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Subject: Dead Media Working Note 05.8
Dead Medium: Russolo's Intonarumori
From: viktrola_AT_nai.net (Frank Davis)
Source: ELEVATOR MUSIC by Joseph Lanza St. Martin's Press
1994 ISBN 0-312-1-0540-1
Page 15:
"Luigi Russolo, an Italian Futurist, lauded the modern
era's beautiful machine clangor. A painter, not a
musician, Russolo was nonetheless committed to being the
Futurist movement's musical activist. His 1913 manifesto
"The Art of Noises" rejected inherited preferences for
harmony in favor of the dissonant masterpieces that
serenade us everyday without our conscious awareness.
Conventional pianos, violins, harps, and horns were
inferior to 'the crashing down of metal shop blinds,
slamming doors, the hubbub and shuffling of crowds, the
variety of din from stations, railways, iron foundries,
spinning mills, printing works, electric power stations,
and underground railways.'"
"To realize his dream of a life when 'every factory will
be transformed into an intoxicating orchestra of noises',
Russolo created Intonarumori (Noise Intoners) - gangly
speaker boxes that transmitted such chainsaw melodies as
an internal combustion engine gurgling in ten whole-tones.
He concocted four main noise families: the Exploder, the
Crackler, the Buzzer, and the Scraper; the pitch and
timbre of each were manipulated by a side lever."
(((It is of note that Russolo's influence can be seen
years later in not only the name of a once popular British
sampling collective, The Art Of Noise, but also in the
industrial movement of the 80's with such groups as
Throbbing Gristle and Einsturzende Neubauten re-
discovering the "noise as music" principle.)))
Dead
Media | 0.01-02.0 | 02.1-04.0
| 04.1-06.0 | 06.1-08.0 |
08.1-10.0 | 10.1-12.0 |