After many thousands of years of rather slow advancement in musical technology and thought it is surprising to think how quickly our views changed in the 20th century in a period as short as twenty years. In his The Art of Noises, Russolo remarks on the future of music and details his plans for a futurist orchestra, including “rumbles, murmurs, gurgles, and scrapes,” among other noises he considered to be fundamental to nature. However complex this may seem in comparison to classical thought it is still built around a system of specific Instrumentation. In contrast, The Liberation of Sound depicts a world of colliding and receding sound bodies whereby arbitrary instruments being chosen for a piece are replaced by “a melodic totality,” which is described as resembling a flowing river. Varèse’s views on the future of music are on an entirely different level than Russolo’s and without the advent of electronics would probably have been incomprehensible to him.
Even in 1936 it must have seemed realistic for Varèse’s predictions come true. After all, today’s most advanced sequencers and synthesizers still don’t meet most of Varèse’s demands. Though we may be able to emulate bodies of sound impacting in some way, it seems technologically infeasible to ask for a musician to have total and complete control of over the noise he produces. Jumping back seventy years amplifies this problem to a major extent and can be seen in some of the backlash to his ideas. Though Varèse can’t largely be blamed for the lack of help he received, it does nevertheless weigh down on his actual output. In fact, most of his very own compositions are written for traditional instrumentations and normal orchestras, in direct contrast to his ideas in The Liberation of Sound.
Russolo, however, played a major hand directly in bringing his ideas to life. He invented dozens of intonarumori and other instruments in his workshop and put them to use in his futurist orchestra. This seems to be a far more pragmatic approach to advancing music in creating simple but entirely original instruments as opposed to Varèse’s groundbreaking but unrealistic thoughts on sound production. Though narrower in his scope he seems to have far exceeded in terms of output and quantity. On the other hand it also seems very apparent that Russolo was at the same time far more limited in terms of scope and quality. His sirens and horns almost seem like children’s toys in comparison to Varèse’s dreams. And indeed, if they were to some day come to life they would far exceed anything done by a futurist orchestra.
Both composers seem focused on the difference between sound and noise. Russolo asserts that at the dawn of man the world was almost entirely devoid – only punctuated by great natural disasters. The power to recreate the effects of such disasters would surely feel powerful in a composer’s hand. This seems to correspond greatly with Varèse’s call for colliding sound masses. It is not surprising that hearing noises as thunderous as earthquakes and volcanoes would be thought capable of affecting the human emotion. We still fear natural events such as these on a very primal level. Great emotion can be derived from noise, which up until this century has been unused throughout much of human history. It is only until now that many of the techniques we use to produce unique noise (feedback and circuit bending) were produced.
In the early 1900’s our views on the potential of music and human-created noise expanded greatly. Russolo’s early advances in a futurist orchestra pushed the boundaries of traditional music even before the advent of many electronic instruments. Varèse furthered what Russolo had done, speaking not just of new and interesting instruments, but a entirely brand new concept of colliding bodies of sound. Varèse predicts a future where we are not limited by arbitrary instruments and intervals, instead songs will “flow like a river,” thereby fluidly transitioning from one expression or feeling to another. Though Varèse theorized a much more complex and interesting system of music than Russolo’s, his ideas weren’t able to come nearly to completion as Russolo’s were. Russolo invented a variety of original instruments that pushed the boundaries of music technology far more than Varèse’s largely traditional compositions. In the end, for their musical grandeur and love of noise, I only wish both men could have experienced a Justice show in their time.