Music for 16 Futurist Noise Intoners, a Performa Commission, 2009. IMAGE 4 - Luciano Chessa on left and Joan La Barbara on right. Photo by Paula Court, Courtesy of Performa.JPG
Conductor-composer Luciana Chessa leads a performance by the Intonarumori orchestra he reconstructed from the originals by Luigi Rossolo.
(Paula Court)
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Part of their vision came true. Music did indeed come to be made by machines.
What they didn't get right: the kind of machines that would make it.
In fact, the Italian Futurists of the early 20th century had something quite different in mind. What they imagined weren't exactly the iPods or synthesizers of today but rather something more like the Intonarumori devices headed this week to the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Part curiosity, part mystery, part sculpture, these 16 box-like "noise intoners" conceived by Luigi Russolo in 1913 embody the mechanized sound world predicted by our forebears.
PREVIEW
Intonarumori
What: An orchestra of Italian Futurist noise intoners.
When: 7:30 p.m. Friday, Jan. 16.
Where: Cleveland Museum of Art, 11150 East Blvd., Cleveland.
Tickets: $33-$45. Go to clevelandart.org or call 216-421-7350.
"It's an experience I'm quite sure Cleveland has never had before," said Tom Welsh, director of music at the museum.
"It puts all our more familiar music in a much different context. It's one of those unknown chapters of music history that remains relevant today."
Here's what the main event, a concert in Gartner Auditorium, will look like.
Onstage will be 16 wooden boxes, each about the size of a large cabinet, arranged in a semicircle. Behind each box will be a musician, whose job will be to produce a unique sound – some wailing, buzzing or grinding noise evocative of Milan at the height of the industrial age – by turning a crank and moving a lever.
By itself, Welsh said, no one device makes all that much sound. Altogether, though, the boxes produce an impressive ruckus.
"When you have all of them going, that's when it gets really dramatic," Welsh said.
All this will take place under the eye of Luciano Chessa, the composer and conductor who researched Russolo and in 2009 re-created his greatest creations, the originals of which were destroyed or lost during war. On the program will be fragments by Russolo himself as well as new pieces commissioned for the intoners by Lee Ranaldo, Pablo Ortiz and Christopher Burns.
The last thing Chessa wanted was for the Intonarumori to sit idle in art galleries, accumulating dust when they could be making music. Even here, the machines will be in use when they're not onstage, during open rehearsals in the museum atrium, where they also will be on display Jan. 11-16.
"I get amazing reactions," said Chessa, by phone from New York, where an exhibition of Italian Futurism recently ended at the Guggenheim Museum.
"It's noise music, but it's not computer-generated, so it's a little bit of a novelty. There's a little bit of goofiness, too. It's fun to play around with and subvert expectations. It takes you by surprise."
How the machines produce the sound is far from obvious. That, in fact, is part of the point. Much as designers today hide the guts of computers and synthesizers inside sleek cases, so did Russolo, an artist who also seriously explored painting and philosophy, encase his machines in neat wood boxes.
Moreover, Russolo actively sought to keep their inner workings under wraps, fearing copycats in an age when many were mining the Futurist vein.
Chessa himself was able to rebuild the Intonarumori only by means of patent blueprints, and even then, he had to use a fair amount of imagination. He estimates the devices he built are only 75 to 80 percent accurate.
"There is a little bit of my contribution in it, which may or may not have been possible [in Russolo's day]," Chessa said. "But I didn't want to let that stop me. I had some idea of what could have been inside the boxes, and I figured I could do it."
Today, of course, there's no reason to be so secretive. Inside each of the intoners, Chessa said, is some mechanism by which a string or skin under tension is rubbed or bowed.
Individual notes and melodies can be hard to produce, Chessa explained, but slides and bent pitches come naturally. Scores written for the devices deal less in traditional notation than in timing, dynamics and cuing.
"For me, it was important to construct a full orchestra," Chessa said. "He [Russolo] always thought of it in terms of full orchestral sound."
A friend of Chessa's, Welsh witnessed firsthand the arrival of the Intonarumori. He was present all along as the composer researched, built and shared the devices, generating what he called "not a small bit of news in the music world."
Hence his excitement at their arrival this week in Cleveland, and his willingness to make a Futurist-like prediction of his own. Those who attend the concert or open rehearsals, he said, are bound to catch glimpses of musical dreams both past and present, and appreciate today's landscape more fully.
"It's not just a look backward," Welsh said. "I hope to give people a broader understanding of the world of music we're living in. I couldn't be more thrilled."