Italian Musical Futurism

when noise takes the stage (ca. 1909-1925)

Not all of early twentieth-century Italy followed the previous musical tradition. Some chose to turn the page decisively. In 1909, with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism, and soon after with Francesco Balilla Pratella’s Manifesto of Futurist Musicians, Futurist music presented itself not as an evolution, but as a radical rupture.

Noise as Protagonist

The main turning point lay in the sonic material itself. With Luigi Russolo’s manifesto, The Art of Noises (1913), which argues that the modern ear has already absorbed the speed and deafening clatter of the city and industry, the door was opened to a music built on something other than traditional harmonies. No longer an orchestra made up only of strings, winds, and percussion, but of noises, whistles, crackles, and many other sonic materials that until then, and even today, had been considered environmental. The distinction between musical sound and noise was suddenly abolished, and from that moment urban and industrial noises became a fully legitimate compositional resource.

The Manifesto that Legitimated the Conceptual

Luigi Russolo’s manifesto, The Art of Noises (1913), represents a fundamental watershed in the history of Western music, not so much because of its immediate sonic results, but because of the theoretical justification it provided for the entire later avant-garde. In a letter addressed to Francesco Balilla Pratella, Russolo theorised the overcoming of traditional music in favour of “noise,” laying the foundations for the drift that, in the second half of the twentieth century, would lead to Conceptual Music and to the progressive dissolution of the musical work as an aesthetic experience.

Technological Evolution as Alibi

Russolo begins from a sociological observation: the ear of modern man, accustomed to the roar of industrial machines and the metropolis, is no longer satisfied with the “pure” and “limited” sounds of the traditional orchestra. He argues that the history of music is a linear evolution toward dissonance and complexity, culminating in the physiological need for “noise-sound.” This teleological vision serves to legitimise the abandonment of centuries-old harmonic and melodic rules: if noise is the inevitable destiny of music, then traditional compositional competence becomes obsolete.

The Rejection of Pure Sound

Russolo criticises the music of the past for its supposed timbral poverty, reducing the entire orchestra to four categories (strings, brass winds, woodwinds, percussion), which he defines as a limited circle. He proposes replacing this “limitation” with the infinite variety of noises (rumbles, whistles, screeches, etc.), mechanically reproduced by the Intonarumori.

Here lies the first germ of the conceptual drift, since attention shifts from musical construction (melody, harmony, counterpoint) to raw sonic matter. Noise, however tuned and regulated, remains noise. To elevate it to art, Russolo must resort to a theoretical superstructure, establishing a priori that it is not listening in itself that gives pleasure, but the idea that such noise represents modernity. This is the beginning of that process in which the work is no longer the aesthetic experience, but the document of a thought.

A Taxonomy of the Arbitrary

Russolo classifies noises into six families (rumbles, whistles, whispers, screeches, percussions on various materials, human and animal voices) and invites musicians to combine them according to their imagination. This apparently illusory freedom conceals a paradox, because by eliminating the shared protocols of tonality and form, musical language regresses to an anarchic stage. If every sound is equivalent to every other, the technical competence of the composer (the “knowing how”) is replaced by intention (the “wanting to mean”). The Intonarumori thus becomes the ancestor of the musical ready-made. A sonic object (industrial noise) is decontextualised and declared “music” by the author’s will.

From Provocation to Instruction Manual

Russolo’s conclusions dramatically anticipate the crisis of twentieth-century music. When he states that the new orchestra will obtain the most complex and novel sonic emotions not through a succession of noises imitating life, but through a fantastic association of these varied timbres, he is in fact inaugurating the era of music that requires explanations.

If, in order to appreciate an orchestra of engines and machines, I must first acquire Futurist ears (that is, adhere to a specific aesthetic ideology), then music ceases to be a language and becomes a code for initiates. Russolo, despite the naive enthusiasm of the pioneer, opened the way to that Conceptual Music which, decades later, would replace sound with instruction and the work with the user manual, relegating the listening experience to a secondary role compared with comprehension.

Ultimately, The Art of Noises is not only a Futurist manifesto, but the founding document of an aesthetic that, in its attempt to “expand the field of sounds,” ended by narrowing the field of music, transforming it from an art of time and emotion into a branch of speculative philosophy.

Action, Provocation, Stage

The Futurist concert was no drawing-room scene for gentlemen, but a battlefield. Performances with the intonarumori, new and noisy instruments, were deliberately designed to disturb, shake, irritate, unsettle, and provoke. Not simple performances, but true acts of cultural rupture. Music was no longer to be mere passive listening. The listener had to be forced to rethink what he was hearing.

Russolo, the “noise artist” who changed the rules

Russolo not only wrote a theory, but expanded it through practice, being both the author of The Art of Noises and the original inventor of the intonarumori, mechanical instruments that generated adjustable noises to be inserted into the orchestra. After him, others could no longer invent anything truly new in the language of noises, since once everything is free, anyone can do whatever they want. Let us add that what the Germans composed afterwards was only the faded shadow of what Russolo had already achieved on his own.

Balilla Pratella, theory before the boom

If Russolo was the radical innovator, Pratella was the theorist, still partly anchored to tradition, who paved the way for him. With the Manifesto of Futurist Musicians (1910) and the Technical Manifesto (1911), he denounced the supposed academicism of Italian music and called for a radical renewal, not as extreme as Russolo’s, but nonetheless necessary.

A Declaration of War against Tradition

The Manifesto of Futurist Musicians, written by Francesco Balilla Pratella in 1910, is not merely an artistic programme, but a genuine indictment by the Futurists against the state of music in Italy. Addressing young people directly, Pratella describes the Italian musical environment as a “nursery of impotence,” dominated by backward conservatories, mercantile publishers, and corrupt critics who suffocate every innovation.

The manifesto attacks traditional opera with violence, defining it as the “heavy and suffocating goitre of the nation,” and lashes out against celebrated composers such as Puccini and Giordano, whose works are branded as “base, rickety, and vulgar.” The only one partially spared from this condemnation is Pietro Mascagni, praised for his attempt to rebel against publishing monopolies.

Pratella contrasts Italian stagnation with European ferment, citing Wagner and Strauss in Germany, Debussy in France, Elgar in England, Mussorgsky in Russia, and Sibelius in Finland as examples of artists who, despite their limitations, fight against the past. In Italy, by contrast, the cult of the past (the “industry of the dead”) would, in his view, prevent any evolution.

The Decalogue of the New Music

The core of the manifesto lies in its “Irrevocable Conclusions,” a kind of decalogue urging young composers to break completely with the institutions and forms of the past:

• Desert the Conservatories: Abandon schools and academies and embrace free study as the only means of regeneration.
• Reject Competitions and Prizes: Refrain from contests judged by incompetent juries (“cretins and weaklings”) and expose the falsifications of the system.
• Free Yourself from the Past: Create a music directed toward the future, inspired by nature and modern life, rejecting all imitation.
• Destroy “Well-Made Music”: Fight academic rhetoric and the very concept of bel canto, promoting a music “absolutely different from that made until now.”
• Reduce the Singer’s Primacy: The primacy of the singer must end; the voice must become an instrument of the orchestra, equal to the others.
• Abolish the Traditional Libretto: Replace old librettos with “dramatic poems” in free verse, written by the composer himself.
• Fight Popular and Sacred Repertoire: Open war on drawing-room romances (of the Tosti type), on the “stomach-turning Neapolitan little songs,” and on sacred music, considered meaningless in the age of the crisis of faith.

In short, Pratella’s manifesto is not a mere cry of liberation, but an act of high cultural treason. The text brazenly invites one to renounce the Italian tradition, to turn one’s back on a millennium of glorious history in order to embrace a supposed foreign superiority, especially German. While he spits venom on opera and on the “stomach-turning” Neapolitan song, Pratella bows before the genius of Wagner and Strauss, urging the young to desert the conservatories in order to wage war against Italian music.

It is a position that sends a chill down the spine when read in hindsight: the exaltation of violence, contempt for melodic pity, and admiration for Teutonic “strength” are the poisoned seeds of a tragic century. Let us not forget that this destructive fury, which defined war as “the world’s only hygiene”, was marching straight toward the abyss of dictatorship: Fascism in Italy and, not far beyond, Nazism in that Germany so idolised by the Futurists. Behind the mask of innovation lay the ferocious face of those who wished to erase the humanity of art in the name of an inhuman modernity.

Preaching the Future, Composing the Past

There is a basic irony that unmasks Futurist rhetoric better than any criticism. If we listen to the actual music of Francesco Balilla Pratella, the author of that incendiary manifesto which sought to destroy academies and tradition, we find no trace of the promised revolution. No noises, no destruction of tonality, no warlike “hygiene.”

In his Trio of 1919, Pratella seems almost to repent of his own words. He returns to the fold, taking refuge in a language based on counterpoint and traditional harmony. In these notes one no longer recognises the man who railed against the past; instead one hears late-Romantic music, pleasant enough, but hopelessly bound to that “old world” he had wanted to incinerate in words. Proof that Musical Futurism, for many, was more an intellectual pose than a true artistic substance.

Futurism and Fascism

There is a thick and inseparable thread linking the Futurist artistic avant-garde to the birth of Fascism in Italy. To understand how the regime could germinate and feed itself for twenty years, one must dig into the cultural humus prepared by Marinetti and his followers. From its beginnings in 1909, Futurism revealed itself to be an intrinsically political movement, founded on an irrational vitalism that glorified violence and militarism.

The political creed of early Futurism is unequivocal. Marinetti launched violent proclamations against parliamentarianism (defined as a “noisy henhouse”), against the clergy, and against the old, invoking a national expansion guided by pride and energy. This exasperated nationalism reached its height in the Tripoli campaign and in anti-Austrian interventionism in 1914, where Futurist demonstrations became real spectacular riots, effectively anticipating the style and methods of Fascism.

Revolutionaries before Mussolini

Benito Mussolini himself acknowledged that the Futurists had shown revolutionary and interventionist intentions well before he did. Even Antonio Gramsci credited them with the “Marxist” merit of having destroyed the foundations of bourgeois culture with a ferocity the Socialists had never dared. In 1918, with the Manifesto of the Futurist Political Party, the movement attempted to institutionalise itself by proposing a hybrid and contradictory programme, made up of extreme nationalism mixed with advanced social demands (the right to strike, women’s suffrage, technical education), oscillating constantly between anarchy and dictatorship.

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