by Marinetti to the multitude of Russian formations: the disintegration of classical forms and processes in order to arrive at an artistic world that truly looked to the future.
As far as the sound arts are concerned, Arseny Avraamov was probably the undisputed protagonist of this period. A political activist and communist revolutionary, music theorist and journalist, composer and author of a proposal to burn all the pianos in Russia, Avraamov is one of the often forgotten names of that revolution which led to imagining a music no longer confined to strictly tonal and formal practices.
Our man experimented, through pianos and other prepared keyboard instruments, with microtonal practices (which he himself called ‘ultrachromatic’) and, like other contemporary Soviet groups, he approached the writing of what we would today call noise music for ensembles made up of carpenter’s tools, organs that operated locomotive whistles, theremins and other not strictly musical objects.
True proletarian music, in short, had to emphasize “the rhythms corresponding to the universal and impersonal elements of humanity. The new music had to embrace all the noises of the mechanical age, the rhythm of the machine, the din of the great city and the factory, the hum of drive belts, the clanging of engines and the shrill notes of car horns”, in a manner theoretically not dissimilar, though different in practice, from what Russolo had envisaged a few years earlier.
The greatest result of Avraamov’s theories came in 1922, in a composition devised to celebrate the sound and spirit of the new State born of the October Revolution. “Symphony of Sirens” was an impressive sound work staged in extremely rare concerts meant to celebrate the 1917 revolution, and saw its main realization in 1922 in the streets and squares of Baku, a medieval city today the capital of Azerbaijan. The forces called upon to carry out the composer’s instructions were groups of choirs, the horns of the entire Caspian naval fleet, organs operating locomotive whistles, infantry regiments and seaplanes, and the sirens of all the city’s factories, coordinated by Avraamov himself who, from the top of a building, waved two red flags like a conductor’s baton.
The result, which can be partially experienced through phonographic reconstructions derived from the documentation of these happenings that took place between 1919 and 1923, when the composer finally managed to perform in the Soviet capital, is sonically impressive and can only leave us to imagine what it must have meant to be inside the city during its performance. Alternating purely ‘concrete’ moments with an ultra-modern method of conceiving non-classically musical elements, used melodically, rhythmically or as the mere presence of a sound event laden with meaning, an entire area of the city was transformed into a musical space.
It was thus a realization of Avraamov’s project of acoustic topography, meant to spread sound over vast geographical areas. Beyond the incredible modernity of the compositional techniques and of the use of sound sources, not too differently from how the GRM would operate decades later on the basis of sounds on tape, what is most striking in “Symphony of Sirens” is its ability to turn the spirit of the nascent Soviet State into sound, a State that was appropriating its social, identitarian and political dimension in the aftermath of the victory in the civil war against the Tsar’s loyalists, in a Europe reduced to rubble and in total reconstruction, emerging without any certainties from the First World War in which as many as three empires had disappeared, and with a dramatic phase of readjustment in its immediate future.
Soviet and working-class power, symbolized by factory sirens and cannon shots, could not remain caged within the bourgeois confines of a theater and aspired to take over the world, reflecting on city spaces and on how those who inhabited them might perceive them, even using sounds no longer abstract, drawn from the European musical canon.
This imaginary path brings us back, by rebound, to Italy, some thirty years later. Here too we find a country searching for an identity, as much political and social as artistic. A country that had abandoned only a few years earlier the Fascist dictatorship and the Savoy monarchy that had reunited it under a single flag, and that once again found itself facing enormous problems of economic and social reconstruction. The conversion from a pile of rubble to a world economic power received, as everyone knows, an enormous push forward during the 1950s, transforming a country of bell towers into one of factories, as witnessed by an enormous body of cinematic, literary and photographic documentation meant to highlight the duality of the newfound Belpaese.
In these years also began the experience of the mythical Studio di Fonologia RAI in Milan, where the Italian pioneers of the new music of the twentieth century worked, and which made the Lombard capital one of the European capitals of electroacoustic music, on a par with Paris and the German centers.
But even before the birth of the Studio, what was probably the first work of Italian musique concrète and electroacoustic music came about, at the hands of two of those who would become among the most important European composers of the twentieth century: Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna. Within the RAI studios, the two created “Ritratto di Città”, subtitled “Studio di rappresentazione radiofonica”, assisted by texts by Roberto Lyedi and the narrating voices of Nando Gazzolo and Ottavio Fanfani. Their radio piece tells, through sound images, a day in Milan, without ever lingering on didactic moments. To quote the author of the texts, Roberto Lyedi: “\[…\] throughout the work there seems to me to be this representative concern, which is not a descriptive concern, but a concern to create concretely, I would say materially, solidly, situations in the listener. At the stylistic level this has its reflections: it can be noticed in the color, I would say too bright, of the text, in the expressionistic cut of the whole work, in the exasperated flavor, I would say, of the whole development of Ritratto di città.”
The gaze on the Milan of “Ritratto di città” is almost magical, hallucinated. Real and synthetic sounds accompany the journey of the listener who enters the bars, the factories, the homes of the ‘new’ Milanese. A journey into a psychological Milan, whose soul is represented by the activity of those who inhabit it and by their ‘communal solitude’. Ideal protagonists of this sound ecosystem are the taxi drivers who carry strange individuals from one side of the city to the other, interchangeable individualities hidden behind the doors of their homes, workers and students, actors in an extremely noisy human anthill that finds its real fulfillment “in that minute, or that hour, or that second, it doesn’t matter, in which at each new awakening of the morning the city finds itself, suddenly and with surprise, entirely covered by silence”, which opens and closes the work.
In contrast to the dryness, determination and immanence of “Symphony of Sirens”, Berio and Maderna’s “Ritratto di città” presents the already mentioned expressionist, abstract cut, which nevertheless lends itself well to interpreting the context it refers to. In the comparison between the two works, so far apart in means and production but so close in their intent to photograph phonically the spirit of two places, we can also discern the profound difference between the Soviet ideological state and the liberal-capitalist one that Italy had decided to embody. And perhaps these new ways of understanding musical art were the only ones suited to sculpting these portraits, embodying their spirits, virtues and contradictions.
It is therefore natural to ask how one might musically interpret the spirit of a city, or of a community, in the present state of things. One may perhaps wonder whether, instead, it is even possible to frame an identity so characterized as the protagonists of this piece did, and not an amorphous post-internet reality, the same from Milan to Baku, from Beijing to Los Angeles, which finds itself only in the reproducibility of its means of communication and in an ironic patina that all too often hides an innate loneliness.
Ten tracks in which the song form manages to hybridize with concrete and electroacoustic practices, in a gentle result in which the atmospheres and sounds of the author’s daily life manage to form small impressionist paintings, well represented by the cover made by Tommaso Pandolfi (Furtherset).
English translation of the Italian original. Read the original →