Background
Luigi Russolo was born on April 30, 1885 in Portogruaro, Italy. He was the son of a cathedral organist and the brother of Antonio Russolo, an Italian Futurist composer.
1917
Russolo, Piatti and the Intonarumori
Via Brera, 28, 20121 Milano MI, Italy
Brera Academy
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Luigi Russolo was born on April 30, 1885 in Portogruaro, Italy. He was the son of a cathedral organist and the brother of Antonio Russolo, an Italian Futurist composer.
Despite the fact, that Luigi Russolo attended Brera Academy, mostly he was a self-taught painter.
Between 1931 and 1933, he studied occult philosophy in Spain.
In 1909, Luigi showed a group of etchings at the Famiglia Artistica in Milan, where he met Umberto Boccioni and Carlo Carra. His works of Divisionist period were influenced by Previati and particularly by Boccioni. In 1910, after his encounter with Marinetti, Russolo signed both the Manifesto of Futurist Painters and the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting. Afterwards, he participated in all Futurist soirees and exhibitions. His mature Futurist canvases, while open to Cubist influence, drew primarily on the examples of Anton Giulio Bragaglia's photo-dynamism and Etienne-Jules Marey's chrono-photography.
Russolo issued his manifesto L'arte dei rumori (The Art of Noises) in 1913, that expanded into book form in 1916, theorized the inclusion of incidental noise into musical composition. With Ugo Piatti, he later invented the intonarumori, noise-emitting machines, and in 1913-1914, Russolo conducted his first Futurist concerts with numerous intonarumori. Audiences reacted with enthusiasm or open hostility. During that period, Russolo started to contribute to the magazine Lacerba, where in 1914 he published an essay, which introduced a new form of musical notation.
With the outbreak of World War I, Russolo volunteered and after being seriously wounded in December 1917, he spent eighteen months in various hospitals. In 1921, the painter held three futurist concerts in Paris, that were greatly acclaimed by Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Diaghilev, Ravel and Mondrian.
During the 1920s, Russolo invented a series of musical instruments named "rumorarmoni", "enharmonic bow", "enharmonic piano" and appeared in three short Futurist films, for which he also composed the music. Luigi held his last concert in 1929 at the opening of a Futurist show in Paris at the Galerie 23.
After a period in Spain, he settled down in Italy in 1933.
In 1941-1942, Russolo took up painting again in a realist style, that he called "classic-modern".
Quotations:
"As it grows ever more complicated today, musical art seeks out combinations more dissonant, stranger, and harsher for the ear. Thus, it comes ever closer to the noise-sound."
"Everyone will recognize that each sound carries with it a tangle of sensations, already well-known and exhausted, which predispose the listener to boredom, in spite of the efforts of all musical innovators."
"In antiquity, life was nothing but silence. Noise was really not born before the 19th century, with the advent of machinery. Today noise reigns supreme over human sensibility."
