TUNING NOISES AND

PAINTING TIME:

HOW FUTURISM MADE HISTORY (1981?)

With the famous initial Futurist Manifesto published in Paris in 1909, the Italian Futurists demanded that everyone be released from the oppressive weight of centuries of dead classical art and past glories of the Roman Empire 2000 years ago. Unlike today's laid-back mediators and drop-outers, they asked people to drop in and go along with the new current of industry, engineering, and technology, for this was the Age of Speed.

The automobile, the airplane, the city, coupled with the scientists' concept of Time as the Fourth Dimension, inspired them to celebrate the aesthetic of their contemporary environment, and to draw and paint and sculpt motion and time and even noise along with the usual visual representations. In this they anticipated the cinema and indeed helped it become the important part of worldwide life it developed into later. Their concern with reform and innovation extended to literature, poetry, and the Theatre.

Unlike the Surrealists, who were hostile to music for quite some time, the Futurists were quite concerned with music and with all sound, speech and noise, culminating in The Art of Noise and the Intonarumori (Italian for "giving a tone or pitch to noises") instruments invented for the orchestra of the future, which provided a wide spectrum of sounds hitherto neglected by the Musical Establishment. Remember, this was long before our rock groups with powerful amplifiers and light shows and flickering strobes!

Futurism spread over much of the world, to New York and Paris and even Russia--where it did its thing vigorously for a short while before the Stalinist era struck it down. It re-echoed in the Dada movement which followed it, and its spirit survives today, as for instance with the hot-rodders and motorcycle enthusiasts everywhere.

Walking, running, dancing, even laughing, can be clearly seen in Boccioni's, Carra's, and Severini's paintings and sculptures. Not the static superposition of disparate and fragmentary images in much modern visual art, but the stroboscopic effect of different instants of action, seen simultaneously by our after-images and persistence of vision. Let us call it the picturing of verbs rather than nouns. There is something really positive about that.

The word futurism of course has taken on new and very different meanings for us--high technology, electronics, the computer age, space exploration, video games, science fiction, etc. But the original meaning still survives and the movement itself continues, in various forms and various senses. Its positive dynamic aspects are very important now, to counterbalance the Gloom-and-Doom Think-Tanks who have grabbed the title of Futurist for themselves.

The Italian Futurists and their contemporary counterparts in other countries wanted to see progress in music as much as progress in other arts, but alas! This was not to be. During all my own years of life, music has been stiifled and strangled by its past.