Composers From Italy

"Balla (former art teacher of Boccioni and Severini) flabbergasted us because, not content with being involved in a Futurist campaign, as you can well imagine him doing, he launched himself into a complete transformation. He rejected all his works and all his working methods. He started work on four pictures of movement (one painting was 'Girl running on a balcony'), which were still realist but incredible ahead of their time.. .He confided this to Aldo Pallazzeschi: 'They (Balla's former pupils Boccioni and Severini) did not want anything to do with me in Paris and they were right: they have gone much further than I, but I will work and I too will progress.'"

"Further developing his first synthesis of a speeding automobile, Balla has arrived at the first plastic complex. This has revealed to us an abstract landscape of cones, pyramids, polyhedrons, spirals of mountains, rivers, lights, shadows. In short, there is a deep analogy between the essential force-lines of speed and the essential force-lines of a landscape."

"Using complex, constructive, noise-producing abstraction, that is, the Futurist Style. Any action developed in space, any emotion felt, will represent for us the intuition of a discovery."

"We [Futurists, Balla and Depero ], seek to realize this total fusion in order to reconstruct the universe by making it more joyful, in other words by an integral re-creation. We will give skeleton and flesh to the invisible, the impalpable, the imponderable and the imperceptible. We will find abstract equivalents for all the forms and elements of the universe, and then we will combine them according to the caprice of our inspiration, to shape plastic complexes which we will set in motion."

"Futurism, as it has developed over six years, has solidified and surpassed Impressionism, has proposed plastic dynamism, atmospheric modeling, and the interpenetration of planes and states of mind."

"As a result we shall have the necessary variety of clothes, even if the people of a given city lack the imagination themselves. The happiness of our Futurist clothes will help to spread the kind of good humour aimed at by my great friend PaIazzeschi in his futurist 'Manifesto against Sadness'."

"We want Futurist clothes to be comfortable and practical Dynamic Aggressive Shocking Energetic Violent Flying (i.e. giving the idea of flying, rising and running) Peppy Joyful Illuminating (in order to have light even in the rain) Phosphorescent Lit by electric lamps."

"And we must invent dynamic designs to go with them and express them in equally dynamic shapes: triangles, cones, spirals, ellipses, circles, etc."

"Use materials with forceful MUSCULAR colours – the reddest of reds, the most purple of purples, the greenest of greens, intense yellows, orange, vermillion – and SKELETON tones of white, grey and black."

"WE MUST INVENT FUTURIST CLOTHES, hap-hap-hap-hap-happy clothes, daring clothes with brilliant colours and dynamic lines. They must be simple, and above all they must be made to last for a short time only in order to encourage industrial activity and to provide constant and novel enjoyment for our bodies."

"WE MUST DESTROY ALL PASSÉIST CLOTHES, and everything about them which is tight-fitting, colourless, funereal, decadent, boring and unhygienic. As far as materials are concerned, we must abolish: wishywashy, pretty-pretty, gloomy, and neutral colours, along with patterns composed of lines, checks and spots."

"They [ Boccioni and Severini ] did not want anything to do with me in Paris and they were right: they have gone much further than I, but I will work and I too will progress."

"The Rhine, with two long branches, stretches out and loses itself among inlets and hills, the boats of tourists and of industry smoke, white, black, and gray, and small, small, seem almost not to move; the silver clear, transparent water, calm and ordered, contrasts with all the rest.. ..the water gurgles, the sides of the boat are covered in spray, many people greet each other, white handkerchiefs are waved from on high, the hotels, the flags, the inscriptions, the hills and the pointed tips of the bell towers, everything seems unreal, untouchable."

"Villages and valleys pass by [Balla viewed during his train voyage to Düsseldorf in July 1912] and with my friend the binoculars [field glasses] I stare into the closest windows; semi-undressed people who wash themselves, bedding on balconies, clean almost empty rooms, a stupendous white shoulder of a women who, with a nude arm opens a door and goes inside."

"It will interest artists because, in it, I have made a special study of the way of walking of this girl, and, in fact, I have succeeded in giving the illusion that she is in the process of moving forward."

"Christopher Hogwood: "Caricaturists of all countries I have a great interest in; I like to observe what happens to an artist's vision when there is a deliberate distortion for the viewer. This is found in Italian art and in much Italian music. Vivaldi sometimes uses caricature in a very serious and grim sense, not at all comic.""

"With Antonio Vivaldi, Italian Baroque music reached its zenith. The prosperous, cultivated world of contemporary Venice shines through all his works, composed with innate craftsmanship."

"Overrated: Antonio Vivaldi. I'm tired of him. Stravinsky once said that Vivaldi wrote the same concerto 500 times. I disagree. Instead, I think he began 500 concertos and never achieved anything in them. So he kept trying over and over again without ever quite succeeding."

"Robert Craft: “Are you interested in the current revival of eighteenth-century Italian masters?” Igor Stravinsky: “Not very. Vivaldi is greatly overrated—a dull fellow who could compose the same form so many times over.”"

"Overrated: Vivaldi. He has recently become Mr. Baroque, and that is not fair to Bach and Handel. His music does not have the substance, the innovative quality or the passion of the greatest composers. Of course, it's perfectly good music and it makes the listener feel good, but there is no door opening as there is with the great masters."

"Italians have such illustrious people they can celebrate, that everyone celebrates — Michelangelo, Vivaldi and, of course, for us on the left, Sacco and Vanzetti."

"Se questa non piace, non voglio più scrivere di musica."

"La Notte, che tu vedi in sì dolci atti Dormir, fu da un angelo scolpita In questo sasso, e perchè dorme ha vita: Destala, se nol credi, e parleratti"

"Noise accompanies every manifestation of our life. Noise is familiar to us. Noise has the power to bring us back to life. On the other hand, sound, foreign to life, always a musical, outside thing, an occasional element, has come to strike our ears no more than an overly familiar face does our eye. Noise, gushing confusely and irregularly out of life, is never totally revealed to us and it keeps in store innumerable surprises for our benefit. We feel certain that in selecting and coordinating all noises we will enrich men with a voluptuousness they did not suspect."

"My ears open nasals! beware! such joy is yours o my people to sense see ear scent drink everything everything everything taratatatatata the machineguns shouting twisting under a thousand bites slaps traaktraak cudgellings whippings pic pac POUMTOUMB juggling clowns’ jump in full sky height 200 meters it's the gunshooting Downwards guffaws of swamps laughter buffalos chariots stings prancing of horses ammunition-wagons flue flac zang chaak chaak rearings pirouettes patatraak bespatterings manesneighings i i i i i i i medley tinklings three bulgarian batallions on the move crook- craak (double bar slowly) Choumi Maritza o Karvavena officers' shouts copper plates knocking against each other pam ici (vite) pac over there BOUM-pam-pam-pam here there there farther all around very high look-out goddamnit on the head chaak marvelous! flames flames flames flames flames flames flames crawl from forts over there Choukri Pacha telephone orders to 27 forts in turkish German hello Ibrahim! Rudolf hello! hello! actors roles blowing-echoes odor-hay-mud-manure I can't feel my frozen feet stale odor rotting gongs flutes clarinets pipes everywhere up down birds twitter beatitude shade greenness cipcip ip-zzip herds pastures dong-dong-dong-ding-bééé Orchestra"

"Luigi Russolo (1885–1947) — painter, composer, builder of musical instruments, and first-hour member of the Italian Futurist movement — was a crucial figure in the evolution of twentieth-century aesthetics. As creator of the first systematic poetics of noise and inventor of what has been considered the first mechanical sound synthesizer, Russolo looms large in the development of twentieth-century music."

"Musicas-machinery-noise and urban-sound-as-music received their first notable currency among the Italian Futurists in the immediate prewar years. Balilla Pratella and his 'ideologist' Luigi Russolo yearned for a music that not only celebrated the city in some programmatic way but that reproduced it."

"Boccioni, Russolo and I all met in the Porta Vittoria café [in Milan, Italy], close to where we all lived, and we enthusiastically outlined a draft of our appeal [the 'Manifesto of Futurist Painters', late February, 1910]. The final version was somewhat laborious; we worked on it all day, all three of us and finished it that evening with Marinetti and the help of Decio Cinti, the group's secretary."

"My dear Pratella, I submit to your futurist genius these new ideas, and I invite you to discuss them with me. I am not a musician, so that I have no acoustic preferences, nor works to defend. I am a futurist painter who projects on a profoundly loved art his will to renew everything. This is why, bolder than the bolder professional musician, totally unpreoccupied with my apparent incompetence, knowing that audacity gives all prerogatives and all possibilities, I have conceived the renovation of music through the Art of Noise."

"Conclusions:"

"This evolution toward noise-sound is only possible today. The ear of an eighteenth century man never could have withstood the discordant intensity of some of the chords produced by our orchestras (whose performers are three times as numerous); on the other hand our ears rejoice in it, for they are attuned to modern life, rich in all sorts of noises. But our ears far from being satisfied, keep asking for bigger acoustic sensations. However, musical sound is too restricted in the variety and the quality of its tones. Music marks time in this small circle and vainly tries to create a new variety of tones.. .We must break at all cost from this restrictive circle of pure sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds."

"Above all, we [the Italian Futurist painters] continue and develop the divisionist principle, but we are not engaged in Divisionism [developed by Seurat and Signac ]. We apply an instinctive complementarism which is not, for us, an acquired technique, but rather a way of seeing things."

"Sound is defined as the result of a succession of regular and periodic vibrations. Noise is instead caused by motions that are irregular, as much in time as in intensity. 'A musical sensation,' says Helmholtz 'appears to the ear as a perfectly stable, uniform, and invariable sound.' But the quality of continuity that sound has with respect to noise, which seems instead fragmentary and irregular, is not an element sufficient to make a sharp distinction between sound and noise. We know that the production of sound requires not only that a body vibrate regularly but also that these vibrations persist in the auditory nerve until the following vibration has arrived, so that the periodic vibrations blend to form a continuous musical sound. At least sixteen vibrations per second are needed for this. Now, if I succeed in producing a noise with this speed. I will get a sound made up of the totality of so many noises--or better, noise whose successive repetitions will be sufficiently rapid to give a sensation of continuity like that of sound."

"My dear Balilla Pratella"

"In antiquity, life was nothing but silence. Noise was really not born before the 19th century, with the advent of machinery. Today noise reigns supreme over human sensibility."

"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 revolution of music is paralleled by the increasing proliferation of machinery sharing in human labor. In the pounding atmosphere of great cities as well as in the formerly silent countryside, machines create today such a large number of varied noises that pure sound, with its littleness and its monotony, now fails to arouse any emotion."

"Music is everything that one listens to with the intention of listening to music."

"Alas, this industrialized twelve-tone horse, dull on the outside and empty inside, constantly being perfected and dragged to a new Troy in shadow of an ideological war long since fought and won by responsible minds like Schoenberg, with neither systems nor scholarship for armor!"

"A composer's awareness of the plurality of functions of his own tools forms the basis for his responsibility just as, in everyday life, every man's responsibility begins with the recognition of the multiplicity of human races, conditions, needs, and ideals. I would go as far as to say (as my anger comes back) that any attempt to codify musical reality into a kind of imitation grammar (I refer mainly to the efforts associated with the Twelve-Tone System) is a brand of fetishism which shares with Fascism and racism the tendency to reduce live processes to immobile, labeled objects, the tendency to deal with formalities rather than substance. Claude Lévi-Strauss describes (though to illustrate a different point) a captain at sea, his ship reduced to a frail raft without sails, who, by enforcing a meticulous protocol on his crew, is able to distract them from nostalgia for a safe harbor and from the desire for a destination."