Notes
231 Introduction 1. Maria Zanovello, Luigi Russolo: L’uomo, l’artista (Milan: Cyril Corticelli, 1958), 78–79; henceforth Zanovello, Luigi Russolo. 2. Luigi Russolo, Al di là della materia (Milan: Bocca, 1938); quoted from the second edition (Milan: Luciano Ferriani editore, 1961), 102–3. 3. Giovanni Lista,“Russolo, peinture et bruitisme,” in Luigi Russolo, L’art des bruits (Lausanne: l’Age d’Homme,1975),28; henceforth Lista,“Russolo,peinture et bruitisme.” This judgment was later echoed by other scholars.See Piera Anna Franini,“Il futurismo in musica fra rivoluzione e tradizione: Terza parte,” Musicaaa! 3, no. 8 (1997): 26. 4. Barclay Brown was the first to point out“Russolo’s role in creating the first musical synthesizer”; see Brown, introduction to Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises, trans. Barclay Brown (New York: Pendragon Press, 1986), 1. 5. These interests will include such alternatives spiritual practices as remote healing , spirit conjuring, etheric doubling, ectoplasmic materialization, sun gazing, palm reading, yoga meditation, etc. Because of the syncretic nature of the occult field of inquiry, more an all-encompassing ocean than a univocal stream of study, I prefer to let the term occult (as well as the discipline that studies it, occultism) define itself, with all its manifold and even contradictory allure, in the following pages than reveal it in a narrow definition. In this way I pay homage to the term’s etymology. 6. A case in point is Anna Gasparotto’s thorough examination of Russolo’s late philosophy in the MART 2006 catalog (cited in n. 10), research that shows how Russolo ’s spiritual and occult research is now taken more seriously. But if Gasparotto’s scholarship is presented in parallel with Russolo’s visual art explorations of the 1940s, no contribution in MART employs spirituality as an access key to a deeper understanding of Russolo’s futurist activities. Daniele Lombardi’s brief contribution to studies of Russolo’s futurist investigations in the realm of sound, which is also included Notes 232 . Notes to Pages 4–5 in the catalogue, only makes passing reference to Russolo’s spirituality and does not provide any kind of interpretation of his sound theory. Instead, it mostly list facts and notions previously available in print, including some which meanwhile had already been corrected by my Luigi Russolo and the Occult (e.g., Russolo’s 1931’s nuovo istrumento musicale a corde is here still referred to as piano enarmonico). 7. The word intonarumori first appears as apparecchi intonarumori (noise intoner instruments) in Russolo’s article “Gl’intonarumori futuristi,” dated May 22, 1913, and published in Lacerba on July 1, 1913. Since the word apparecchi was implied, it soon would be omitted. In the course of this book I will use the word intonarumori for both the singular and plural forms, as it is in Italian (e.g.,“il singolo [apparecchio] intonarumori ,” or“un’orchestra di [apparecchi] intonarumori”). Lacerba is available in facsimile (Milan: Mazzotta, 1970). 8. Zanovello, Luigi Russolo, 21. Throughout this book, italics are mine unless otherwise noted. 9. Gianfranco Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori: Con tutti gli scritti musicali (Turin: Martano, 1978), 115, 117; henceforth Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori. All quoted passages from The Art of Noises are based on the Barclay Brown translations (see note 4), which I edited when needed. Italics are mine unless otherwise indicated. 10. Daniele Lombardi,“Tanto rumore per nulla?” in Luigi Russolo, Vita e opere di un futurista (Milan: Skira, 2006), 118; henceforth MART. Franco Tagliapietra,“Riflessioni sulla pittura: Teoria e produzione dal dopoguerra al 1930,” in MART, 56. In her essays for this catalog, Anna Gasparotto recognizes that Russolo’s late spiritual interests were rooted in his early Milanese years, but by claiming that they were the result of his early Milanese milieu and “resurfaced” later, that is, that Russolo had “pushed them aside” until he“revisited” them in Paris as part of his“curious and detailed investigations ,” she implies that his occult interests skipped the futurist years altogether; Gasparotto,“Da Parigi a Tarragona al rientro in Italia,” in MART, 69, 85, and “Cerro di Laveno e il lago Maggiore: L’incontro e la conversazione con un gruppo di amici, la pittura‘classico-moderna,’” in MART, 98. 11. For the titles and dates of Russolo’s artworks, I rely on the chronology Franco Tagliapietra prepared for MART. 12. Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’arte dei rumori,16. 13. I first proposed the notion of a continuity in Russolo’s...
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