Sunday, July 10, 2022

After Harmony – On The Art of Noise

Excited to introduce the writing of Cecelia Estrada Vaughan to these pages! - J.V.



About Luigi Russolo - 1885 – 1947 Machines that scream: inventing Futurist Music …

“Ancient life was all silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of the machine, Noise was born. Today, Noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibilities of men.”

Luigi Russolo writes, “Each sound carries with it a nucleus of foreknown and foregone sensations predisposing the auditor to boredom, in spite of all the efforts of innovating composers.

 All of us have liked and enjoyed the harmonies of the great masters. For years, Beethoven and Wagner have deliciously shaken our hearts. Now we are fed up with them. This is why we get infinitely more pleasure imagining combinations of the sounds of trolleys, autos and other vehicles, and loud crowds, than listening once more, for instance, to the heroic or pastoral symphonies.”

This futurist manifesto, “The Art of Noises,” became, perhaps frustratingly, the painter’s best-known contribution to the creative world. While nobody is quite sure what went on in Russolo’s head, the concert prompted him to recontextualize virtually every pre-existing musical conception he had. – Cecelia Estrada Vaughan

RELATED

http://www.artype.de/Sammlung/pdf/russolo_noise.pdf

https://arthistoryproject.com/artists/luigi-russolo


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