Russolo's Intonarumori

From Makezine blog:

In 1913, Italian painter and composer Luigi Russolo created a new type of musical instruments he dubbed the "Intonarumori", or "noise intoners". The sounds produced by these devices were definitely unusual for his era and you'd be hard pressed to find anything similar to it today.



Sadly, none of Russolo's intoners survived WWII, but new versions have been built using the original schematics. In fact, NYC's Performa festival featured an evening of intonarumori music.

The future of mankind

We've mentioned it in passing before, but there is a charming little museum in LA. Styled after a cabinet of wonders of days gone by, the Museum of Jurassic Technology takes you on a tour through human knowledge. At first you don't know what it's about. A joke? A spoof on museums?



First the visitor is shown a filmstrip of the history of museums - which really truns out to be a history of the collection of human knowledge. It starts out with Noah's Ark, The library of Alexandria, Cathedrals of the Middle Ages, and modern museums and universities of today. Most of the museum turns out to be a collection of forgotten or disproved knowledge... curiosities that "could" be true... or "might" be true.



Finally, upstairs there is a movie that talks about the Russian philosopher Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov who believed that the advancement and evolution of all human knowledge should be humankind's final triumph over death. What he called the Common Cause could and must be the uniting factor that would transcend all differences in culture, religion, wealth or race.



There is a bunch of great stuff in the film. They talked about Konstantin Tsiolkovsky who was the Russian visionary and father of Russian space travel. Tsiolkovsky was a follower of Fyodorov's ideas. Since mankind was to be immortal he would need more space to live. Tsiolkovsky concieved of space stations, space elevators and the like - all in the Ninteenth Century.

Fyodorov is one of those names which, now that you know who it is, you will find his name popping up all the time. Dostoyevsky was a contemporary.



Anyway, the soundtrack to this movie at the Museum of Jurassic Technology has some cool duduk music.

a new instrument

H Lyman Sayen

Scientist and artist 1875 - 1918




True to the hyper-inventive atmosphere of his time, H. Lyman Sayen was interested in scientific experiments which led him to a new design of a large induction coil by the time he was eighteen. Later he designed and patented a self-regulating X-ray tube. Sayen fought in the Spanish-American War and was sent to Fort McPherson, Georgia, where he was commissioned to construct and operate the country's first military X-ray laboratory.

In 1899 he enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts to pursue his interests in art. In 1902 he applied for a patent for an electric recording perimetert for the extraction of foreign bodies form the human eye by means of roentgenography. The patent was granted in 1905. Soon after, Sayen won a national competition for the design of four lunettes to be placed in the room assigned to the Committee on Insular Affairs at the United Sates Capitol in Washington.

In 1906 Sayen had been living in Paris with his new wife and met Leo and Gertrude Stein. He then was thrust upon the world of Fauvism and Cubism. Eventually Sayen was able to take a class with Matisse and in 1912 was invited to become a member of the Salon d'Automne - the same time a young Fernand Leger was invited.

During 1911 and 1912 he worked to patent his design of a more easily manufactured steel billiard ball.

By the fall of 1912, the Sayens apartment proved to have too many steps to incorporate the birth of their new baby. Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas were the first to visit their only child Ann. By the outbreak of WWI the Sayens moved back to Philadelphia for safety. In his first exhibition in the US generated the following review:

When the work of the futurists first burst on our ken via the international show given in the N.Y. Armory, we were told that the painters were not representing objects, but depicting sensations produced by viewing their chosen subjects. The result was somewhat incomprehnsible to many of us, but the idea at least seemed logical. Mr. Sayen, on the contrary, is very evidently depicting objects, which are usually quite recognizable, but he introduces strange color combinations and obscure forms which do not explain themselves and are disquieting to the understanding.

Clearly these early American reviewers were struggling to categorize the new art from Europe. While we would have a better time today describing Mr. Sayen's work as Fauvist because of his use of color and theories of emotions paired with color, the ideas going through the minds of artists often run very closely together. Sometimes it is difficult to label a Futurist from a Cubist for example. Cataloging can become even more difficult when you consider many artists considered themselves in different camps from one painting to the next.

Consider Sayen's painting The Thundershower, 1917-1918. There are elements of Bruitism, Simulteneity, Dynamism - all which would suggest the force of Futurism - but then then he also evokes the collage (Dada or Merz) and even the overall two-dimensional rpesentation that might have come from Cezanne or even Mondrian.



Don't forget that Sayen was also a scientist and inventor - a proponant of the triumph of technology and science. He also had views for the progress of art and its meaning. Look what he had to say at the Sketch Club in Philadelphia in 1914:

Modern art... is all spontaneity and requires an equally spontaneous apprehension. To feel it requires a quickening of the spirit. It has revealed to us men of great power. Picasso and Matisse will I believe exrt a powerful influence for a long time on painting and sculpture....

To paint today is to make a beautiful object. just as this chair is an object. It is the making of reality, not the representation of it. Popular sense has supposed the new type of art as representing peculiar emotions. It is more than that, it IS the emotions themselves. In fact emotion is no longer the name for the act, neither of its creation nor its apprehension. Perception touches nearer the mark. Its rhythm is that of the pulse, its beauty the law of God. This is the art that today confronts that atrophied half of the mentality of the United States.... It is the modern spirit, the spirit of an emancipated democracy and it has not only come at a time when the external man is saturated with the infiltration of the new sprit, but at a period when the mind of the individual presents a scene of moral confusion and the need today is for a new and more liberal brand of order for the old one has grown stale.

Art and Science

Two articles for your enjoyment from Science Daily.

First, we all knew this was coming - I'm surprised it's taking so long actually:
ScienceDaily: Computer Scientist Plans Bach Over Broadband

And, the following...

Source:
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
Date:
July 20, 2007

Art And Music For The Birds
Science Daily — Nature is a valued source of inspiration for artists. But what have artists offered the natural world? Would a bird even like rock and roll?

Conceptual sculptor Elizabeth Demaray, an assistant professor of fine arts at Rutgers University—Camden, is testing the musical tastes of our fine feathered friends with an exhibition featuring four 10-foot red perches offering what are considered to be the best in classical, rock, country, and jazz for local birds.

Demaray’s concept of art for the birds hatched from a conversation with co-creator John Walsh, a video artist, who sent Demaray sounds made by the catbird, an avid appreciator of human noise. The Rutgers-Camden scholar makes art that interacts with natural surroundings –- imagine spotting a tree donning a sweater or finding a rock upholstered as a baseball. She decided to find out if rockin’ robins do exist.

“Humans have an impact on other animals around us. Catbirds and mockingbirds listen to noise we make, but we don’t know if they might respond to human sound,” says Demaray. While there have been no scientific studies on birds’ response to human music, anecdotal evidence suggests that certain species of bird listen to and replicate human song.

“My interest with the piece was to get us to think about the impact we have on the other species around us,” she adds.

The bird listening stations are part of the exhibition “Inside/Outside: Habitat” on view at the Abington Arts Center’s Sculpture Park in Jenkintown, Pa., through Wednesday, Nov. 21. Visitors of the interactive exhibit receive a schedule of songs emitting from each station, which will repeat approximately five songs each.

Birds can tune in to classics like Vivaldi’s “Concert in D Major,” Miles Davis’s “Blue and Green,” and Led Zepplin’s “Kasmir.” They may also hear songs about the winged life like “Marching Jaybird” by Etta Baker, “Birds” by Neil Young, and “I’m a Cuckoo” by Belle and Sebastian.
“If we’re going to give birds music, we might as well give them what we consider to be our masterpieces. But the only gauge humans have on what’s good music is our own interest,” says the Rutgers-Camden artist. “Of course, we may find that birds have their own criteria for assessing our music. So, to see it they might prefer Miles Davis to the Dixie Chicks, you should come see for yourself.”

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

more mechanical musical instruments

Made in 1772...

Lenin a futurist?

Of course, given the nature of of the times and the agressive speach of contemporary artists, Early Twentieth-Century Futurists (and Dadaists, and Surrealists) can often easily get lumped with major (often currently unpopular) political movements of the time. These artists were active in being important figures in their society. They weren't artists purely for personal gain but also they often thought they were bettering mankind's existential health. They were radical thinkers in art, and since art is a natural part of life, they were radical thinkers in the social realm as well.

The Futurists might have been afraid of Europe sinking into another dark-ages. At the turn of the century there was such a huge surge in science and new ideas, the Futurists saw themselves as a catylist for encouraging an even faster pregression.

It's not fair, really, to sit back today and call Lenin a Futurist. Just as it is misleading to call Tatlin a Communist. Many of the major ideals line up on both sides because these ideas for change in the new Century were so important to so many thinking people. Still, there is a large gap between the action of men of power and the written words of men of thought.

Marcu, a young Roumanian was living in Zurich at the same time as Tzara, Janco, Jung, Ball, and Lenin (who was in exile there). Marcu gives us this from his memoirs:

When we left the restaurant, it was late in the afternoon. I walked home with Lenin.
"You see," he said, "why I take my meals here. You get to know what people are really talking about. Nadezhda Konstantinovna is sure that only the Zurich underworld frequents this pleace, but I think she is mistaken. To be sure, Maria is a prostitute, but she does not like her trade. She has a large family to support - and that is no easy matter. As to Frau Prellog, she is prefectly right. Did you hear what she said? Shoot all the officers!..."

"Do you know the real meaning of this war?"
"What is it?" I asked.
"It is obvious," he replied. "One slaveholder, Germany, who owns one hundred slaves, is fighting another slaveholder, England, who owns two hundred slaves, for a 'fairer' distribution of the slaves."
"How can you expect to foster hatred of this war," I asked at this point, "if you are not, in principle, against all wars? I thought that as a Bolshevik you were really a radical thinker and refused to make any compromise with the idea of war. But by recognizing the validity of some wars, you open the doors for every opportunity. Every group can find some justifications of the particular war of which it approves. I see that we young people can only count on ourselves..."
"Lenin listened attentively, his head bent toward me. He moved his chair closer to mine... Lenin must have wondered whether he should continue to talk with this boy or not. I, somewhat awkwardly, remained silent."
"Your determination to rely upon yourselves," Lenin finally replied, "is very important. Every man must rely upon himself. Yet he should also listen to what informed people have to say. I don't know how radical you are, or how radical I am. I am certainly not radical enough. One can never be radical enough; that is, one must always try to be as radical as reality itself..."

............

Another interesting interchange between radical artists of the Early Twentieth Century and political power mongers happened in 1948. Marinetti personally invited Moholy-Nagy and Kurt Schwitters to accompany him to a banquet with the German Press Association. Goebbels was there, as was Goring, August Wilhelm of Hohenzollern, Hess, Roehm, and Nazi underlings. Moholy, Schitters and Moholy's wife were sandwiched between the head of the National Socialist Organization for Folk Culture, and the leader of the "Strength Through Joy" movement. Moholy-Nagy's wife Sibyl writes:

The disharmony between the guests was accentuated by the absence of speeches and an unlimited consumption of excellent German Rhine wine. Moholy was silent. His face was shuttered, and when our eyes met I saw that he was full of resentment. The more Schwitters drank, the more fondly he regarded his neighbor.
"I love you, you Cultural Folk and Joy," he said. "honestly, I love you. You think I'm not worthy of sharing your chamber, your art chamber for strength and folk, ha? I'm an idiot too, and I can prove it."
Moholy put his hand firmly on Schwitters' arm and for a few minutes he was silent, drinking rapidly and searching the blank face of his neighbor with wild blue eyes.
"You think I'm a Dadaist, don't you," he suddenly started again. "that's where you're wrong, brother. I'm MERZ!" He thumped his wrinkled dress shirt near his heart. "I'm Aryan - the great Aryan MERZ. I can think Aryan, paint Aryan, spit Aryan."
He held an unsteady fist before the man's nose. "With this Aryan fist I shall destroy the mistakes of my youth - if you want me to," he added in a whisper after a long sip."
There was no reaction at all from the Strength Through Joy man while the official from the Folk Culture Organization nodded droolingly, his round cheeks puffed up with wine and amazement. Schwitters took a sudden liking to him.
"Oh joyful babyface," he muttered, tears running down his cheeks. "You will not prohibit me from MERZing my MERZ art?"
The word 'prohibit' had finally penetrated the foggy brain of the Strength Through Joy man.
"Verboten ist verboten," he said with great firmness and a heavy tongue, "Heil Hitler!"
Schwitters looked wildly at Moholy, at me, at Marinetti, but before he could incite anyone to action, Marinetti had risen from his chair. he swayed considerably and his face was purple.
"My friends," he said in French, "after the many excellent speeches tonight, I feel the urge to thank the great, courageous, high-spirited people of Berlin. I shall recite my poem "The Raid on Adrionople."
There was polite applause. Some nice poetry would break the embarrassing dullness of the dinner.

Adrianople est cerne de toutes parts SSSSrrrr zigzigzigzigz PAAAAAAAAAAAAAAghrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

roared Marinetti

Ouah ouah ouah, depart des trains suicides, ouah ouah ouah

the audience gasped; a few hushed giggles were audible

Tchip tchip tchip -fEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEElez

he grabbed a wineglass and smashed it to the floor

Tchip tchip tichip - des messages tlegraphiques couturieres Americaines Piiiiiiiiiiiiiing, sssssssssrrrrrr, zitzitzitzit toum toum Patrouille tapie -

Marinetti threw himself over the table.

Vanite, viande congeleeeeeeeee - veilleuse de La Madone

expiring almost as a whisper from his lips.
Slowly he slid to the floor, his clenched fingers pulling the tablecloth downward, wine, food, plates, and silverware puring into the laps of the notables.
Schwitters had jumped up at the first sound of the poem. Like a horse at a familiar sound the Dadaist in him responded to the signal. His face flushed, his mouth open, he followed each of Marinetti's moves with his own body. In the momentary silence that followed the climax his eyes met Moholy's.
"Oh, Anna Blume," he whispered, and suddenly breaking out into a roar that drowned the din of protesting voices and scraping chair legs, he thundered:

Oh, Anna Blume
Du bist von hinten wie von vorn
A-N-N-A

Stockhausen and the future(ists) (part 4 of 4)

If one were to pick an object of the world and express what that object means to us in the human experience we could see more clearly how the work of Stockhausen and the Futurists relate. For example, when a Futurist wishes to express a table he or she would immediately want to know how the table would move, or under what circumstances it would move and it would show the entire movement of that table in one flat space. Simultaneity might also provoke a Futurist artist to express other things moving in relation to the table at the same time. Stockhausen can view this table with the knowledge gained in the last fifty years. The atomic age lets us know that the table is no longer merely a table but it is an object which is composed of millions of atomic materials in constant motion. If all materials are composed of fundamental elements it is possible to imagine that object being transformed into a different object with the elements added, subtracted, or rearranged. In other words the Futurists might want to exhibit the simultaneous motion of a train smashing through the table with passengers dining comfortably on similar tables in their cabins, and Stockhausen could conceivably express a transformation from the table into the locomotive itself. The Futurists idea of simultaneity is the expression of the movement of the table and its modern environment at the same time. Stockhausen’s idea of expressing simultaneity is to express the table becoming the environment, or perhaps to show various degrees of the elements between the table and its environment. Stockhausen’s music is often essentially a decomposition or deconstruction of melodic and harmonic elements and new permutations of these elements. Using electronics he can create these permutations almost infinitely in ways the human body can not comprehend without the knowledge of mechanical or electronic devices.


Karlheinz Stockhausen’s work can clearly be seen as an extension of the Futurist aesthetic that motivates us towards thinking above and beyond the limitations of our natural body. They both use a simultaneous expression of time that is free of the body’s limitations, they both believe in the potency of the future compared to the latent perceptions of the past, and they both rely on the machine’s ability to do what the body naturally cannot. Stockhausen has similar views of expressing the simultaneity of the human experience and the relationship between man and machine but he applies what we have learned from science and technology in the last fifty years. Stockhausen shares the Futurists’ wish to “hurl their defiance to the stars,” and proclaim the age of the machine as a necessary step in human evolution. He also uses technology to heighten our perception of the world and escape from what he calls the prison of our organic limitations.


It is a constant desire of mankind to learn as much as we can about the world and it is also the constant need of the artist to express our experiences. Therefore it is inevitable that the learning and the expressing combine to push mankind further in its evolution. Both the Futurists and Stockhausen struggle with the possibility of escape and transcendence from the limitations that were imposed upon us from birth, and both wish to express the possibility of a malleable reality which would allow us to evolve into a freer and more perfect entity.

Russolo and Marinetti - men of the future (part 2)

Luigi Russolo was another Italian Futurist who had ideas for Futurism in music. In 1913 he wrote, “We take greater pleasure in ideally combining the noises of trams, explosions of motors, trains, and shouting crowds than in listening again, for example, to the ‘Eroica’ or the ‘Pastorale.’”4 He describes the pleasure of listening to a large modern capital with its “gurglings of water, air, and gas inside metallic pipes, the grumbling of motors that breathe and pulse with an indisputable animality, the throbbing of valves, the rising and falling pisons, the screeching of mechanical saws, the jumping of trams on their rails.”5 Russolo’s idea is to form a new orchestra with a new classification of sounds. Instead of strings, brass, and woodwinds he envisions screams, thumps and explosions. These are sounds of the machine; essentially Russolo was describing a type of electronic music in 1913. The exact technology for performing these sounds was not yet possible but the Futurists envisioned a music that was free of the organic sounds of human performers. Russolo envisioned a new orchestra that would obtain sonic emotions by imitation of life but by a “fantastic association of various timbres and rhythms.”6 Russolo’s idea of Futurist music was the glorification of factory and machine simultaneously using new mechanical sounds as the orchestra of tomorrow. In other words Futurist music was music which neglected the organic human body while reveling in the power technology and its ability to do what the body could no longer match.

Marinetti’s motivation was somewhat political when he founded Italian Futurism; he wanted an Italy free of its archeological sleep and an Italy of vitality. His glorification of the new and avant-garde was a way of drawing attention to the future rather than the past. Neitzsche said, “there can be no nostalgia! No pessimism! There’s no turning back! Boldly, let us advance! Forward! Faster! Further, Higher! Let us lyrically renew our joy in being alive!”7 Like Neitzsche the Futurists believed in the potency of the future. They affirmed that “the future is a malleable entity in perpetual creation and is the only authentic dimension of reality,” and they believed that, “the past does not actually exist except in the memory.”8 What only exists in this latent fraction of the mind cannot be conceived of as reality instead absolute truth was to be found in the future.9 In 1909 Marinetti published the novel Mafarka the Futurist, the story of the birth of a mechanical winged superman. The author created a mythology of the future and set it in the past. This convergence of the past and future allowed the past to exist as a symbol of mysticism and the future to be exalted as the only truth. Marinetti wrote that only the machine could deliver us from our biological and genetic fate and, at the same time, assure the irreversibility of history.

The Futurist’s conception of time is one that further expresses the desire to escape from the human organic body. Futurist artists used simultaneity as the expresses the desire to escape from the human organic body. Futurist artists used simultaneity as the expression of the incredibly complex rhythms of life. Essentially Simultaneity is the perception of many different events and meanings at the same time. Simultaneity is movement beyond the body and a display of all things in the human experience, but exhibiting and comprehending this movement can only truly happen without the limited perceptions of the human body.

Mechanical Musical instruments - Nethercutt

"The Nethercutt collection is a world-class treasure house of prize winning automobiles, automobilia, and mechanical musical instruments. The heart of this 'functional fine art' collection contains over 200 meticulously restored American and European automobiles dating from 1898 to 1982."

This collection boils the excitement in the blood of any futurist. This spycam picks up the following:

1. an Ampico reproducing piano (where the player mechanism fits in a drawer below the keys),
2. "Vorsetzer" player piano (where the player mechanism is actually a turn-of-the-century robot that plays any piano - it sits in front of the piano and plays it with 88 fingers)
3. a quick shot of a Regina music box with automatic disc changer
4. some smaller orchestrions
5. an automatic banjo
6. a large orchestrion playing with closeups of the bellow action
7. some classic automobiles in a palatial showroom
8. an old battery charger and electric car from about 1905