He quits painting to play the roar

In 1913, the same stretch of years he painted this car, Russolo did something almost no painter at the peak of a movement ever does. He largely set the brush aside. Not forever, he painted again late in life, but as his main work, for the next decade or more, he stopped being a painter. The man who had just figured out how to paint the roar of a car decided that paint could not actually make the roar, and went looking for something that could.

On 11 March 1913 he wrote it down, in the form of a letter to the Futurist composer Francesco Balilla Pratella. The letter became a manifesto, and the manifesto has a title you should remember: The Art of Noises (in Italian L’arte dei rumori). Its argument was simple and, in 1913, startling. The industrial age, Russolo wrote, had remade the human ear. We now lived among engines, factories, trams, crowds, machine guns, a whole new orchestra of noisethat no symphony contained. Music, he argued, had to “break out of this limited circle of [pure] sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds.” In other words: the same machine age that gave the painters the racing car had given music a whole new palette, and nobody was using it.

Then, with a fellow painter named Ugo Piatti, Russolo did the thing that makes him a genuine ancestor instead of just a manifesto-writer. He built the instruments. They were called intonarumori (“in-toh-nah-roo-MOH-ree”), which means roughly “noise-tuners”, plain wooden boxes, each with a horn out the front and a hand-crank and a lever on top. Turn the crank, work the lever, and the box produced a tuned family of noises, closer to a factory floor tuned to pitch than to anything you would call an orchestra. He gave the families names that tell you exactly what they did: howlers, roarers, cracklers, hummers, gurglers, and more, more than twenty of them in the end. They were, by every account including his own, rudimentary, mechanical things, but they were the first instruments ever built deliberately to play noise as music.

The first concert of these noise instruments was given in Modena, in Italy, on 2 June 1913; a bigger, rowdier series followed in London in 1914. Audiences did roughly what you would expect audiences to do when a man cranks a box of howls at them and calls it a symphony, and the noise on the stage was sometimes outdone by the noise in the hall. But the door was open. Russolo is now counted a founding ancestor of noise music, of musique concrète (music built from recorded real-world sounds), and of electronic music, cited as an influence on composers from Edgard Varèse to John Cage to Pierre Schaeffer. Half a century before a synthesizer, an Italian painter cranked the future out of a wooden box.

Now go back, for a moment, and stand in front of the painting again with all this in your head. The wedges that push, the planes that step, the whole canvas straining to sound, this is the same man, in the same year, hunting the same thing from two directions at once. The painting is an attempt to put the roar of a machine into oil and cloth. The intonarumori were an attempt to put the same roar into the air, where a roar actually lives. The car canvas and the noise machines are not two careers; they are two attacks on a single target, the energy of the modern machine, one with a brush and one with a crank. He just decided, in 1913, that the crank stood a better chance.