I. A Photograph Comes to Life
In every history of sound-art lurks a photograph of the
Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo (1885-1947) and his assistant in
Russolo’s painting studio with the intonarumori. Literally noise-intoners, these were musical instruments with delicious names: gorgoliatore (the gurgler), ululatore (the howler), stroppicciatore (the rubber), and so on. Played with levers and cranks, and housed in simple plywood boxes, the intonarumori channeled
their gurgles and howls through large, speaker-like cones. Much in the
photograph is obscure: the bulky boxes hide the internal mechanisms from
view, and both the photographer and the precise date of exposure are
unknown.
In spite of or perhaps partly because of its obscurity,
the image has become famous, entrancing generations of artists and
experimental musicians. Part of its allure is formal: the patterned
spread of hexagonal tile on the floor creates a strong, almost
diagrammatic perspective in the foreground, which then terminates in a
jumble of boxes against the back wall. The effect is deeply classical,
not unlike some paintings by the 15th century master of perspective
Paolo Uccello. In the photograph, the two men appear dwarfed by the
giant instruments. Together, they seem composed but slightly ill at
ease, late-19th century men adrift in a 20th century world of
inflationary geometries. The whole scene is suffused with the decline of
the Belle Epoque.
Luciano Chessa, a musician and musicologist, has studied
this photograph intensively for several years. He is probably the world
expert on this picture and on its close cousin, an alternate exposure of
the same scene with a slightly different arrangement. Ever since he
began looking at the photos while writing his dissertation on Russolo
(published in 2004), he hasn’t been able to leave them alone, mining
them for their every minute detail as a documentary record of the
instruments. When RoseLee Goldberg, impresario of the Performa festival
in New York, invited him to recreate the instruments for concert
performance in 2009, he began an extended project of reconstruction. At
once scholarly and creative, Chessa’s project recreates a technique of
the historic avant-garde, bringing it into the present in a necessarily
altered form. Given its massive scope, it also raises historically
complex aesthetic, political, and musicological concerns that have so
far escaped serious critical review. This essay attempts to situate and
evaluate Chessa’s remobilization of the intonarumori within each of
these realms.
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