R
ecently, there has been a growing interest in the work of the Italian painter, composer and musical-instrument builder Luigi Russolo (1885–1947). As the author of the first treatise on the aesthetics of noise and alleged cre-ator of the first mechanical sound synthesizer (intonarumori) [1], Russolo should be regarded as a crucial figure in the evo-lution of 20th-century music and sound art and one who in-fluenced Varèse, Schaeffer, Cage and others.Russolo’s reputation currently rests on his association with Italian futurism, an artistic and political avant-garde move-ment founded in 1909 by the poet and impresario Filippo Tom-maso Marinetti, whose aesthetic is commonly understood as being built around the adoration of the future and of speed and strength as incarnated in the Moloch of the modernist age: the machine.
This view is not entirely accurate. As Maurizio Calvesi pointed out as early as 1967, futurism is more than “exaltation of the machine and exterior reproduction of movement” [2]. This new reading has demonstrated that futurism is ab initio a movement that vehemently criticizes materialism, positivism and scientific rationality, opposing them through worship of the irrational inspired by the occult [3].
Capitalizing on this view, my previous research posited an interest in the occult throughout Russolo’s life, in his symbol-ist paintings of the 1910s, film scores of the 1920s, theosophi-cal writings of the 1930s and paintings of the 1940s. Modernist biographers tend to ignore his interest in the occult and val-orize his “progressive” contributions, and Lista [4] even finds Russolo’s theosophical phase “regressive.” It is not a regres-sion, however: Russolo’s late works are a coherent and neces-sary development in his lifelong interest in the occult. This interest, especially in his futurist years, has not yet been fully investigated.
L
EONARDO’
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OUCHRussolo’s fascination with occult traditions is demonstrated by his unwavering admiration for the work of Leonardo da Vinci, especially his experiments with acoustics and his interest in mechanical musical instruments. They inspired Russolo’s famous intonarumori; furthermore, the rapidity with which Russolo constructed them was due to his capitalizing on Leonardo’s research.
Russolo did not blindly apply Leonardo’s principles; instead
he extended them, integrating them into his own aesthetics of sound. Leonardo’s theory of acoustics was a source of Russolo’s revolutionary aesthetics, Leonardo’s support for the infinite division of the semi-tone was a progenitor of Russolo’s enthusiasm for enarmonia (micro-tonality) and Leonardo’s under-standing of “noise” (shown in his differentiation of strepido and ro-more) was the germ of Russolo’s aes-thetics of noise. They further shared an interest in the noises of war [5]. To what extent was Russolo aware
of Leonardo’s work? Could a card-carrying futurist have been inspired by the past? Given the conflict between futurism and positivism, Leonardo (the epitome of Thinking Man) seems, at first glance, out of place in Russolo’s pantheon.
Surprisingly, even in the most radical avant-garde circles (fu-turist included), Leonardo’s work was often highly regarded [6]. Within Russolo’s set of cultural references, Leonardo was something of an initiate, a man who could sublimate techni-cal knowledge by directing it toward a spiritual goal—the very essence of futurism. Leonardo’s spiritual side came to futur-ism through the late 19th-century decadentists and symbol-ists, and young Russolo was one of the conduits [7].
The evidence for this hypothesis is largely circumstantial, as the borrowings were never directly acknowledged. Direct proof of Leonardo’s influence on Russolo is unlikely to be found, due to the nature of the futurist aesthetic. Nevertheless, this hypothesis explains many seeming coincidences and seemingly unrelated incidents.
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RESENCES INR
USSOLO’
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IFERussolo lived most of his life in Milan, where Leonardo’s in-fluence is widespread (from his locks in the Naviglio Canal to his massive monument in the Piazza della Scala [8]) and where he developed most of his plans for the construction of musi-cal instruments. Russolo moved to Milan at age 16. He soon sneaked into classes at the Accademia di Brera without en-rolling, with the complicity of his friends [9]. It was probably through the Accademia that Russolo developed his passion for the work of Leonardo.
The matter of the young Russolo’s restoration work on the Last Supper, typically mentioned as a mere curiosity in his bi-ographies, thus becomes central to his formation. His wife Maria Zanovello writes that he worked in a group that restored both the Last Supper and Leonardo’s decorations of the stanze
L’Arte dei “Romori”: Leonardine
Devotion in Luigi Russolo’s Oeuvre
Luciano Chessa
A B S T R A C T
T
he author has discerned a deep interest in the occult arts at the core of Luigi Russolo’s Art of Noises. Such an interest is confirmed by Russolo’s admiration for Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo’s writings on music and acoustics constituted in fact a scientific and spiritual paradigm for Russolo; the former’s mechanical musical-instrument projects were important models for Russolo’s own, from 1913’s intonarumori to the nuovo istrumento musi-cale a corde of 1931. Perhaps because of the futurists’ ambiv-alent position toward the fig-ure of Leonardo (proto-futurist or passatista), Russolo pro-fusely quoted Leonardo but carefully avoided mentioning any borrowing.CELEBRA
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Luciano Chessa (composer, musicologist), San Francisco Conservatory of Music, 50 Oak Street, San Francisco, CA 94102, U.S.A. E-mail: <lchessa@sfiic.org>.
A note on the title: The current Italian spelling for the word “noises” is rumori. Romori is an
in Sforza Castle [10]. This 1904–1908 restoration, led by Luigi Cavenaghi, was the only formal study of art Russolo ever undertook [11].
We can reasonably suppose that Rus-solo, in addition to familiarity with Leo-nardo’s artworks, became familiar with Leonardo’s writings, particularly the Trat-tato della pittura. However, it was probably through Vasari’s Vite de’ più eccellenti pit-tori sculpit-tori e archittetpit-tori, which Russolo cites frequently in his writings [12], that he first learned of Leonardo’s musical
where Russolo served as an assistant re-storer. Both were also published in fac-simile in the 1890s.
Arundel 263, however, must have been his main source: fol. 175r (Fig. 1) shows musical instruments that foreshadow the intonarumori. But Arundel 263 was in the British Library (and Russolo did not visit London until 1914) and was not printed in facsimile until 1923–1930 [14]. How, then, could Russolo have known it? The solution was revealed to me by Carlo Pe-dretti, who pointed out that fol. 175r was search. Vasari hints at Leonardo’s
musi-cal abilities and specifimusi-cally mentions a lyre in the form of a horse’s skull, fash-ioned as a gift for Ludovico il Moro [13]. Vasari’s book may have led him to exam-ine Leonardo’s codices.
Most of Leonardo’s music-related spec-ulations are found in three manuscripts: Arundel 263, the Codice Atlantico and the Codice Trivulzio. Two of these are housed in Milan: the Codice Atlantico in the Bib-lioteca Ambrosiana and the Codice Tri-vulzio in the library of the Sforza Castle,
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Fig. 1. Folio 175r from Leonardo da Vinci’s
Codex Arundel 263. (Photo
© The British Library. All rights reserved. Arundel 263 f175r.)
reproduced in the immensely popular Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci (1883). The accessibility of fol. 175r does not prove that Russolo borrowed from it. Nev-ertheless, the intonarumori employ a number of mechanical principles akin to those in this folio: adjustable telescoping sound boxes, resonating bodies tuned in different ratios and coiled springs vi-brating against a membrane. Russolo must have browsed the manuscripts at some point: in Al di là della materia, he admits, “Posterity has finally realized how many treasures of intuition and pro-found observation fill [Leonardo’s] man-uscripts” [15].
Like symbolists before him, Russolo finds something spiritual in Leonardo. In his last writing, “L’eterno e il transitorio dell’arte” (1947), he writes of the Mona Lisa as an example of art that transcends space and time and aspires to the eter-nal [16]. He speaks similarly of the Last Supper:
The work of art is pure spirit and lives outside even of its own material body, eternally young even though its body, which is matter, is aged, blackened, cracked as is happening to Leonardo’s
Last Supper. It becomes in its pictorial
ma-teriality a nebulous and evanescent breath without having lost anything of its supreme spiritual life [17].
Further testimony comes from Paolo Buzzi, who wrote a brief commemora-tive introduction to the Zanovello biog-raphy. Here Leonardo is mentioned twice in four pages. Buzzi first suggests a profound connection between Russolo and Leonardo:
Russolo, the polymath, concerned him-self with another avenue of physics: the study of acoustic phenomena. For Him, the evolution of music, much like the me-chanical revolution, made new sounds and timbres necessary—something not to disdain, but to aspire to; the coopera-tion of sound-noise. Thus he resembled Leonardo in his design for a lyre for Lu-dovico il Moro. . . . In later years He was an Apostle of magnetism, and here again I cannot resist the comparison with Leonardo in terms of their multifaceted speculation where it concerned the enig-mas of Nature [18].
In the tombeau-like poem that closes the biography, Buzzi once again proposes a comparison with Leonardo: “And He is dead / Leonardine friend / of all the arts” [19].
T
HEI
NTONARUMORITraces of Leonardo appear in Rus-solo’s first intonarumori, the scoppiatore
of “risonatori sintonici,” explained below, which enter into “risonanza composita” with the vibrations of the diaphragm. These resonators could be telescoping or-gan pipes or strings tuned in various ra-tios. In order for the resonators to remain in resonance with the tuned noise as it
glides “enharmonically,” a device varies their tuning according to the tension of the diaphragm.
In the figure included in the patent, Russolo uses as an example pipes tuned in harmonic ratios. The presence of pipes in this figure has generated some confu-sion. Brown believes that the pipes of the sibilatore were fed by bellows. Al-though the patent shows no need for bel-lows, bellows are mentioned in the 18 November 1913 Pall Mall Gazette account of a concert Marinetti gave for the press at futurist headquarters in Milan. This was the only occasion on which an out-sider was allowed to examine the intona-rumori [22].
Assuming the reliability of this ac-count, the presence of bellows in a 1913 instrument does not prove that bellows fed pipes in the 1921 patent. Calling them risonatori sintonici, Russolo explains that their function is only to modify timbre. The pipes are put into action by the air-pressure variations resulting from the vibrating diaphragm, and their tuning is relevant only insofar as it af-fects the textural spectrum (timbre) of the tuned noise. If strings were substi-tuted for pipes, they would vibrate in sym-pathy with the primary medium: the diaphragm.
The resonators were thus not respon-sible for the production of the sound; if they were, based on Russolo’s figure, the sibilatore would simply have produced glis-sandos of major triads. Furthermore, the bellows had nothing to do with the sys-tem of resonators: Russolo would not have waited almost 8 years to patent an instrument using this principle.
The scrosciatore (hisser) was not a true intonarumori but rather an adjunct of both the ronzatore and the sibilatore. In both instances, a series of springs were set by a lever to touch the membrane and vibrate against it, altering the timbre. Russolo also applied intonarumori prin-ciples to a harmonium-like instrument, the rumorarmonio, beginning in 1921. Also “enharmonic,” its final model com-(burster) of 1913. Russolo obtained three
patents for the intonarumori: in Jan-uary 1914, October 1921 and November 1921. The first and last are similar: The only difference is a telescopic cylindrical sound-box added in 1921. The other is a sibilatore (whistler). From the original
in-strument evolved the ululatore (howler), rombatore (roarer), crepitatore (crackler) and stropicciatore (rubber). These instru-ments all have a drumskin attached to a string or coiled wire spring on which a wheel acts as a continuous bow.
As the name “intonarumori” suggests, noise is “tuned” both by the tension of the string and that of the drumskin; in the model with the telescoping sound-box behind the membrane, a change of pitch is accompanied by a change in length of the sound-box. Pitch changes are controlled mechanically by a lever connected to a needle that moves on a graduated scale and thus shows the per-former reference points for pulling. The lever moves continuously, not incremen-tally, creating a microtonality that Rus-solo calls “enharmony” [20].
Volume depends on the pressure of the wheel against the string or spring and was probably not adjustable during per-formance, although the speed with which the crank was turned may have had some effect. The sound is amplified by the drumskin and by a gramophone-like cone. The timbre is determined by the wheel type (smooth and resin-coated or notched), material (metal or wood) and position in relation to the bridge, as well as the vibrating body type (string or spring) and the pressure of the wheel on the string [21].
Based on photographic evidence, Brown concludes that there was one more member of this group: a ronzatore, in which a metal ball mounted on a spring and driven by an electric motor vibrated against a drumskin adjustable in tension. In the October 1921 intonarumori, noise is tuned differently. The noise is generated (the patent does not specify how) and amplified by a skin membrane called a diaframma vibratile. The vibra-tions are tuned by changing the tension of this diaphragm with a timpani pedal or a metal roll that slides across the back, modifying its pressure on the skin.
In order to redesign the tuned noise’s timbre, Russolo hypothesized a system
CELEBRA
TING LEONARDO DA VINCI
Could a card-carrying futurist have
been inspired by the past?
bines all the timbres produced by the var-ious intonarumori.
Russolo designed other instruments during the 1920s, culminating in a “new string instrument” (nuovo istrumento mu-sicale a corde). Patented in 1931, it was a sort of “string organ” in which several friction belts controlled by a keyboard each excited a steel spring longitudinally. Zanovello, inexplicably, calls it an
enhar-monic piano. Although this name is never used by Russolo—not surprisingly, since the instrument has no enharmonic properties—it is erroneously called piano enarmonico in all subsequent secondary sources.
Zanovello goes on to suggest that Rus-solo built a model with a range of one octave [23]. In fact, a model with five keys (now preserved at the Russolo Foun-dation in Varese)—the prototype men-tioned in the Italian patent draft—was all that Russolo ever built [24].
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NSTRUMENTSLeonardo’s projects for new musical in-struments have been documented by Winternitz [25] and can be summarized as follows:
1. mechanical kettledrum with cranked beaters
2. percussion instrument pitch-control mechanisms:
• a support enabling one musician to play several tuned drums • a modern timpani-like pedal,
in which crank, screw and ropes control the tension of the drum-skin
• drum-box apertures that affect pitch when covered by hand • three ratchets of varying lengths
controlled by the same crank to produce a chord
• cones as tuned resonators on a snare drum
• devices that continuously modify sound-box size or morphology (enharmonic ratchets and drums) 3. instruments in which a drumskin
amplifies the noise of horsehair drawn through it (a friction drum) or the noise of crank-driven coiled springs hitting a board attached to such skin 4. enharmonic flute
merely a counterpart of the organ, where ten fingers control numerous pipes, but would have surpassed the organ in one significant aspect: that is, in the flexible dynamics permitting the fine graduation of volume. . . . In Leonardo’s viola or-ganista the finger pressure on the keys would have also modified the loudness of the tones produced [27].
Winternitz may not have understood that, unlike the piano, the instrument could modify dynamics after the key was pressed. A contact lever for this pur-pose is shown in another sketch by Leo-nardo [28]. Both Russolo and Winternitz emphasize how these resources surpass those of the organ and the later pi-anoforte [29].
In any event Russolo seems to have studied the evolution of Leonardo’s proj-ects: One of Russolo’s nuovo istrumento patent drawings (patent figure 2) is from the same perspective as one of Leo-nardo’s [30]. Furthermore, Russolo, like Leonardo, progressed from the friction wheel (intonarumori) to the friction belt (nuovo istrumento).
The viola organista and the nuovo istrumento differ significantly in one re-spect: The strings of the latter are excited lengthwise. This form of vibration is rarely used, because very long strings are necessary: With strings of ordinary length, sounds are so high pitched as to be nearly useless [31]. Russolo over-came the problem by using coiled springs of steel thread. The friction belt set the springs to vibrate along the plane of the coil. He thought increased pres-sure would make the volume louder by adding traditional lateral vibration to the longitudinal.
It has been suggested that the in-tonarumori derived from the cranked wheel of the hurdy-gurdy [32]; but in the hurdy-gurdy all the strings vibrate simul-taneously. Most are drones, and only two unison “melodic strings” change pitch. Some of the hurdy-gurdy’s mechanisms and its continuous sound occur in many of Russolo’s instruments. However, Rus-solo, preoccupied with “enharmony,” never called for the hurdy-gurdy’s most obvious aural characteristic: a drone.
S
OUNDS
ENSIBILITIESRussolo’s borrowing from Leonardo is not limited to principles of construction but extends to acoustics and aesthetics. Leonardo sought ways for music to exist in pitch space as a “continuous quantity.” This is strikingly close to Russolo’s theo-rization of enharmony [33].
Leonardo implies the same concept in Il Paragone [34], a section of the Trattato 5. double bellows that allow organs
to produce continuous sound 6. viola organista, a keyboard string
instrument. Leonardo first employed a bow, then a hurdy-gurdy wheel and finally a double friction belt, probably of horse-hair or silk. Dynamics could be varied by changing pressure on the keys.
S
IMILARITIESThe similarities of Leonardo’s and Rus-solo’s mechanical principles are striking. They include:
• the skin membrane as a means of amplifying a noise
• changing the tension of the mem-brane to alter pitch
• controlling dynamics through pres-sure of a wheel or belt on a string • notched friction surfaces • rotating sound generators • sound-boxes modifiable in their
dimensions
• springs vibrating against a mem-brane
• tuned resonators applied to a mem-brane
• continuous sound
• continuous mechanical beating of a drum.
Russolo may have based his rotary-fric-tion instruments on the principles of Leonardo’s viola organista, the most ob-vious instance of such borrowing be-ing the nuovo istrumento musicale a corde, which is essentially a perfected version of Leonardo’s viola organista. For Russolo, this instrument surpassed the organ:
[In the nuovo istrumento] one regulates the intensity of the sound with a greater or lesser pressure of the belt [against the vibrating body], that is to say pressing more or less so as to lower the key more or less with the finger, as the violin reg-ulates the intensity of the sound with the pressure of the bow against the strings. One can therefore obtain with the in-strument all the effects of continuous, sustained chords as in the organ, but be-ing able to give them all the expression of a violin, every small and quick varia-tion of pressure on the key being imme-diately reproduced by the belt, which thus modifies with great sensitivity the in-tensity of the resulting sound [26]. Compare the above to Winternitz’s vi-sion of Leonardo’s viola organista:
Such an instrument would not have been
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TING LEONARDO DA VINCI
Like symbolists before him, Russolo
finds something spiritual in Leonardo.
della Pittura written to prove that paint-ing has a greater metaphysical status than the other arts. Leonardo accords the same status to music when it deals with continuous quantities, that is, when it has “continuous flow”: “The flow—that is to say the smooth gliding from one tone to the next—elevates music to a scientia men-tale dealing with the continuous quanti-ties, like Geometry and Painting” [35]. Leonardo designed musical instru-ments in accordance with this theory. Among the instruments depicted in Arundel 263 f. 175r, the drum with the timpani-like mechanism, the instrument that Winternitz identifies as a pot drum, a type of ratchet, and the drum with the slide window are, by Russolo’s definition, enharmonic [36].
One of the most interesting of Leonardo’s “enharmonic” instruments is the “glissando flute,” a sketch of which is found in the Codice Atlantico (CA f. 397 rb). In the text, Leonardo says that this flute does not change pitch by leap but “in the manner of the human voice.” It can produce microtones (“You can ob-tain one eighth and one sixteenth of the tone and just as much as you want”) and, by moving the fingers along the slits, glis-sandi [37].
Puzzled by this instrument, Winter-nitz notes, “Such a glissando instrument would have not fitted into the orchestra [sic] of Leonardo’s day,” and naïvely adds: “Could Leonardo have foreseen in a dreamy corner of his incredible brain glissando instruments such as that in-vented in 1924 by the Russian scientist Lev Theremin?” [38]
The theremin, however, is hardly rele-vant, as the slide trumpet and trombone were already in use [39]. Winternitz clearly fails to understand Leonardo’s mi-crotonal purpose when Winternitz writes, “Obtaining an eighth and one sixteenth obviously means . . . to reach the upper octave” [40]. More importantly, he fails to connect these microtonal instruments with the theoretical base found in Leonardo’s writings on acoustics, even though he goes on to analyze these writ-ings in the last section of his book [41].
T
HER
EASONS FORS
ILENCEI have listed some of the possible ways in which Russolo is indebted to Leonardo. Producing this list is not enough, how-ever. We must ask why Russolo, although he mentioned Leonardo often, never ac-knowledged a debt to him.
Perhaps, like his fellow theosophist Gi-acomo Balla, he thought of himself as a reincarnation of Leonardo. Russolo
be-solo. Silence would then have become necessary.
One finds a nervous embarrassment in an anecdote from Zanovello [46]. While reading the galleys of a section of Al di là della Materia entitled “Alla Ricerca del bello” and dedicated to the “lighthouses of the human spirit” [47], she asks her husband why Leonardo is not included. Russolo, caught unprepared, responds as best he can: “Leonardo is not an artist; he is a scientist.” When she insists on all he taught her of Leonardo’s spiritual im-portance, Russolo grows irritated. All he can find to say is: “To speak of Leonardo is not an easy thing.” The following day, however, he composes a passage on Leonardo:
Leonardo is an incomparable historical figure. There might be another example of a man who equally divided his genius between science and art, but no one with the intensity and results of Leonardo. If his contemporaries could not under-stand how such an artist could lose so much time in speculations that at the time were not understood because they too far preceded validation by the
ex-perimental science, posterity has finally realized how many treasures of intuition and profound observation fill his manu-scripts.
If his contemporaries understood in Leonardo only the artist, posterity, amazed by his experimental science, ended up wanting to make him into a positivist and even almost a materialist. But what a clumsy error. His awesome definition: “Painting is a poetry that one sees” is all inclusive and certainly does not mean merely that painting paints what poetry describes. He said “poetry” and not history, description or speech, be-cause in poetry one presupposes an eva-sion of the laws of necessity in order to reach a higher harmony which is spiri-tual, through the harmony of verses.
. . . Leonardo wrote “He does not turn who is fixed on a star!” And almost to ex-plain the one and the other he has es-tablished this hierarchy: “Our body is ruled by the sky and the sky is ruled by the spirit.”
This hardly amounts to materialism! [48]
Reading these lines, so infused with candid admiration for Leonardo the man lieved in reincarnation; he wrote of it
frequently in Al di là della materia. He also believed that thoughts subsist “for a certain time after their emission in and around the places where they emerged. . . . Having the property of be-ing received, help . . . and go to enrich other men” [42].
There is also, Russolo writes, a “spiri-tual conversation” among artists of dif-ferent epochs, like the passing of a baton, independent of genre of artistic expres-sion:
A close kinship, an exchange of spiritual energies, a passage of divine fire occurs therefore between the great artists through the spiritual world where the arts no longer have the diversity of the matter with which they are shaped, but conserve only their intimate final spiri-tuality [43].
A passage of “divine fire” between Leonardo and Russolo must have seemed plausible to the latter, because of his res-idence in Milan and time spent in con-tact with Leonardo’s works. The stanze of Sforza Castle could have been imbued
with Leonardo’s spirit—an idea found in Giovanni Testori, who wrote a play about the ghost of Leonardo floating over the Castle ramparts [44].
There exists, however, a more concrete interpretive pathway. Although “Russolo, in the abundant masses of annotations, writings and notes on his instrument, is silent on every technical description of construction” [45], his silence may have been due to embarrassment that his fu-turist ideas were so directly derived from the past.
There is always much to learn when one analyzes the reasons for a repression, as it generates traces, due to the impos-sibility of complete suppression of feel-ings. This may be why Russolo could not admit a connection with Leonardo. He may have feared discovery that he was deriving research objectives and princi-ples of construction from Leonardo. The intonarumori and nuovo istrumento were not copies of Leonardo’s work, but they could have seemed that way to
Rus-CELEBRA
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There is also, Russolo writes, a
“spiritual conversation” among artists
of different epochs, like the passing
of a baton, independent of genre of
artistic expression.
and the artist, and at the same time un-derstanding the context in which they were written, we sense the bitter aftertaste of a confession. If Russolo’s wife had not persisted, there would have been no sec-tion on Leonardo in Al di là della materia. In all of his writings, this is the only in-stance in which Russolo expressly cites the manuscripts of Leonardo, finally re-vealing to us that he knew them.
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to Douglas Kahn, David Nutter, D. Kern Holoman, Beverly Wilcox, Tamsin Nutter and Mario Ruffini, without whose valuable advice this ar-ticle would not have been completed.
References and Notes
1. Barclay Brown, “Introduction,” in Luigi Russolo,
The Art of Noises (New York: Pendragon Press, 1986)
p. 2.
2. Maurizio Calvesi, Il Futurismo. La fusione della vita
nell’arte (Milan, Italy: Fratelli Fabbri Editori, 1977) p.
228 (extract translated by the author).
3. Luciano Chessa, Luigi Russolo and the Occult (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 2004); Germano Celant, “Futurism and the Occult,” Artforum 19 (1981) pp. 36–42; Simona Cigliana, Futurismo
Eso-terico. Contributi per una storia dell’irrazionalismo ital-iano tra Otto e Novecento (Naples, Italy: Liguori, 2002).
4. Giovanni Lista, “Russolo, peinture et bruitisme,” introductory essay in Luigi Russolo, L’art des bruits (Lausanne, Switzerland: l’Age d’Homme, 1975) p. 28.
5. The chapter on war noises in Russolo’s Arte dei
ru-mori recalls Leonardo’s writings on acoustics and
bal-listics: Chessa [3] pp. 300–303. On the peculiar way in which futurists employ the term enarmonia to mean “microtonality,” see Chessa [3] pp. 209–211.
6. Chessa [3] pp. 304–317. On Leonardo’s influence on Duchamp, see Linda D. Henderson, Duchamp in
Context (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998).
7. Russolo exhibited early symbolist tendencies. Sym-bolism remains the oedipally repressed father of the creative behavior of several futurists. On futurists and Leonardo, see Chessa [3] pp. 305–312. On the spir-itual side of Leonardo’s work in late-19th-century movements, see Pietro Marani, “Leonardo, i moti e le passioni. Introduzione alla fortuna e sfortuna del Cenacolo,” in Il Genio e le Passioni. Leonardo e il
Ce-nacolo. Precedenti, innovazioni, riflessi di un capolavoro,
exh. cat., Pietro Marani, ed. (Milan, Italy: Palazzo Reale, 21 March–17 June 2001)(Milan, Italy: Civico Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, 2001) pp. 29–38.
8. Filippo T. Marinetti, La grande Milano tradizionale
e futurista (Milan, Italy: Mondadori, 1969) pp. 69, 173,
187.
9. Marianne Martin claims Carlo Carrà was one, but her source (Buzzi) does not confirm this. Marianne W. Martin, Futurist Art and Theory (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1968).
10. Maria Zanovello, Russolo. L’uomo. L’artista (Milan, Italy: Cyril Corticelli, 1958); this account is repeated by Lista [4]; Gianfranco Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’Arte
dei rumori. Con tutti gli scritti musicali (Turin, Italy:
Martano, 1978); and in Martin [9]. These sources
29. This aim was common, e.g. Cahill’s telharmo-nium: F. Busoni, “Abbozzo di una nuova estetica della musica,” in Fedele d’Amico, ed., Lo sguardo lieto. Tutti
gli scritti sulla musica e le arti, (Milan, Italy: Il
Saggia-tore, 1977) p. 68n18.
30. Winternitz [13] p. 159; Maffina [10] p. 229, Fig. 2.
31. One of the exceptions is Ellen Fullman’s Long
string instrument of the 1980s.
32. Daniele Lombardi, Il suono veloce (Lucca, Italy: LIM Ricordi, 1996) p. 39.
33. Russolo was the first to introduce an enharmonic instrument. See Russolo in Maffina [10] pp. 210–211.
34. Both notions are in fact based on the assumption that pitch-space is continuous and that every selec-tion of pitches (i.e. every scale) extracted from this continuity is therefore arbitrary. Leonardo also dis-cussed continuity in Arundel 263; see Winternitz [13] p. 221. 35. Winternitz [13] p. 216. 36. Winternitz [13] pp. 179, 181–183. 37. Winternitz [13] p. 192. CA f. 397 rb is on page 194. 38. Winternitz [13] p. 192.
39. In the text of CA f. 397 rb, Leonardo says the glis-sando is achieved by moving “the hand up and down [along the slits] just as with the tromba torta and more so in the zufolo.” The tromba torta and zufolo may be early examples of a slide trumpet and flute à coulisse.
40. Winternitz [13] p. 192.
41. Winternitz [13] pp. 204–223.
42. Russolo [11] pp. 246–247 (excerpt translated by the author).
43. Russolo [11] p. 210 (excerpt translated by the au-thor). Russolo quotes from Leonardo in the next paragraph.
44. Giovanni Testori, “Reliquiae fugientes,” in Marani [7].
45. Maffina [10] p. 27 (excerpt translated by the au-thor).
46. Zanovello [10] pp. 83–84.
47. The expression “fari dell’umanità” comes from Giovanni Papini, Il crepuscolo dei filosofi (1906). The section on “i fari dell’umanità” may be modeled on Édouard Schuré’s Great Initiates, a book Russolo read. Zanovello [10] p. 77.
48. Russolo [11] pp. 269–270 (excerpt translated by the author).
Manuscript received 1 February 2007.
As composer, pianist, musical saw and Viet-namese dan bau soloist, Luciano Chessa has largely performed in the U.S.A. and in Eu-rope. Chessa holds a Ph.D. from the Univer-sity of California at Davis and currently teaches History of Contemporary Music at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. His music, published by RAI TRADE, is distrib-uted in the U.S.A. by the Theodore Presser Company.
give his supervisor’s name as “Crivelli,” but they are mistaken: see Achille Patroclo, ed., Le Vicende del
Ce-nacolo di Leonardo da Vinci nel secolo XIX (Milan, Italy:
Ufficio Regionale per la Conservazione dei Monu-menti della Lombardia, 1906).
11. Its influence may be seen in the closeness with which Russolo followed Silvestri’s 1924 restoration of
The Last Supper. Luigi Russolo, Al di là della materia
(Milan, Italy: Luciano Ferrani, 1961) p. 272.
12. Russolo in Maffina [10] p. 306; Russolo [11] pp. 210, 306.
13. Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de piv eccellenti architetti,
pit-tori, et scvltori italiani, Corrado Ricci, ed. (Milan,
Italy: Bestelti e Tumminelli, 1927) III:17; see espe-cially the chapter “The Mystery of the Skull Lyre,” in Emanuel Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1982) pp. 39–72.
14. Codice Arundel. I manoscritti e i disegni di Leonardo
da Vinci pubblicati dalla Reale Commissione Vinciana. Volume I. Il codice Arundel 263 del Museo Britannico.
Riproduzione fototipica con trascrizione diplomat-ica e critdiplomat-ica. Parte I[–IV] (Rome, 1923[–1930]). Rus-solo must have known it after 1904, because it contains sketches for the Last Supper.
15. Russolo [11] p. 270 (excerpt translated by the au-thor).
16. Maffina [10] pp. 347, 314.
17. Maffina [10] p. 315 (excerpt translated by the au-thor). This position differs from an earlier position on the Last Supper reported in Marinetti [8] pp. 118–119. Marinetti is known to have manipulated facts to advance his modernist agenda; he “edited” writings of his futurist associates in the course of his activities as a publisher. See Calvesi [2] p. 78.
18. Buzzi in Zanovello [10] pp. 11, 12–13 (excerpt translated by the author). The capitalized personal pronoun is, in Italian as in other languages, normally reserved for God. The reference to the lyre suggests that Buzzi might have read Vasari.
19. Buzzi in Zanovello [10] p. 95 (excerpt translated by the author).
20. On the term “enharmony” (used before Russolo by Balilla Pratella) see Note [5] above. On “conti-nuity,” see Chessa [3] pp. 211–221, 295–299.
21. The synthesizer-like qualities of the intonarumori alleged by Brown and others were achieved me-chanically; mostly a concept, they arose from Rus-solo’s systematic/taxonomical (but also ecumenical!) approach to sound. Naturally, a single intonarumori would mechanically “synthesize” only one kind of sound; these instruments displayed synth-like prop-erties as a whole. This obtained until Russolo in the 1920s built the rumorharmonium, an instrument that combined all the timbres of the individual in-tonarumori and controlled them through a keyboard interface (a change curiously close to Moog’s con-ceptual departure from the Buchla).
22. Brown [1] p. 5.
23. Zanovello [10] p. 77 (excerpt translated by the author).
24. In Maffina [10] p. 225.
25. Winternitz [13].
26. Maffina [10] pp. 224–225 (excerpt translated by the author).
27. Winternitz [13] pp. 155, 164.
28. Winternitz [13] p. 153 (8.17).
CELEBRA
