Music made of noise

Luigi Russolo and the noise machines, 1913–1914 · written for this lesson

1. In Unit 1 you read the beginning of Luigi Russolo's The Art of Noises (1913): "Ancient life was all silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of machines, Noise was born." Russolo believed that the old orchestra of violins and flutes was too small for the modern world. He wanted a new orchestra that could play the sounds of trams, engines, factories and crowds. To organise these sounds, he divided them into six families.

2. Then he built the instruments. With his assistant Ugo Piatti, he made wooden boxes with metal horns, called intonarumori ("noise-intoners"). Inside each box a wheel rubbed against a string, and the player turned a handle and moved a lever to change the note. In 1913 they showed their first machine, the "burster", to an audience of two thousand people in Modena. On 21 April 1914 they gave their first full concert in Milan. The audience began shouting and throwing things at the curtain half an hour before the music started, and the fighting went on during the concert while Russolo kept conducting.

3. Russolo predicted that one day people would be able to tell apart "ten, twenty or thirty thousand different noises", and that "every workshop will become an intoxicating orchestra of noise". None of his original instruments survive; they were probably destroyed in Paris during the Second World War. Today musicians play copies built from his drawings and photographs.

Marinetti's Zang Tumb Tumb, 1914 · written for this lesson

1. In October 1912 Marinetti went to the Balkans as a war correspondent, to report on the siege of Adrianople (today Edirne, in Turkey). He did not write ordinary reports. He tried to put the sounds of the battle directly onto the page. The result was a book, published in Milan in 1914, called Zang Tumb Tumb: the sound of a cannon firing and its shells landing.

2. Marinetti called this new kind of writing words in freedom. In his Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature (1912) he had given the rules. Destroy syntax. Use verbs only in the infinitive. Remove adjectives, adverbs and punctuation. Put nouns side by side so they crash into each other. And use onomatopoeia: words that are the noise itself. In Zang Tumb Tumb the letters change size, run diagonally across the page and break into pieces, so the reader sees the noise as well as hearing it.

3. Marinetti performed these poems in theatres, shouting, whistling and banging on tables. Later he recorded one of them, The Battle of Adrianople. Listen to it: you do not need to understand Italian to follow the battle.

Moscow 1913, Zürich 1916, Fiume 1919 · written for this lesson

1. In Moscow, the Russian Futurist Aleksei Kruchenykh went further than Marinetti. In 1913 he published a short poem written in a language he invented, which he called zaum, "beyond the mind". The words have no meaning in Russian or any other language. Kruchenykh claimed that these five lines contained more of the Russian spirit than all the poetry of Pushkin. Here they are in Latin letters:

dyr bul shchylubeshchurskumvy so bur l ez

2. In Zürich, in neutral Switzerland, artists who had escaped the war opened a nightclub, the Cabaret Voltaire, on 5 February 1916. They called their movement Dada. That summer the German poet Hugo Ball walked on stage dressed in a costume of blue and gold cardboard, with a tall hat and cardboard claws, and slowly recited a poem of invented sounds called Karawane ("Caravan"). It begins:

jolifanto bambla ô falli bamblagrossiga m'pfa habla horemégiga goramenhigo bloiko russula huju

3. Fiume had its own sound poem, shouted by thousands of people at once. You met it in Unit 2: "Eia, eia, eia! Alalà!" It means nothing in Italian. D'Annunzio invented it in 1917 to replace "Hip, hip, hurrah!" Like Karawane, it works through sound, rhythm and the voice, not through meaning.