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. In the first
English language study of Russolo, Luciano Chessa emphasizes the
futurist's interest in the occult, showing it to be a leitmotif for his
life and a foundation for his art of noises. Chessa shows that Russolo's
aesthetics of noise, and the machines he called the intonarumori, were
intended to boost practitioners into higher states of spiritual
consciousness. His analysis reveals a multifaceted man in whom the drive
to keep up with the latest scientific trends coexisted with an embrace
of the irrational, and a critique of materialism and positivism.
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