If one were to choose an iconic piece of Futurist painting that best encapsulates the potentialities of interartistic exchange, Luigi Russolo’s La musica would be hard to beat. The painting is part of the permanent collection of our project partner, the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London. La musica was first exhibited in Milan in 1911, two years before Russolo’s ground-breaking manifesto The Art of Noises (Milan, 11 March, 1913). A dark blue band swirls around the pianist, a graphic mark of the trajectory of the music from the piano keys to the enthralled audience. The band captures what Russolo calls “the unwinding of the melodic line in time”. As the size of the curves created by the ribbon-like band increases, so does its thickness, communicating to us visually ideas of rhythm and tempo.
The association between colour and music is linked to theories of colour and emotion that were much discussed in avant-garde circles at the time. These same theories also gave birth to one of the modernist masterpieces on the relationship between colour and music, Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942-43 (MOMA, New York). Mondrian’s painting was the visual translation of his encounter with the city of New York and jazz music. Russolo’s Music can also be described as an encounter or, to use Russolo’s term, a translation of sorts.
In 1920, in the Futurist journal Poesia, Russolo described the painting as “a kind of pictorial translation of the melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, polyphonic and chromatic impressions forming the complex musical emotion”. Russolo asks us to focus on the boundary between the aural and the visual by exploring the commonalities between music and painting. Russolo also interestingly uses the concept of translation as a metaphor for artistic and interartistic exchange.
As Florian Mussgnug has noted in another post on our site (7 December 2015, Elephants in the Dark: Towards a theory of Interartistic Practice), translation in the 21st century has emerged as a powerful metaphor for cultural and artistic exchange. Russolo shows us that a century earlier the same concept was used to reflect on the encounters between the arts. Translation was the metaphor and the tool which helped to formulate new artistic theories and new practices of interartistic exchange.
One key Futurist principle is central to Russolo’s painting: dynamism. Closely bound to this is also the idea of synaesthesia, which became a central preoccupation for the Futurists in their attempt to break the boundaries of tradition and meaning. Music for Russolo is rhythm and harmony but it is also pattern and colour, and so it is closely linked to painting. La musica has always seemed to me to capture the embodied experience of both music and painting. Russolo describes the impression music leaves on the body as chromatic. It is this visual essence of music that allows the boundary between the two arts to dissolve. What Russolo seems to suggest is that if music is experienced by our bodies as colour, in turn colour and pattern in painting are essentially linked to rhythm and sound.
In 1913, Russolo’s theories developed further. Music was replaced by the art of noises, in an attempt to go beyond the limitations of music and traditional musical training, whilst recapturing the primordial and essential power of sound.
Further reading:
More than Meets the Eye. New Research on the Estorick Collection, cat. of the exhibition (London, Estorick Collection, 2015).
