The problem of constructing a new civilization, even if not always treated explicitly, was at the center of the debate about the nature of modernity on the part of the avant-gardes, and it shaped their search for a new ideal of total life, within which the search for a new synthesis between nationalism and modernity began to assume special importance. Italy, affirmed Croce, "will not be spiritually great if it will not conquer its own religious conscience, which is at the same time a philosophical conscience." 40 Young avant-gardists would have had little difficulty agreeing, though their understanding of what the new "religious conscience" would be differed sharply. In effect, as Prezzolini wrote in 1912, all "the younger generation of Italy" felt "that a vast and serious movement...could not be achieved except under some total form....It had to have depth, ethical or metaphysical or in a certain religious line...the movement had to be total, which is to say it had to speak to man, to the man of today, to the Italian of today." The intuition that "something great was being born" gave a note of messianic expectation to the search for a new total vision of life, a note that was evident in the demand for a new religion, something that the avant-garde considered indispensable for enabling the nation to continue its pursuit of the conquest of modernity. 41
The search for a new secular religion was an essentially modern phenomenon, and in no way represented a resurgent form of older millenarianisms or eschatological visions typical of the premodern era (see NF, 31). The demand sprang spontaneously, so to speak, from the same enthusiastic experience of modernity, which, it is true, might be assimilated to that state of "collective effervescence" that generates religious states of mind. 42 In part it emerged from the typically modernist demand to formulate a response to the 'death of God,' but in part it constituted a polemical attack against rationalist political ideologies, understood as the theoretical systems of understanding and defining the course of history which had dominated the political culture of the nineteenth century. Pragmatism, the new idealism of Croce and Gentile, the various philosophies of life formulated in the wake of Nietzsche, united in giving prestige to the experience of faith in the life of individuals and collectivities. To the culture of the avant-garde, modernity, far from having decreed the definitive decline of religion before the radiant triumph of reason, was viewed as an epoch in which the force of faith would regain its vigor. The death of God was inaugurating a new era of religious searching. 43 The problem of modernity, observed Croce in 1908, was above all a religious problem: "The entire contemporary world is searching for a religion," driven by the "need for an orientation concerning life and reality, the need for a concept of life and reality." 44 In this sense all the avant-garde movements that arose in Italy prior to fascism aspired to be religious movements, to elaborate a new sense of life and the world, to propagate it through modern myths for the education of the masses and their integration into the national State, to give them the collective conscience of the nation as a community of values and of destiny. 45 The religious problem, observed Antonio Anzilotti, a young historian who contributed to La Voce, was inherent in the very nature of modernity, an age that had begun with an affirmation of disbelief but now was setting off in search of a religious faith from which it could draw new energies for action: "only the religious sense of life, which identifies the realization of the common weal with the development of the better part of our personality, can give absolute value to each individual and collective act." 46 One might define the entire experiment of La Voce as an attempt to give modernity a new religious faith, an idealistic soul. Though they appreciated economic and industrial progress, the intellectuals centered around La Vove understood the 'conquest of modernity' above all as an increased capacity for man to control his own destiny. And for them the search for a new faith was strictly connected with the myth of Italianism, with the ideal of a new Italy that would be a protagonist in world affairs. "Italy must be intellectually great, it must give life to a modern civilization," proclaimed Prezzolini, the review's editor. 47 His faith in Italy was wholly shared by his colleagues, all firmly convinced that Italy was "a great nation, a nation pressed by the urgency of global competition, and it has declared that it will accept the struggle and hope in its victory." 48 The goal to which the Vocians looked was the regeneration of the Italian character that would form the "soul" of a new Italy. La Voce championed the model of a modern Italian, who would derive from his humanistic faith moral energy and a capacity to live within "the multiform life of his age," to feel "truly with a sense of stupor, anger, veneration, rage, and love--the life of today." 49 The Italianism of La Voce, nevertheless, continued to coexist with a humanist and cosmopolitan vision that emphasized "an integral and humanistic education of man" as the basis for the formation of a modern Italian conscience, because "education is one thing alone, the education of man....One will not create good Italians if one has not first created good men." 50
The modernism of La Voce did not imply a rejection of history or national tradition, but intended to avail itself of both as pedagogical tools for the formation of the modern Italian. A religion, even a secular and modern religion, had to have its own universe of myths and rites, just as the modern nation of mass society could not do without myths by which to educate the masses according to the principles and values of modern humanism, the cultural and intellectual foundation of a new mass national democracy. Only "by creating a myth for modern society, a catechism, a clergy, will it be possible to realize practical democratic reform." 51 History and tradition, for the Vocians, were sources on which to draw for constructing a secular mythology for the "modern religion," for forming the conscience of the modern Italian. Universal history could become "the true modern myth." 52 And yet the Vocians did not agree at all about which religion should be the educational foundation of the modern Italian. Prezzolini and those who were most influenced by Croce and Gentile thought they would elaborate a religion of modern man upon the foundations of neo-idealist philosophy. Others, such as Giovanni Boine, believed "that it will be Catholicism that will restore religion to the world." 53 It was this diversity of attitudes and ideals in their understanding of the religious need of modern man that prevented the Vocians from becoming a true and genuine movement, exponents of a total vision of life, of a new modern religion with myths, symbols, and rites. Others would soon fill the gap.
The militants of the nationalist movement were considerably more united and decisive. They wished to institute "a religion of the nation" that would integrate myths about the nation's past glories with myths of modern greatness still to be conquered. As a model they took Japan, which had completed a process of revolutionary modernization without sacrificing its national tradition. 54 Corradini also appealed to the experience of the French Revolution to invoke the institution of a "religion of the nation" as a spiritual force uniting the individual to the collecticity, perpetuating the sense of national identity across the successive generations through time (see CL, 23-30). The nation had to become the modern divinity of a new and secular religion that was to be propagated through the institution of rites and symbols, celebrating the cult of ancestry: "we have to create symbols that can enfold a collectivity, contain the masses, synthesize countless isolated cases of individual energies...the crowd, the collectivity, these must be the substitutes for the hero in the regime of today." 55 The highest symbols of the "religion of the nation" in mass society were to be the monuments realized not to celebrate an individual, but as an "expression of collective and successive thought, of a social and national ideal." As Morasso had already observed, in modern times the monumental presupposes "the notion of collectivity, for it is made, to use a modern phrase, by the public and for the public; only a people can quicken it into life, and it is a people, or rather the soul of a people, that a monument must contain and represent." 56 As an aesthetic model for the modern monument, Morasso proposed the machine, the collective creation of "countless energies disciplined and directed by strong discipline and an inflexible power to one goal; here one sees a true profusion of forces in search of the optimum and the enormous." 57
In modernist nationalism the aestheticization of politics stemmed directly from the sacralization of politics, the process of institutionalizing a secular religion necessary for the spiritual unity of a mass society that wished to confront the challenges of modernity. The Futurists, too, could easily have subscribed to this project of a "religion of the nation," notwithstanding their very different attitude toward history and tradition, poles apart from that of the Vocians and the nationalists. Though they felt that the conquest of modernity required the violent destruction of the nationalists' cult, they agreed with them in wishing to place "Divina Italia" (Divine Italy) on the altar of a secular religion, in glorifying the Italian race, and in endowing it with an innate vocation for universal cultural preeminence. 58 Boccioni was tormented at seeing "the brutish state in which the aesthetic ideals of our great country have fallen, even though we have 40,000,000 inhabitants who are considered the most intelligent in the world." Yet he also firmly believed that "Italy is a young and strong country that will become great--period. In spiritual terms, everything has to be remade--and therefore, in aesthetic terms." 59 Futurism justified its furious iconoclasm of the past precisely on the grounds that it was necessary to proceed with a violent modernization of Italy, to launch it forward in the quest for new greatness. The Futurists argued they were "definitely at the head of world art," living proof that "the constructive Italian spirit is returning to dominance in the art of our age." 60 The myth of Italianism was their religion, and to it they consistently remained faithful, regardless of whether their politcs oscillated between the right and the revolutionary left, even during the years when fascism was already in power. 61
In the search for a secular religion for modern Italy, the modernist avant-gardes inevitably entered into the realm of politics, where the antagonism between differing ideals of modernity was more glaring and their conflict unavoidable, for interest in the question spanned the spectrum of Italian political and intellectual life. Croce, for example, sought to create an Italian conscience that would be "not socialistic and not imperialistic, but would reproduce in a new form that of the Italian Risorgimento." 62 His was a rational, liberal, bourgeois ideal of modernity that he considered fully capable of enabling Italy to address the challenges of modern life, guided by a parliamentary democracy, and from the century's beginning he had committed himself to combatting the new mentality made up of mysticism, activism, irrationalism, aestheticism, and imperialism, which he regarded as a diseased and pathological form of modernity to be identified first with decadence and later with fascism. But to most of the younger generation the liberal and bourgeois ideal of modernity, transmitted by the founding fathers of the national state, already seemed an inadequate model; and within the culture of the avant-gardes, criticisms against Enlightenment, rationalist, and individualist modernity were already widely diffused, fed by the ideas of Nietzsche, Sorel, Pareto, and Croce himself. Yet this widespread critique did not necessarily issue in anti-liberalism, and many continued to search for other ways of integrating the new masses into the nation and assuring the country of a system of government adapted to guide it on its path through the vortex of modern life. Even the myth of Italianism, which so conditioned the thought of the Italian avant-garde, did not always issue in authoritarian nationalism. Futurism was typical in this sense. From its origins it was averse to parliamentary democracy, an attitude that was transformed into genuine political commitment with interventionism and then, at the end of the Great War, with the foundation of the Futurist Political Party. Though glorifying nationalism and imperialism, Futurism retained a libertarian and cosmopolitan core, and remained ready to favor radical social reforms providing they were formulated with a recognition of the nation's preeminence. The principal ideological motif of the Futurist political party during its life from 1918 to 1920 remained the anarchistic utopia of a New State governed by Futurist artists, where the maximum of individual liberty and cultural cosmopolitanism would be reconciled with an intransigent religion of the nation, with imperialism, and with a cult of violence and the glorification of war as the impetus for a perpetually revolutionary modernity, one that would impede the crystallization of traditionalist inertia and make Italians live fully within the realm of modernity, leading "an adventurous, energetic, and quotidianly heroic life." 63 Within the circles surrounding La Voce, too, the predominant motif was one reconciling nationalism with cosmopolitanism, the freedom of the individual with the national state. The Vocians proposed a new national democracy, but their concept of democracy remained rather vague within the diversity of understandings of it that the journal proposed, though it is also true that the review sometimes supported concrete reforms such as universal suffrage, administrative decentralization, and free trade. The apparent contradiction was inherent in the composite nature of La Voce, made up of an empirical reformist current and a revolutionary idealist current that conceived of the new politics as having a missionary task to regenerate the character of the Italian people. La Voce dissolved before the outbreak of the Great War, but many of the Vocians entered politics in order to support, often on different grounds, Italian intervention. Many considered it the true and genuine test of modernity for the nation, the proof its ascent to the role of a great power. Only the nationalists such as Corradini and Morasso elaborated a genuinely authoritarian paradigm of modernity. Liberal democracy, in their view, was "in contradiction with the movement of modern life," 64 because the very process of the development of mass democracy, both in socialism and the expanding economy of capitalism, led to an affirmation of "the primacy of force and the necessity of an ever vaster and deeper dominion, renewing some of the characteristic conditions of the ancient civilizations based on domination." 65 The development of modernization, by the very nature of modernity in the age of imperialism, required new forms of authoritarianism for mass society: "Reappearing everywhere are oligarchic tendencies, military dominations, systems extolling strong aristocracies of leadership, a government that is absolute and energetic." 66 Germany and Japan were seen as models for the Italian conquest of modernity in a new age of despotism by 'imperial civilization,' a direction in which all the great nation-states were headed, according to Morasso.
What in political terms the militant and authoritarian nationalists of the avant-garde shared was their contestation of the "Giolitti system," which was viewed as a corrupting form of parliamentary dictatorship; and an aspiration toward the construction of a New State by means of a 'rivoluzione spirituale' (mental revolution) meant to produce a political revolution as well. In part this aspiration expressed a generational revolt conducted under the banner of the myth of youth, youth as a force revolutionary and regenerative in itself. All the movements that contested the "Giolitti system," and the Futurists above all, shared a belief in the myth of youth: the struggle of the healthy and vitalist young against the corrupt and senescent old men was a necessary phase in the conquest of modernity. 67 The young possessed particular regenerative qualities that gave them the attitudes and prerogatives suitable for a new ruling class capable of guiding the nation through the tempests of modernity. The old ruling class was a caretaker of the past; the new aristocracy was the vanguard of the new Italians who would be "builders of the future." 68 The young, whether of the right or the left, were convinced that they possessed the ethical values and moral qualities needed to bring about a mental revolution that would be the premise and condition of a political revolution, "radically changing the entire soul of man," as Papini proclaimed in 1913 when he was engaged in the Futurist campaign to prepare "in Italy the advent of this new man." 69 The Futurists, wrote Boccioni around the same time, wanted to give Italy
...a conscience that would continually impel it to tenacious labor, to fierce conquest. Let the Italians finally experience the intoxicating joy of feeling that they can stand by themselves alone, armed, highly modernized, struggling against everyone and not just acting as great grandchildren who are drowsy with a greatness that is no longer ours....We have to take a stand, incite our own passion, drive to the limit our own faith in our great future, that faith that every Italian feels in his deepest self, yet doesn't sufficiently desire! There will have to be some blood, and some corpses will be necessary....We might have to hang or shoot anyone who deviates from the idea of a great Futurist Italy. 70
The myth of regenerative violence--through war or revolution--is part of the cultural heritage of the modernist avant-garde. What sparked the interventionism of many young intellectuals was the conviction that Italy, in order to reach the state of modern greatness, would have to pass through a bloody experience of war and give its contribution to the creation of a new civilization. For Italy, participation in the Great War was the entry "into the great history of the world," as the philosopher Giovanni Gentile argued at the end of the conflict. 71 Significantly, Marinetti preferred to use the term "conflagration" to define the Great War, alluding to the Heraclitean and Stoic myth of palingenesis by the great fire, from which, in this case, would rise a new and Futurist Italy. War, in the Futurist conception, was "the great and sacred law of life," it was the periodic "testing, bloody and necessary, of the force of the people." 72 Though with different motivations, a positive conception of war in the life of the nation was predominant throughout the new national culture. War was an integral part of the nationalist vision of modernity. Corradini defended the "modernity of war." 73 Already in 1905 Morasso, with a tragically prophetic spirit, had announced that "the nineteenth century was the century of a democratic-humanitarian utopia; the twentieth will be the century of force and conquest....It is in the new century that force will have its largest kingdom, and it is in the new century that we will see ever more formidable armies and ever more bloody wars." 74 Amendola attributed a moral significance to war, a collective test of discipline and sacrifice in which the character of the individual and the nation were tempered and tested. 75 Giovanni Boine idealized military discipline for its sense of hierarchy and order, an exemplary model of collective education for forming the character of Italians and educating them in the cult of the "religion of the patria." 76
The idea of war's positive value derived from the myth of national palingenesis as a necessary process for the formation of a modern Italian conscience. 77 The New Italy was supposed to be shaped though a heroic pedagogy, created with a spirit of sacrifice, the exercise of discipline, readiness for combat, the sublimation of the individual in devotion to the collectivity. All these elements constituted a modernistic national ethics, borrowed from the "cult of the heroic," in "an atmosphere of myth and epic," as the syndicalist revolutionary Angelo Oliviero Olivetti wrote. 78 In his view there were spiritual and cultural affinities between revolutionary syndicalism and Futurism in their will to power and their ideal of a "palingenesis through the burning crucible of struggle." 79 The Futurists, not surprisingly, glorified Italy's participation in the Great War as the necessary rite of collective initiation into modernity, a violent acceleration of the process of modernization. "The war will develop gymnastics, sport, practical schools of agriculture, commerce, and industry. The war will reinvigorate Italy, enrich its men of action, oblige her to stop living in the past amid ruins and a sweet climate, and to force her to use her own national forces." 80
The outbreak of the Great War was, in a certain sense, both foreseen and anticipated by the culture of the avant-garde. On the threshold of the war Italy was in a state of messianic expectation of an incumbent catastrophe that would be palingenetic, a catastrophe that the avant-gardes were invoking in order to realize the mental revolution necessary to regenerate the nation and bring it to the conquest of modernity. When war broke out the majority of the militants of the avant-garde became active supporters of intervention. "Reality is moving with an accelerated rhythm. We have had the singular privilege of living at the most tragic hour in the history of the world. Do we want to be...inert spectators of the great drama? Or do we want to be--in some way and in some sense--protagonists?" 81 So wrote Mussolini on 18 October 1914, announcing his conversion to the cause of interventionism. His choice cost him his expulsion from the Socialist part, but he was hailed by the cultural avant-gardes as the "new man" on the Italian political scene. "In him," wrote the Futurist painter Carlo Carrà, "there is the drama of our entire generation." 82 Interventionism and the war set in place the last conditions for the participation of the cultural avant-garde in the adventure of fascism.
Setting aside the specific debates and conflicts that marked the relations between Futurism and Fascism what constituted the principal cultural nexus linking the culture of the avant-gardes and fascism was the search for a symbiosis between art and life, culture and politics, nationalism and modernity--a search enacted through the myth of Italianism. But there were also a number of other features of fascist political culture that connect it very directly with the culture of the modernist avant-gardes in the early twentieth century, features that constituted essential traits of fascist political modernism. 83
Above all the activist conception of life within fascism was typically modernist. That conception, as the newspaper for the Italian Battle Fasces explained, meant "knowing how to understand the times that we live in, to adapt oneself to the changed atmosphere, to the events that succeed one another, that accumulate in the panting vortex of modern civilization." 84 This activism was inseparable from fascism's irrationalist conception of politics, which affirmed the priority of lived experience over ideology and faith over theory in the formation of a political culture. 85 Fascism's anti-theoretical relativism and its institutional experimentalism were another modernist trait within fascism, in concordance with an existentialist intuition of politics, which was now understood in its immediate and vitalistic origins as "daring, as attempt, as undertaking, as dissatisfaction with reality, as adventure, as a celebration of the rite of action." 86 Typically modernist, moreover, was the affirmation of the primacy of mythic thought--in the sense articulated by Sorel--within a politics of the masses:
We have created our own myth. Myth is a faith, a passion. It is not necessary that it be a reality. It is a reality in the fact that it is a spur, a hope, a faith, a form of courage. Our myth is the nation; our myth is the greatness of the nation. It is to this myth, to this grandeur, which we want to translate into reality, that we subordinate everything. 87
Modernistic, too, was the mythic use of history and tradition, and in particular the appeal to the heritage of Rome, an appeal that was centainly one of the major motifs of fascism's polemics with Futurism, which protested against the fascist cult of Rome and its encouragement of classicizing sorts of realism in fascist art. Yet for fascism, history--beginning with Roman history, above all--was not a temple in which to contemplate and nostalgically venerate the grandeur of remote glories, carefully preserving the memories consecrated by archaeological remains. It was an arsenal from which to draw myths of mobilization and legitimization for political action. The archaeological recovery of Roman ruins was not dissociated from this exigency of the mythic construction of fascism's symbolic universe. The cult of Romanness, in this sense, was celebrated modernisitically as a myth of action for the future:
It is not a nostalgic contemplation of the past, but hard preparation for the future. Rome is our starting point and our reference point; it is our symbol, or if you will, our Myth. We dream of a Roman Italy, which is to say: an Italy that is wise, strong, disciplined, and imperial. Much of what made up the immortal spirit of Rome is resurgent in fascism.... It is indispensable that the history of tomorrow, which we assuredly want to create, not be a contrast or a parody of the history of yesterday. The Romans were not only combatants, but also formidable constructors who could challenge Time, as indeed they have. 88
The appeal to Romanness had the value of a mythic foundation for a fascist politics looking to create a new civilization for the modern age, one as solid and universal as the civilization of the Romans. 89 Like Italians of the Renaissance, the fascists viewed Rome as a source of inspiration for civic virtues, a sense of the State, a sacralization of politics, and universal organizing values--all elements for elaborating a modern model of a new civilization. In this sense the cult of Romanness was reconciled, without notable contradiction, with other elements of fascism that were more strictly futurist, such as its activism, its cult of youth and sport, the heroic ideal of adventure, and above all the will to experience the new continually in action projected toward the future, without reactionary nostalgia for an ideal of past perfection to be restored. To be sure, there were also fascist intellectuals who idealized the harmony of the good old days, such as the writers associated with Strapaese and the artists who theorized a return to the classical order of Renaissance art. But the principal impulse of fascism stemmed from its "movementist" and Dionysian feeling for existence, from the myth of the future, and not from the static contemplation of the past.
Fascism had no nostalgia for a lost paradise to be reconstructed. It never instituted a cult of tradition as the sublimation of the past in a metaphysical vision of inviolable order, to be preserved whole, to be segregated from the accelerated rhythm of modern life. Fascism recognized tradition as "one of the great mental forces of peoples"; it was not something "sacred, immutable, and untouchable," but a "successive and constant creation of their soul." 90 The past was supposed to be a "springboard of combat from which to launch into the future," 91 and the fascists considered themselves, like the Futurists, to be "constructors of the future." The Italian created by Mussolini, in one novel by a Futurist writer, was depicted as a "modern barbarian...a modern man stretching out toward the future with spiritual tentacles." 92 From Futurism fascism had absorbed a dynamic feeling of modernity that was expressed in the ideal of "continual revolution," an ideal that impelled fascism never to rest content with its accomplishments or even to guarantee its permanence in power with a prudent politics of conservation, but to feel itself obliged,almost condemned, to obey the command of its original essence and to project itself into the future, towards new realities to be constructed. "We are always 'tomorrow.'" 93 Even fascists who glorified rural provincialism, as did the writers and artists of the journal Il selvaggio, proclaimed that they were not opposed to modernity, but that they wanted an "Italian modernity." 94
Fascist modernism sought to realize a new synthesis between tradition and modernity, without renouncing modernization in order to realize the nation's goals of power. Even though fascism exalted the ideal of il buon contadino (the good peasant) still tied to the land and its traditions, fascism was not anti-industrialist and it did not reject technological progress; technology was an instrument of the modern civilization that fascism could never renounce without being obliged to renounce its ambitions to power. The progress of mechanized civilization, said one writer in Gerarchia (the principal intellectual review of the regime) was "the sign of the power of modernization." 95 To wish for the disappearance of the machine, warned the authoritative Dictionary of Politics of the Fascist Party, was "ingenuous and crazy." 96 The advance of machines was a feature of modern society that could not be halted because that would mean "to halt the very path of civilization." 97 The machine was an instrument for liberating man from the servitude of work, a weapon of conquest for the nation's will to power. To be sure, there were also elements of ambiguity in the fascist attitude toward modernity, elements that partly attenuated the modernist enthusiasm of early twentieth-century nationalism. A distinction within its vision of modernity was introduced between "sane" modernity and "perverse" modernity. Reversing Croce's understanding of modernity, the fascists pretended to be the artificers of sane modernity and the antagonists of that perverse modernity that stemmed from Enlightenment values of liberal reason. They had discovered a new "formula for modern society," capable of saving Western civilization from the degenerations of industrialism, mechanism, and urbanism. 98 This formula, however, imposed the renunciation of individualism and freedom, the cause of modernity's perverse effects, under the banner of the absolute primacy of the national collectivity as organized by the totalitarian state. Though it inherited many of the motifs and myths of modernist nationalism, fascism recomposed and adapted them in an original form of political modernism that wished to bring to completion the conquest of modernity through the totalitarian revolution. That revolution, like the mental revolution of the avant-gardes, was to be a total revolution, affecting every aspect of individual and collective life, from habits to character, in order to regenerate the nation, forge the new Italian, and construct a new society, subjugating the machine to the "service of man and the collectivity as an instrument of liberation, not as a source of misery." 99 Italian modernity, as constructed by fascism, was to be a society of man, in which humanity would recover its dominion over the society of the machine. The totalitarian state and the sacralization of politics, integrating the masses into the nation through the faith, rituals, and symbols of fascist religion, were the foundations of a modern order that would be capable of channelling and using all the energies of modernization to the advantage of national power.
With the sacralization of politics and the institutionalization of the cult of the fasces, fascism realized, in forms that were distinctively its own, another aspiration of modernist nationalism, the construction of a lay religion for the nation. Artists of Futurist provenance, such as Sironi, architects who were exponents of modernistic rationalism, such as Giuseppe Terragni and Giuseppe Pagano, promoters of experimental theater such as Giulio Antonio Bragaglia, faithfully and passionately contributed to the construction of the symbolic universe of fascist religion, helping its myths and ideals to be represented to the masses and perpetuated through time. The fascist aesthetic of the Futurists was consistent with their conception of the political function of art and their faith in the religion of the nation. Futurist art, within fascism, was supposed to express the deep forces of the modern soul through "representative symbols of the new religious spirit that will bind together this century and from which nobody will escape, for it is universal and lasting." 100 The adaptation of art to the political needs of the regime did not strike them as inconsistent with their principles, convinced as they were that art achieves greatness in history only when it becomes the means for the representation of a superior sense of life, as Gino Severini asserted. 101 Modernist painters such Campigli, Carrà, and Sironi fought to affirm the pedagogic function of art in the service of the fascist state:
In the Fascist State, art acquires a social function, an educational function. It must translate the ethics of our time. It must give unity of style and greatness of line to communal life. Art, therefore, returns to being what it was in its highest periods and amid the highest societies: a perfect instrument for spiritual government. 102
For fascism the synthesis of politics, religion, and ethics, or Italian modernity, was to be actualized in new political institutions, in a new secular relighion, and in modernization serving the aggrandizement of national power. Above all, however, it was to be actualized as a way of living, a stype of life. Style was what defined the original and universal essence of a society and what transmitted its greatness to future eras. Fascist modernism pursued the original impulse of the Futurists in its search for a new and original modern Italian style, deliberately privileging modern art over traditionalist classicism in accordance with Mussolini's own desire. Among fascist artists it was perhaps Sironi, Mussolini's preferred painter, who knew best how to interpret and represent the political-aesthetic ideal of Italian modernity. Sironi believed that fascism was the most advanced political expression of modernity itself, which he saw as an "epoch of grandiose myths and gigantic upheavals." 103 Fascist art, in all its manifestations, was to create the style of fascist modernity, to express the "complex orchestrations of modern life" and the "pagan and constructive primitiveness of the modern age." 104 Sironi's modernism integrated art and politics in an affirmation of a collective will to power, and it linked the artist with the political experiment of the totalitarian state in the creation of a new religion of Italianness. The fascist artist had a mission: with a modern sensibility, mythically to recall the great ages of Italian art, seeking to realize a new creative greatness, a synthesis between the classic and the modern, an epic transration of fascist politics. Myths and symbols, as in the great religious art of the past, were to impress "a new impulse on the popular soul." 105
The same ideal of integrating art and politics in the search for an Italian modernity inspired the modernist poetics of Massimo Bontempelli, a former Futurist militant like Sironi and organizer of the movement Novecento. In his view, the new art of fascism would harmonize with modernity, an era he saw as "an age of activity and conquest," or one "avid of conquest," by inventing "the myths and stories necessary for new times." 106 Bontempelli believed in the coming of a "Third Age" of humanity in which it would be the task of Italian artists, "the primordial people of a new era, to discover and create new myths, new stories that will nurture the youth of the Third Age." 107 Through an aesthetic of "magical realism" they would give the future an intuition of modern life, "as an adventurous miracle: continuous risk and continuous effort to get through it safely," even at its "most normal and quotidian." 108 Even Bontempelli's modernism was wedded to the religion founded on the myth of "Italianism." Italy's cultural preeminence was "irrefutable"; she was unique among the nations because "alive with an eternal spirit" that from one age to another renewed "her office of instigator of civilization," a spirit that now, after the Great War, had returned and assumed the task of creating the myths of modern society. 109
Intellectuals and artists of this sort, who had been active in the modernist avant-garde and Futurism, enthusiastically participated in fascism and contributed to elaborating its cultural politics and its aesthetic style. In it they saw a political weapon for realizing the avant-gardist myth of total revolution, understood as an intellectual and spiritual revolution that was supposed to modify the essence and values of life, giving rise to a new art, a new style of life, a new man. They participated in fascism, it must be emphasized, rather than simply adhering to it. For the involvement of Futurism in fascism was not simply an external act of joining a political movement, but an active and self-aware collaboration in elaborating the movement's culture and political style, that went as far as a substantial agreemnent between avant-garde culture and totalitarian political culture regarding certain fundamental themes. In fact the Futurists, in arguing for a Futurist paternity for fascism, stressed those elements that could easily be integrated into totalitarian culture: from the religion of Italianismo (Italianness) to the search for an Italian modernity, to the heroicization of life and the glorification of war.
After the failure of the experience with a Futurist political party in 1920, Futurist politics, as captained by Marinetti, swiftly renounced the libertarian motifs of its ideology and the utopia of Futurist democracy. With the advent of fascism to power, Marinetti and the Futurists returned to fascism with a de facto acceptance of its politics as the "minimal program" of the Futurist revolution. Perhaps they also trusted that fascism, once it had consolidated and developed its totalitarian politics, would gradually surpass or set aside some of the more conservative and reactionary forms dictated by political contingency, slowly approaching the "maximal program" of the Fururist revolution. With their artificial optimism, the Futurists struggled to accelerate this process within the regime, voluntarily collaborating in the political culture of the totalitarian state and the construction of fascist religion's sxymbolic universe. Moreover, the return was also accompanied by a change in the Futurist vision of modernity, a transformation that rendered it much closer to fascism's own, with its distinction between a sane and a perverse modernity. Sharply attenuating the modernist enthusiasm that had marked the early years of the twentieth century, it largely abandoned the goals of radical and total renovation of human existence in a libertarian and individualistic sense, while increasingly it exalted the myths of bellicose, imperialist nationalism. 110 In effect its tragic sense of existence as an unredeemable reality gained the upper hand over its enthusiasm for modernity, which now appeared to the Futurists in the perverse forms of "bureaucratic cancer" and the mucification of society through new forms of conformism. Even the fascist state was affected by these perverse forms of modernity, which rendered it all the more remote from the New State originally dreamt of by Futurism. From this point of view one can indeed maintain that the original matrix of Futurism largely faded away under the fascist regime. The Futurists, however, were not obliged to make a serious sacrifice of their theoretical coherency in order to participate with renewed enthusiasm in the cultural politics of the totalitarian state. They had, after all, always proclaimed that the religion of the nation was to prevail over the principle of freedom. The essence of Futurist freedom was not political freedom, but the creative freedom of genius, a sort that could easily adapt itself to living within a regime that never pretended to impose aesthetic conformism and that glorified politics as the art of shaping the masses, calling upon artists to collaborate in the task of forging the new Italian. To be sure, the fascist new man, regimented in the organizations of the regime and educated according to the rigid rules of discipline and military uniformity, was a "mass-Italian" that departed significantly from the Futurist ideal of the "unique--type Italian." But the Futurists ignored this discordance of ideals, accepting the fascist revolution as an initial phase toward the realization of the Futurist revolution. As Marinetti had announced in 1920
The Futurist revolution that will bring the artists to power promises no earthly paradise. It will certainly be unable to suppress the human torment that is the ascensional power of the race. The artists, tireless airmen of this feverish travail, will succeed in reducing this suffering. They will solve the problem of well-being in the only way it can be solved: spiritually. 111
All things considered, the Futurists could regard the totalitarian state, which after all had been created by a man with a Futurist temperment, one who combined the duce with the artista, as a passable realization of the Futurist revolution. Even fascism didn't promise an earthly paradise, instead assuring Italians that they would have a future of greatness and conquest, and it too resolved the problem of well being "spiritually" through aesthetics and the sacralization of politics. The choreography of the fascist cult, the countless collective celebrations with songs and music, the festivals and spectacles staged in the piazzas by the political culture of the regime, the transformation of political mobilization into a continuous theatrical--religious performance--all this could appear to the Futurists as a realization, however minimal, of the ideal city imagined by Marinetti in his brief work, Beyond Communism:
The proletariat of gifted men in power will create the theater free to all and the great Futurist Aero-Theater. Music will reign over the world. Every town and city square will have its great instrumental and vocal orchestra. So there will be, everywhere, fountains of harmony streaming day and night from musical genius and blooming in the sky, to color, gentle, reinvigorate, and refresh the dark, hard, banal, convulsive rhythm of daily life. 112
The Futurists were restless fascists and disagreed with some of the regime's political and cultural decisions. None of them, however, ever questioned the fundamental motifs of the totalitarian state: the primacy of mythical thought, the vitalist realism, the mystical exaltation of national community, the heroic and warlike pedagogy, the imperial ambitions, or the myth of the Italian nation as the vanguard of a new society. The Futurists were neither deceived nor misled by fascism; they were fascinated by its appeal for the total mobilization of culture to regenerate Italians in a religious cult of the nation and to construct a new society that would leave its mark upon the future in the style of 'Italian modernity.' No Futurist believed that Fascism harbored the intention of realizing a world of reason, freedom, equality, or peace.
Emilio Gentile, Professor of Political Science at the University of Rome, has published "La Voce" e l'età giolittiana (La Voce and the era of Giolitti; 1972), Le origini dell'ideologia fascista (The origins of fascist ideology; 1975), Il mito dello stato nuovo dall'antigiolittismo of fascismo (The myth of the new State from antigiolittism to fascism; 1982), and Il culto del littorio: la sacralizzazione della politica nell'Italia fascista (The cult of the fasces: the sacralization of politics in fascist Italy; 1993; forthcoming in English with Harvard University Press).
1. The original reads: "Chiamato ad annunciare una nuova epoca." Yvon De Begnac, Palazzo Venezia. Storia di un regime (Rome: La Rocca, 1950), 111. Idem, Taccuini mussoliniani, ed. Francesco Perfetti (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990), 15. On the relations between Mussolini and La Voce see Emilio Gentile, Il mito dello Stato nuovo (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1982), 103-34, hereafter referred to as MSN; and Walter L. Adamson, Avant-Garde Florence From Modernism to Fascism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 139-43, hereafter abbreviated AGF.
2. The original reads: "Ora, io formalmente dichiaro che, senza futurismo, non vi sarebbe stata rivoluzione fascista." Perfetti, Taccuini Mussoliniani, 425.
3. Giuseppe Prezzolini, "Fascismo e futurismo," Il Secolo, 3 July 1923; reprinted in Luciano De Maria, ed., Per Conoscere Marinetti e il Futurismo, 4th rev. ed. (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1981), 286-91, especially 287-88.
4. The original reads: "Per chi abbia senso delle connessioni storiche, l'origine ideale del fascismo si ritrova nel futurismo." Benedetto Croce, "Fatti politici e interpretazioni storiche," La Stampa, 15 May 1924; reprinted in Benedetto Croce, Cultura e vita morale, 3rd ed. (Bari: Laterza, 1955), 268-69, hereafter abbreviated CVM.
5. For an overview of the problems and a sampling of recent studies on Futurism and fascism, see Renzo de Felice, ed., Futurismo, cultura e politica (Turin: Edizioni della Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, 1988), hereafter abbreviated FCP; and Claudia Salaris, Artecrazia: l'avanguardia futurista negli anni del fascimo (Florence: La Nuova Italia Editrice, 1992).
6. For an early effort to define fascism as a modern phenomenon see Emilio Gentile, Le origini dell'ideologia fascista (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1975). For a recent study that considers fascism as an "alternative modernism," see Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Pinter, 1991), 47, hereafter abbreviated NF. Other recent works that examine "modernist fascism" and "fascist modernism" are: Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand, eds., Faschismus und Avant-Garde (Königstein im Taunus: Atheneum, 1980); Emilio Gentile, "From the Cultural Revolt of the Giolittian Era to the Ideology of Fascism," in Frank J. Coppa, ed., Studies in Modern Italian History: From the Risorgimento to the Republic (New York and Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1986), 103-19. See also Fascist Aesthetics, special issue of the South Central Review 5 (summer 1988); Walter L. Adamson, "Fascism and Culture: Avant-Gardes and Secular Religion in the Italian Case," Journal of Contemporary History 24 (July 1989): 411-35; idem, "Modernism and Fascism: The Politics of Culture in Italy, 1913-1922," American Historical Review 95, no. 2 (April, 1990): 359-90. See also Fascism and Culture, ed. Jeffrey Schnapp and Barbara Spackman, a special issue of the Stanford Italian Review 8 ; Walter L. Adamson, "The Language of Opposition in Early Twentieth-Century Italy: Rhetorical Continuities Between Prewar Florentine Avant-Gardism and Mussolini's Fascism," Journal of Modern History 64 (March 1992): 22-51; Fascism, Aesthetics, and Culture, ed. Richard J. Golsan (Hanover, New Hampshire: New England University Press, 1992); AGF; Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).
7. Cf. Walter Benjamin, "Epilogue," in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), 241-42.
8. The original reads: "Estetizzazione della politica," "politica come spettacolo," "concezione estetica della vita politica." Emilo Gentile, "Alcune Considerazioni sull'ideologia fascista," Storia contemporanea (January 1974): 123-24.
9. See Jeffrey Schnapp, "Epic Demonstrations: Fascist Modernity and the 1932 Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution," in Richard J. Golsan, ed., Fascism, Aesthetics, and Culture, 3.
10. See Emilio Gentile, "Fascism as Political Religion," Journal of Contemporary History (May-June 1990): 229-251; and idem, Il culto del littorio. La sacralizzazione della politica nell'Italia fascista (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1993), hereafter abbreviated CL.
11. Marshall Berman, L'esperienza della modernità (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1985), 26 (translation of All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity).
12. Walter L. Adamson, "Modernism and Fascism: the Politics of Culture in Italy," 360.
13. Emilio Gentile, "Futurism and Politics: From Nationalist Modernism to Fascism (1909-1922)," in FCP, 105-159, especially 106-09.
14. The original reads: "Ottimismo artificiale." F. T. Marinetti, "Lettera aperta al futurista Mac Delmarle," in F. T. Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione futurista, ed. Luciano De Maria (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1983), 94, hereafter abbreviated TIF.
15. The original reads: "Vecchio uomo," "degli uomini moderni." Silvio Spaventa, La politica della destra (Bari: Laterza, 1910), 307.
16. The original reads:
convertire il mondo moderno in un mondo nostro, studiandolo, assimilandolo, e trasformandolo...Il grande lavoro del secolo decimonono è al suo termine. Assistiamo ad una nuova fermentazione d'idee, nunzia di una nuova formazione. Già vediamo in questo secolo disegnarsi il nuovo secolo. E, questa volta, non dobbiamo trovarci alla coda, non a' secondi posti.
Francesco De Sanctis, Storia della letteratura italiana, ed. Luigi Russo, 2 vols. (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1960), 2:463.
17. The original reads: "rapido e immenso sviluppo della grande industria," "millenario equilib rio del mondo...non solo dal punto di vista economico, ma anche da quello politico e morale." Mario Morasso, L'imperialismo nel secolo XX (Milan: Treves, 1905), 330, hereafter abbreviated I.
18. The original reads: "in un mondo nuovo fra il dispiegarsi di nuovo forze incalcolabili...che hanno trasformato non solo le basi della vita politica dei popoli e della condotta morale degli individui, ma anche tutto il sistema dei rapporti economici," "una influenza poderosissima su altri generi di relazioni, sugli stessi sentimenti e abitudini dell'uomo, sulla natura umana, sulle attribuzioni del governo, provocando, per così dire, una nuova coscienza e una nuova politica,"
ripercussione profonda...sull'andamento della vita pubblica e privata, sul regime della nostra sensibilità e della nostra attività...la vita umana ne è uscita completamente mutata, costumanze inveterate sono state distrutte, tendenze profonde della nostra anima sono state deviate ...anche l'assetto sociale è stato sconvolto per essere riordinato in vista di nuovi destini. (I, 325-26)
19. For the English translation, see F. T. Marinetti, "Destruction of Syntax-Imagination without Strings-Words-in-Freedom," in Umbro Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos (London: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), 95-106. The original reads: "Completo rinnovamento della sensibilità umana," "ingigantimento del senso umano,"
acceleramento della vita...amore del nuovo...dell'imprevisto...orrore del quieto vivere, amore del pericolo e attitudine all'eroismo quotidiano...distruzione del senso dell'al di là e aumentato valore dell'individuo che vuole vivere la sua vita...moltiplicazione e sconfinamento delle ambizioni e dei desideri umani...uomo moltiplicato dalla macchina...amore del "record"...passione par la città, negazione delle distanze...nuovo senso del mondo...bisogno di sentirsi centro, giudice e motore dell'infinito esplorato e inesplorato.
F. T. Marinetti, "Distruzione della sintassi. Immaginazione senza fili. Parole in libertà," in TIF, 65-80, here 65, 69, 66-68.
20. The original reads: "Noi futuristi diamo per la prima volta l'esempio di un'entusiastica adesione umana alla forma di civiltà che si va plasmando sotto i nostri occhi...Noi abbiamo l'estasi del moderno e il delirio innovatore della nostra epoca." Umberto Boccioni, "Pittura e scultura futuriste (dinamismo plastico)," in Opere complete (Foligno: Franco Campitelli, [1927]), 17, hereafter abbreviated BOC. This text was originally published as Pittura scultura futuriste (Dinamismo plastico) by the Futurist Editions of Poesia in 1914.
21. The original reads: "Essere moderni! Comprendere in sé le forme vitali proprie del nostro tempo." Scipio Slataper, "Ai giovani intelligenti d'Italia," La Voce, 26 August 1909, 1.
22. The original reads: "turbine vivente," "grandioso congegno della vita moderna" (I, 327).
23. The original reads:
spirito della nuova vita...grande e possente come non fu mai...iniziatrice di un avvenire più grande e possente ancora...il ritmo della vita è straordinariamente violento e fulmineo...Lo spirito che come tempesta mondiale muove le moltitudini inconsapevoli, è lo spirito della nuovo vita...[che] sembra tutto travolgere, perché non sono ancora sorti i nuovi uomini consapevoli che abbiano l'animo pari alla nuova vita del mondo e siano forti sopra le nuove forze. Qui è l'immensa tragedia del presente, e l'epopea dell'avvenire sarà nella vittoria dell'uomo sopra gl'instrumenti e le forze della vita, formidabili come non furono mai.
Enrico Corradini, "La vita estetica," in Novissima ; reprinted in Lucia Strappini, ed., Enrico Corradini, Scritti e discorsi 1901-1914 (Turin: Einaudi, 1980), 64-65.
24. The original reads: "Noi ci sentiamo portati alla vita multipla, armonica, vertiginosa, mondiale." Benito Mussolini, "Bleriot," in Il Popolo, 28 July 1909, X, reprinted in idem Edoardo e Duilio Susmel, eds., Opera omnia (Firenze: La Fenice, 1951-1980), 2:194-95, hereafter abbreviated OO.
25. The original reads: "La parola che riassume e dà carattere inconfondibile al nostro secolo è 'movimento'...Movimento dovunque, e accelerazione del ritmo della nostra vita." Benito Mussolini, "Latham," in Il popolo, 22 July 1909, X; reprinted in OO, 2:187.
26. The original reads: "riconnettere la nuova attesa di civiltà italiana colla grande ascensione economica di cui siamo spettatori da alcuni anni." Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe Prezzolini, La cultura italiana (Florence: Lumachi, 1906), 84.
27. The original reads: "industrialisti lombardi, armatori genovesi, commercianti e banchieri del nord d'Italia," "successo della patria nella lotta fra le varie patrie che si disputano il mondo," Giovanni Amendola, "Il mezzogiorno e la coltura italiana," La Voce, 7 January 1909, 1.
28. The original reads: "ha cominciato a camminare a passi lunghi e sicura sulla via della ricchezza e non può mantenervisi se non camminando contemporaneamente sulla via della potenza." Giovanni Amendola, "La vigile allemande," Il Regno, 25 July 1905, 17.
29. The original reads:
...perdendo le caratteristiche del cimitero. Dove un tempo sognavan gli amanti, e cantavan gli usignoli, oggi fischiano le sirene delle officine. L'Italia accelera il passo nello stadio dove le Nazioni corrono nella grande Maratona della supremazia mondiale. Gli eroi hanno lasciato il posto ai produttori. Dopo aver combattuto si lavora. L'aratro feconda la terra e il piccone sventra le città. L'Italia si prepara a riempire di sé una nuova epoca nella storia del genere umano.
Benito Mussolini, "Un grande amico dell'Italia: Augusto von Platen," Il Popolo, 3 July 1909; reprinted in OO, 2:172.
30. The original reads:
Per gli altri popoli l'Italia è ancora una terra di morti, un'immensa Pompei biancheggiante di sepolcri. L'Italia invece rinasce, e al suo risorgimento politico segue il risorgimento intellettuale. Nel paese degli analfabeti vanno moltiplicandosi le scuole: nel paese del dolce far niente ruggon ormai le officine innumerevoli; nel paese dell'estetica tradizionale spiccano oggi il volo ispirazioni sfolgoranti di novità.
Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, "Manifesto dei pittori futuristi" (11 February 1910), in Luciano De Maria, ed., Per conoscere Marinetti e il futurismo, 20-22, here p. 20. For the English translation see "Manifesto of the Futurist Painters" , in Umbro Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos, 24-26, here 25.
31. The original reads: "Terza Italia senza un significato ideale nel mondo sarebbe il più assurdo miracolo della storia moderna, una risurrezione senza vita, una riapparizione di fantasmi, che passano soltanto." Alfredo Oriani, La rivolta ideale (Bologna: Gherardi, 1912), 157.
32. The original reads: "la guida spirituale della giovane, giovanissima e futura Italia...Io vorrei essere dunque il riorganizzatore spirituale di questa vecchia razza." Giovanni Papini, letter to Ardengo Soffici, 9 September 1905, in Giovanni Papini and Ardengo Soffici, Carteggio, ed. Mario Richter (Rome-Fiesole: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Fondazione Primo Conti, 1991), 1:78.
33. The original reads: "Religione dell'uomo moderno." Emilio Gentile, "La Voce" e l'età giolittiana (Milan: Pan, 1972). On the political culture of La Voce, see also Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 162-68; and AGF, 102-52.
34. The original reads: "una coscienza Italiana moderna che fosse europea e nazionale." Benedetto Croce, note of January 1912, in Memorie della mia vita (Naples: Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici, 1966), 39.
35. See Augusto Del Noce, Giovanni Gentile: per un'interpretazione filosofica della storia contemporanea (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990), 123-94.
36. The original reads: "cultura dell'uomo intero." Benedetto Croce, "Il risveglio filosofico e la cultura italiana" , in CVM, 20.
37. The original reads:
l'uomo moderno vive senza la fede passata e senza una fede presente e spesso senza neppure la fede in una fede futura. Destinato a preparare una civiltà nuova, si sente sacrificato, senza neppure assurgere alla coscienza di questo sacrificio, che potrebbe renderlo grande. Vive spesso la sua tragedia, senza salire tant'alto con lo spirito da farsi lui Fato e dominare il proprio intreccio. Di qui lo sgomento, la nerezza, il nichilismo di tante anime.... L'individuo non è più retto da dighe sociali che separavano, ma sostenevano, che impedivano il salire ma non permettevano il cadere, ed è ogni giorno davanti all'alternativa di diventare padrone del mondo o l'ultimo straccio di carne che una forza cieca afferri per ripulire le vie. Si sente che qualche cosa di grande è in gestazione, ma l'immenso sforzo torce di dolori e di spasimi il corpo sociale.
Giuseppe Prezzolini, "Parole d'un uomo moderno: la religione," La Voce, 13 March 1913, 1-2.
38. The original reads: "L'anima collettiva non è ancora formata e si dibatte tra il vecchio e il nuovo, fra gl'ideali moderni e le credenze antiche." Benito Mussolini, "La malattia del secolo," in Il Proletario, 4 June 1903; reprinted in OO, 1:30.
39. The original reads: "che si esplica nella creazione di nuovi valori morali o artistici o sociali,"
dà uno scopo alla vita...Il superuomo è un simbolo, è l'esponente di questo periodo angoscioso e tragico di crisi che attraversa la coscienza europoea nella ricerca di nuove fonti di piacere, di bellezza, di ideale. È la constatazione della nostra debolezza, ma nel contempo la speranza della nostra redenzione. È il tramonto--e l'aurora. È soprattutto un'inno alla vita--alla vita vissuta con tutte le energie in una tensione continua verso qualche cosa di più alto, di più fino, di più tentatore.
Benito Mussolini, "La filosofia della forza," Il pensiero romagnolo (29 November, 6 and 13 December 1908); reprinted in OO, 1:183-64.
40. The original reads: "non sarà grande spiritualmente se non avrà conquistato la propria coscienza religiosa, che è insieme coscienza filosofica." Benedetto Croce, "Per la rinascita dell'idealismo" , reprinted in CVM, 40.
41. The original reads: "coscienza religiosa," "tutta la generazione nuova d'Italia," "che un movimento vasto e serio...non poteva avvenire che sotto forma totale...doveva avere un fondo, una linea etica, metafisica, in certo senso religiosa...Un movimento doveva essere totale, ossia doveva parlare all'uomo, all'uomo di oggi, all'italiano di oggi," "qualche cosa di grande è in gestazione." Giuseppe Prezzolini, Italia 1912 (Florence: Vallecchi, 1940), 85-86.
42. The original reads: "effervescence collective," Emile Durkheim, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985), 312.
43. Cf. Matei Calinescu, Faces of Modernity: Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 62.
44. The original reads: "tutto il mondo contemporaneo è di nuovo in cerca di una religione," "bisogno di orientamento circa la realtà e la vita, dal bisogno di un concetto della vita e dalla realtà." Benedetto Croce, "Per la rinascita dell'idealismo" , in CVM, 36.
45. Walter L. Adamson, "Fascism and Culture," 403; CL, 26-28.
46. The original reads: "soltanto il senso religioso della vita, identificando l'attuazione del bene comune con lo sviluppo della parte migliore della nostra personalità può dare valore assoluto ad ogni atto individuale e collettivo." Antonio Anzilotti, La crisi spirituale della democrazia (Faenza: Novelli e Castellani, 1912), 49.
47. The original reads: "L'Italia deve essere grande per lo spirito, deve dare vita ad una civiltà moderna." Giuseppe Prezzolini, "Il risveglio italiano," La Voce, 30 March 1911, 2-3.
48. The original reads: "una grande nazione, una nazione stretta dall'urgenza della competizione mondiale, e che ha dichiarato di accettare la lotta e di sperare nella vittoria." Giovanni Amendola, "Il mezzogiorno e la coltura italiana."
49. The original reads: "anima," "vita multiforme del suo tempo," "sentire veramente con senso di stupore, di rabbia, di venerazione, di amore, la vita di oggi." Scipio Slataper, "Perplessità crepuscolare," La Voce, 16 November 1911, 1-2.
50. The original reads: "una educazione umana, integrale, dell'uomo," "l'educazione è una sola, dell'uomo...Non si formano buoni italiani, se non si fanno dapprima buoni uomini." Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe Prezzolini, "Come faremo La Voce," La Voce, 7 November 1912, 1.
51. The original reads: "creando nella società moderna il suo mito, il suo catechismo, il suo sacerdozio, si potrà attuare la riforma pratica democratica." Giuseppe Prezzolini, "Parole d'un uomo moderno: la religione," La Voce, 13 March 1913, 1-2.
52. The original reads: "religione moderna," "il vero mito moderno." Giuseppe Prezzolini, "Parole d'un uomo moderno: la storia," La Voce, 22 May 1913, 1.
53. The original reads: "che sarà il cattolicesimo che ridarà al mondo la religione." Giovanni Boine, letter to Alessandro Cassati, 13 September 1910, in Giovanni Boine, Carteggio, ed. Margherita Marchione and S. E. Scalia (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e di Letteratura, 1979), 3:479.
54. The original reads: "religione della nazione." E. Corradini, "Una nazione," Il Regno, 19 June 1904,3.
55. The original reads: "Bisogna creare simboli nei quali si raccolga una collettività, si contenga una massa, si sommino tanti casi isolati di energie individuali...la folla, la collettività nel regime presente sono per gran parte i sostituti dell'eroe." Mario Morasso, L'Imperialismo artistico (Torino: Fratelli Bocca, 1903), 173, hereafter abbreviated IA.
56. The original reads: "espressione di un pensiero collettivo e successivo, di un'ideale nazionale e sociale," "la collettività, è fatta, per dirla con frase moderna, dal pubblico e per il pubblico; solo un popolo può suscitarla ed è un popolo, o meglio, è l'anima di un popolo che essa deve contenere e rappresentare" (IV, 189).
57. The original reads: "innumerevoli energie disciplinate e dirette sotto dura disciplina a un solo intento da un inflessibile potere e rappresentando una vera profusione di forza in cerca del massimo e dell'enorme" (IA, 204-05).
58. This expression is used by F. T. Marinetti, Taccuini, ed. Alberto Bertoni (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1987), 349.
59. The original reads: "in quale stato d'abbrutimento giace l'idealità estetica del nostro grande paese, forte di 40.000.000 abitanti considerati come i più intelligenti del mondo," "l'Italia è un paese giovane e forte che diverrà grande, e basta. Tutto è da rifare spiritualmente, quindi esteticamente" (BOC, 5-9).
60. The original reads: "definitivamente alla testa dell'arte mondiale," "lo spirito costruttivo italiano torna a dominare nell'arte della nostra epoca." (BOC, 154, 161)
61. On the agreements and disagreements between Futurism and the ideology of the nationalist movement see Emilio Gentile, "Il Futurismo e la politica," in FCP, 112-113.
62. The original reads: "non socialistica e non imperialistica o decadentistica, che riproduca in forma nuova quella del risorgimento italiano." Benedetto Croce, note of January 1910, Memorie della mia vita, 39.
63. The original reads: "una vita avventurosa, energica e quotidianamente eroica." F. T. Marinetti, "Prefazione futurista a Revolverate di Gian Pietro Lucini," in TIF, 27.
64. The original reads: "paradigma autoritario della modernità," "in contraddizione con il movimento della vita moderna" (I, 10).
65. The original reads: "il primato della forza e la necessità di un dominio sempre più vasto e profondo, rinnovando alcune caratteristiche condizioni delle antiche civiltà dominatrici" (I, 11).
66. The original reads: "Riappariscono così le tendenze oligarchiche, le preminenze militari, e i sistemi inneggianti ad aristocrazie forti e direttive, ad un governo assoluto ed energico" (IA, 60).
67. Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914, 106-202.
68. The phrase is from F. T. Marinetti, "Marinetti's Futurist Speech to the Venetians," which makes up part of "Against Past-Loving Venice" (27 April 1910): "Have you forgotten that first of all you are Italians, and that in the language of history this word means: builders of the future." The English translation is from F. T. Marinetti, Let's Murder the Moonshine: Selected Writings, ed. R. W. Flint (1971; reprint, Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1991), 65, hereafter abbreviated LMM. The original reads: "Avete dunque dimenticato di essere anzitutto degl'Italiani, e che questa parola, nella lingua della storia, vuol dire: costruttori dell'avvenire?" The full text of the essay is in TIF, 33-38; this quotation 36.
69. The original reads: "cambiare radicalmente tutta l'anima di molti uomini," "in Italia l'avvento di quest'uomo nuovo." Giovanni Papini, "La necessità della rivoluzione," Lacerba (15 April 1913): [73]-77, here 77; and idem, "Il discorso di Roma, " Lacerba (1 March 1913): [37]-41, here 41.
70. The original reads:
...una coscienza che la spinge sempre più al lavoro tenace, alla conquista feroce. Che gli italiani abbiano finalmente la gioia inebriante di sentirsi soli, armati, modernissimi, in lotta con tutti e non pronipoti assopiti di una grandezza che non è più la nostra...Bisogna prendere partito, infiammare la propria passione, esasperare la propria fede per questa grandezza nostra futura che ogni italiano degno di questo nome sente nel profondo, ma che desidera troppo fiaccamente! Ci vuole del sangue, ci vogliono dei morti...Bisognerebbe impiccare, fucilare, chi devia dalla idea di una grande Italia futurista.
Umberto Boccioni, "Contro la vigliaccheria artistica italiana," Lacerba (1 September 1913), 191.
71. The original reads: "nella grande storia del mondo." Giovanni Gentile, "La data sacra," Il Resto del Carlino, 24 May 1918; reprinted in Giovanni Gentile, Guerra e fede, ed. H. A. Cavallera (Florence: Le Lettere, 1989), 92.
72. The original reads: "Conflagrazione," "grande e sacra legge della vita," "collaudo sanguinoso e necessario della forza del popolo." F. T. Marinetti, "Contro Vienna e contro Berlino," L'Italia futurista (25 July 1916), [1] and idem, "Distruzione della sintassi," in TIF, 68.
73. The original reads: "modernità della guerra." Enrico Corradini, "La guerra," Il Regno, 25 February 1904, 3.
74. The original reads:
Il secolo decimonono fu il secolo della utopia democratico-umanitaria, il secolo ventesimo sarà il secolo della forza e della conquista...E nel nuovo secolo che la forza avrà il suo regno più vasto, ed è nel nuovo secolo che si vedranno gli eserciti più formidabili e le guerre più sanguinose. (I, 32, 39)
75. Giovanni Amendola, "La grande illusione," La Voce, 2 March 1911, 3-4.
76. The original reads: "religione della patria." Giovanni Boine, Discorsi militari (Florence: Edizioni della Voce, 1924), 60-61.
77. Roger Griffin has insisted on the importance of the myth of palingenesis in pre-fascist culture, considering it a fundamental element of "generic fascism," in NF, 38-40.
78. The original reads: "culto dell'eroico," "in un'atmosfera di mito e di epopea." Angelo Oliviero Olivetti, "Sindacalismo e nazionalismo," Pagine libere, 15 February 1911, cited by Francesco Perfetti, "Introduzione" to Angelo Oliviero Olivetti, Dal sindacalismo rivoluzionario al corporativismo (Rome: Bonacci, 1984), 76.
79. The original reads: "palingenesi attraverso il crogiuolo ardente della lotta." Angelo Oliviero Olivetti, "L'altra campana," in Pagine libere, 15 November 1911, reprinted in Dal sindacalismo rivoluzionario al corporativismo, 42.
80. The original reads: "La Guerra svilupperà la ginnastica, lo sport, le scuole pratiche d'argicoltura, di commercio e industriali. La Guerra ringiovanirà l'Italia, l'arricchirà d'uomini d'azione, la costringerà a vivere non più nel passato, delle rovine e del dolce clima, ma delle proprie forze nazionali." F. T. Marinetti, "Contro Vienna e Contro Berlino," [1].
81. The original reads: "La realtà si muove con ritmo accelerato. Abbiamo avuto il singolarissimo privilegio di vivere nell'ora più tragica della storia del mondo. Vogliamo essere...gli spettatori inerti di questo dramma grandioso? O non vogliamo essere--in qualche modo e in qualche senso--protagonisti?" Benito Mussolini, "Dalla neutralità assoluta alla neutralità attiva ed operante," Il popolo d'Italia, 18 October 1914, 1; reprinted in OO, 1:402-03.
82. The original reads: "In lui vi è il dramma di tutta la nostra generazione." Carlo Carrà, letter to Giuseppe Prezzolini, 15 November 1914, quoted in MSN, 128.
83. In the argument to follow, I will not survey the disagreements and conflicts that marked the relations between Futurism and fascism, nor shall I address in all its aspects the attitude of fascism toward modernity and modernization. For an introduction to the fascist attitude toward modernity, see Emilio Gentile, "Impending Modernity: Fascism and the Ambivalent Image of the United States," Journal of Contemporary History 20 : 70-20.
84. The original reads: "saper comprendere i tempi che si vivono, saperci adattare all'atmosfera cambiata, agli avvenimenti che si susseguono, che si accavallano nel vorticorso ansare della civiltà moderna." Dante Bianchi, "...i fascisti picchiano," in Il fascio, 27 October 1920, 1.
85. Emilio Gentile, Storia del partito fascista, 1919-1922 (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1989), 518-19.
86. The original reads: "audacia, come tentativo, come impresa, come insoddisfazione della realtà, come avventura, come celebrazione del rito dell'azione." Sergio Panunzio, Italo Balbo (Milan: Imperia, 1923), 9.
87. The original reads:
Noi abbiamo creato il nostro mito. Il mito è uno fede, è una passione. Non è necessario che sia una realtà. E una realtà nel fatto che è un pungolo, che è una speranza, che è fede, che è coraggio. Il nostro mito è la nazione, il nostro mito è la grandezza della nazione. E a questo mito, a questa grandezza, che noi vogliamo tradurre in una realtà completa, noi subordiniamo tutto il resto.
Bentio Mussolini, "Discorso a Napoli," 24 October 1922, in OO, 38:457.
88. The original reads:
non è contemplazione nostalgica del passato ma dura contemplazione dell'avvenire. Roma è il nostro punto di partenza e di riferimento; è il nostro simbolo, o se si vuole, il nostro Mito. Noi sogniamo l'Italia romana, cioè saggia e forte, disciplinata e imperiale. Molto di quello che fu lo spirito immortale di Roma risorge nel fascismo....Bisogna, ora, che la storia di domani, quella che noi vogliamo assiduamente creare, non sia il contrasto o la parodia della storia di ieri. I romani non erano soltanto dei combattenti, ma dei costruttori formidabili che potevano sfidare, come hanno sfidato, il Tempo.
Benito Mussolini, "Passato e avvenire," Il popolo d'Italia, 21 April 1922; reprinted in OO, 18:160-61.
89. Cf. CL, 145-152; and R. Vesser, "Fascist Doctrine and the Cult of the Romanità," Journal of Contemporary History 1 : 5-21.
90. The original reads: "una delle più grandi forze spirituali dei popoli," "sacro ed immutabile ed intangibile," "creazione successiva e costante della loro anima." Benito Mussolini, "Breve Preludio," in Gerarchia, 25 January 1922; reprinted in OO, 18:19.
91. The original reads: "pedana di combattimento per andare incontro all'avvenire." Benito Mussolini, "La bandiera dei volontari" (Discorso del 4 giugno 1924), in OO, 20:304.
92. The original reads: "costruttori dell'avvenire," "barbaro moderno...un'uomo moderno tutto proteso all'avvenire coi suoi tentacoli spirituali." Mario Carli, L'italiano di Mussolini (Milano: Mondadori, [1930]),32.
93. The original reads: "rivoluzione continua," "Noi siamo sempre 'domani.'" Benito Mussolini, "Discorso alla camera dei deputati (8 December 1928)," in OO, 23:272.
94. The original reads: "modernità italiana." Mino Maccari, "Breviario," in Il Selvaggio, 30 January 1927, 7.
95. The original reads: "il segno di potenza delle nazioni moderne." Alberto Pirelli, "Liti ed ombre della moderna civiltà meccanica," Gerarchia, July 1931, 573.
96. The original reads: "pazzesco oltre che ingenuo." N. Madau Diaz, "Macchine," in Dizionario della politica (Rome, 1940), 3:4-5.
97. The original reads: "arrestare il cammino stesso della civiltà." France Ciarlantini, Incontro con il Nord America (Milan: Alpes, 1929), 175.
98. The original reads: "formula della civiltà moderna." Anonymous editorial in Critica Fascista, 15 January 1937, 81.
99. The original reads: "servizio dell'uomo e della collettività come strumento di liberazione, non come accumulatore di miseria." Benito Mussolini, "Discorso del 19 marzo 1934," in OO, 26:186.
100. The original reads: "simboli rappresentativi del nuovo spirito religioso che fascerà questo secolo e a cui nessuno potrà sottrarsi, perché universale e duraturo." L. C. Fillia, "Spiritualità nuova," in La Città Nuova, 21 April 1932, quoted in Claudia Salaris, Artecrazia: l'avanguardia futurista negli anni del fascismo, 113.
101. Gino Severini, "L'idolotria dell 'Arte' e decadenza dei quadri," Critica fascista (15 January 1927); reprinted in Claudia Salaris, Artecrazia: l'avanguardia futurista negli anni del fascismo, 78.
102. The original reads:
Nello stato fascista l'arte viene ad avere una funzione sociale, una funzione educatrice. Essa deve tradurre l'etica del nostro tempo. Deve dare unità di stile e di grandezza di linee al vivere comune. L'arte così tornerà a essere quello che fu nei suoi periodi più alti e in seno alle più alte civiltà: un perfetto strumento di governo.
Massimo Casmpigli, Carlo Carrà, Achille Funi, and Mario Sironi, "Manifesto della pittura murale" (December 1933), in Mario Sironi, Scritti editie inediti, ed. E. Camesasca (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1982), 155-57.
103. The original reads: "epoca di miti grandiosi e di giganteschi rivolgimenti." Mario Sironi, "Pittura murale," Il Popolo d'Italia, 1 January 1932; reprinted in Mario Sironi, Scritti editi e inediti, 115.
104. The original reads: "complesse orchestrazioni della vita moderna." Mario Sironi, "Pittura murale," 104. "Primitività pagana e costruttiva dell'evo moderno." Mario Sironi, "Il Maestro," Il Popolo d'Italia, 13 March 1931; reprinted in Scritti e inediti, 97.
105. The original reads: "nuova impronta all'anima popolare." Mario Sironi, "Manifesto della pittura murale," 156.
106. The original reads: "di attività e di conquista," "della conquista ha tutte le avidità." Massimo Bontempelli, L'avventura novecentista, ed. R. Jacobi (Florence: Vallecchi, 1974), 159, hereafter abbreviated AN. The second original reads: "i miti e la favole necessari ai tempi nuovi" (AN, 121).
107. The original reads: "primordiali di un'epoca, il compito di scoprire e creare i nuovi miti, le nuove favole, che nutriranno la giovinezza della terza epoca" (AN, 350).
108. The original reads: "realismo magico," "come un avventuroso miracolo: rischio coninuo e continuo sforzo per scsamparne," "più quotidiana e normale" (AN, 351).
109. The original reads: "inconfutabile," "è viva d'uno spirito eterno," "il suo ufficio di suscitatrice di civiltà" (AN, 46).
110. Cf. Emilio Gentile, "Il futurismo e la politica," 155-57.
111. For the English, see "Beyond Communism," in LMM, 164. The original reads:
La rivoluzione futurista che porterà gli artisti al potere non promette paradisi terrestri. Non potrà certo sopprimere il tormento umano che è la forza accensionale della razza. Gli artisti, instancabili aeratori di questo travaglio febbrile riusciranno ad attenuare il dolore. Essi risolveranno il problema del benessere, come soltanto può essere risolto, cioè spiritualmente.
F. T. Marinetti, Al di là del comunismo (Milan: La Testa di Ferro, 1920), reprinted in TIF, 486.
112. LMM, 163; The original reads:
Il proletariato dei geniali al governo realizzerà il teatro gratuito per tutti e il gran Teatro Aereo futurista. La musica regnerà sul mondo. Ogni piazza avrà la sua grande orchestra strumentale e vocale. Vi saranno così, dovunque, fontane di armonia.
F. T. Marinetti, Al di là del comunismo, in TIF, 485.
Away! Let us break out since we cannot much longer restrain our desire to create finally a new musical reality, with a generous distribution of resonant slaps in the face, discarding violins, pianos, double basses and plaintive organs. Let us break out!
-- Luigi Russolo
In 1917, four years after the appearance of Luigi Russolo's Futurist manifesto "The Art of Noises," and eight years after F. T. Marinetti's founding manifesto, the ultra-conservative German composer Hans Pfitzner published a passionate, polemical essay entitled Futuristengefahr (Danger of Futurists), 1 directed not at the Italian Futurists but at the recently published second edition of Ferruccio Busoni's Sketch for a New Aesthetic of Music. 2 Pfitzner, deeply disturbed by the eminent composer's vision of a freer music to come that would finally realize the art's full--but as yet unattained--potential, took it as an unwarranted attack on the glorious achievements of music's past, with only vague and uncertain proposals for its future offered in return.
Shortly afterwards, in a brief reply, Busoni remarked that Pfitzner's title alone led the reader astray, "heaping on my name...all the weaknesses and faults with which you could possibly reproach a certain group of people--a group from which I am far removed. The word 'Futurism' is not used on any page of my little book. I have never attached myself to a sect--Futurism, a movement of the present time, could have no connection with my arguments." 3
Strictly speaking, Busoni was right: the first edition of his essay had appeared in 1906, three years before Marinetti's first manifesto. Though it had originally had a small and limited circulation, attracting little attention even within the musical community, the somewhat enlarged 1916 edition to which Pfitzner responded was widely circulated and heatedly discussed; and by then the Futurist movement was firmly established, already near the end of its first and most productive phase. Busoni moreover had specific contacts with Futurism. He responded publicly to an unsigned 1912 Futurist music manifesto published in a Parisian newspaper, expressing approval of its positions and even claiming priority in advocating microtonal scale divisions. 4 He also had ties with Marinetti and the Futurist painter Umberto Boccioni, whose wellknown painting La città che sale (The city rises) he purchased in 1912 and who subsequently became a close personal friend. Shortly before his death in 1916, Boccioni vacationed with Busoni and his wife at their summer villa near Lake Maggiore while on leave from the Italian army. It was here that he painted his fine full-length portrait of the composer, one of his last and most impressive works. 5 After Boccioni's death the grief-stricken composer wrote a moving tribute to the young painter. 6
Even if Pfitzner was unaware of these connections, the content of the New Aesthetic alone would have been sufficient to trigger associations with Futurism. 7 Despite a calm and reasoned manner, the essay is decidedly inflammatory in devaluing the art's past and extolling its future, vigorously asserting music's need to break away from inherited shackles--its restricted tonal system, exhausted forms, and outmoded instruments. Even such towering res of the past as Bach and Beethoven are considered only beginnings rather than "unsurpassable finalities." 8
Pfitzner responded sharply, even contemptuously: "Busoni places all his hopes for Western music in the future and understands the present and past as a faltering beginning, as the preparation. But what if it were otherwise? What if we find ourselves presently at a high point, or even that we have already passed beyond it?" 9 For Pfitzner, the idea that one should discard the past for an entirely new, unproven world of artistic expression and technical experimentation was both incomprehensible and inimical to all he stood for. His title, invoking guilt by association, simply castigates Busoni by linking him with the most recent, extreme, and ideologically colored manifestation of his own position: the Italian Futurist movement.
The Busoni-Pfitzner controversy reminds us that the moment of Italian Futurism, its first and most productive phase (roughly 1909 to 1916), was part of a more encompassing "Futurist moment," in Renato Poggioli's phrase: "a significant symptom of a broader and deeper state of mind." 10 In one of the most brilliant of his publicity-conscious maneuvers, Marinetti drew upon the widespread future-orientation of the time to give the movement its name. Yet that "deeper state of mind," the larger Futurist context, is critical for understanding the movement; and nowhere is this more so than in Futurist music.
Many, if not all, of the principal ideas associated with Futurism, as well as the larger Futurist moment, developed and intensified over a long period, going back at least to the early years of the nineteenth century. That century's belief in progress, focussing attention toward the future, was first and foremost tied to achievements in science, industry, and technology; but it was no less critical for the arts, including music. Robert Schumann, writing in 1835 in the journal Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, which he had founded in the previous year, treats the current period (his "recent past") as a tawdry moment separating a lustrous former age from a beckoning future:
Our attitude runs as follows: to recall the past and its music with all the energy at our disposal, drawing attention to the ways in which new artistic beauties can find sustenance at a source so pure, then to take up arms against the recent past as an age inimical to are...and finally to prepare for and help expedite the advent of a new poetic age. 11
Schumann's view was sharpened by his successor Franz Brendel, who invoked the forces of historical evolution in order to support the progressive tendencies of the Wagnerian New German School against the more traditionally aligned Brahms-oriented composers that were associated with the critic Eduard Hanslick. But the most vehemently future-directed nineteenth-century musical re was Wagner himself, who in 1849 titled one of his major theoretical studies Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (The artwork of the future), and who wasted no occasion to rail against all music of the past that in his view failed to point forward toward his own.
This Futurist orientation was fueled by a widespread belief among progressive composers that the language of Western music, its tonal system and formal conventions, was reaching a state of exhaustion and thus required constant expansion and renewal. This fostered a growing sense of crisis, reaching a climax shortly after the turn of the century as composers pushed musical language to the outer edges of traditional tonality. Busoni's New Aesthetic, appearing at this moment of crisis, stands poised between two worlds: its radically conceived pleas for innovation are rooted in aesthetic assumptions inherited from the past. Innovation is required because music must be renewed to retain its "spiritual," otherworldly essence, an essence defined by the literary and philosophical representatives of musical romanticism (notably Wackenroder, Tieck, Hoffmann, and Schopenhauer) and then echoes by such nineteenth-century composer-writers as Schumann, Liszt, and Wagner. Far from rejecting the romantic conception of music as a world apart, Busoni, caught in the crisis of musical language, simply refashioned it as a yet-to-be-attained goal, achievable only by escaping the limitations of music's past.
Near the very beginning of his essay, Busoni notes that music can achieve its full potential only in acknowledging "its untrammeled immateriality":
Young as it is, this child [music]...possesses one radiant attribute which signalizes it beyond all its elder sisters [the other arts]. And the lawgivers will not see this marvelous attribute, lest their laws should be thrown to the winds. This child--it floats on air! It touches not the earth with its feet. It knows no law of gravitation. It is wellnigh incorporeal. Its material is transparent. It is sonorous air. It is almost Nature herself. It is-- free. 12
This mirrors the dominant line of nineteenth-century aesthetics, which privileged music first among the arts due to its lack of association with the material world. "No other art," wrote Wackenroder, "has a basic material [Grundstoff] in itself already so impregnated with heavenly spirit." 13 Shielded from material existence, music offered a language transcending ordinary meaning. Wackenroder, likening it to "the language of angels," 14 believed it could speak the unspeakable, communicate fundamental metaphysical truths beyond the grasp of mere words and reason. Busoni's views are strikingly similar. What is new is the belief that music's current technical and spiritual impasse (and for Busoni the two are inseparable) requires the composer to reach beyond its traditional materials and syntax. Only then can music win its freedom and realize its true nature.
A sizable proportion of Busoni's essay is thus devoted to presenting new technical possibilities, music's only hope if it is not to be grounded in a morass of outworn formulas and clichés. Discussing harmony, he urges composers to move forward: "for all signs presage a revolution, and a next step toward that 'eternal harmony.' Let us once again call to mind that in this latter the gradation of the octave is infinite, and let us strive to draw a little nearer to infinitude." The recommended step is thus additional (microtonal) divisions of the octave, since the current "system of tone, key, and tonality, taken in its entirety, is only a part of a fraction of one diffracted ray from that Sun, 'Music,' in the empyrean of the 'eternal harmony.'" 15
Perhaps most novel is Busoni's suggestion that if music is to acquire richer sonic and expressive power, it must abandon traditional instruments. He reports enthusiastically on an invention by the American Thaddeus Cahill, the "Dynamophone," which, through transformations of electrical current, allows for infinitely small and mathematically exact pitch variations. Contemplating these possibilities, Busoni approaches a state of rapture:
And what a vista of fair hopes and dreamlike fancies is thus opened...Who has not dreamt that he could float on air? and firmly believed his dream to be reality?--Let us take thought, how music may be restored to its primitive natural essence; let us free it from architectonic, acoustic and aesthetic dogmas; let it be pure invention and sentiment, in harmonies, in forms, in tone-colors...let it follow the line of the rainbow and vie with the clouds in breaking sunbeams.... 16
Yet for all its utopian tone and pleas for renewal through technical experimentation and innovation, the New Aesthetic had little effect on Busoni's own compositions. Purely theoretical and speculative, it is an early instance of that separation of musical thought and practice so characteristic of the twentieth century.
A sense of crisis was of course no less evident in the other arts. The appearance around the turn of the century of so many different movements espousing new artistic aims, usually with revolutionary intent, reflected a general feeling of malaise. Those centered on the visual arts, such as Die Brücke, Der blaue Reiter, fauvism, and cubism, responded to the breakdown of the traditional syntax of objective representation, a development that corresponded to, and temporally coincided with, the dissolution of traditional tonality and its concomitant formal conventions in music. What set Futurism off from these others was in part its unique ability to master and manipulate the resources of mass communication, especially newspapers, to promote its artistic principles and (largely totalitarian) political program. But more significantly, it differed in not associating itself so exclusively with a particular aesthetic or technical orientation (a tendency reflected in the names of such movements as symbolism, cubism, and Vorticism). It allied itself first and foremost with the "future" itself, and thus opposed itself to the past. The Futurist manifestos, stressing creation ex nihilo, proposed a total rejection of tradition--a desire "to mock everything consecrated by time," as Marinetti put it. 17 The movement thus seemed to epitomize more fully than any other the revolutionary spirit of the age.
To be sure, the Futurists advocated specific artistic approaches for achieving their ends, setting them forth in the various technical manifestos issued as sequels to the more general, ideologically focussed initial ones. But while the tone and visual layout of their proposals were new and arresting, the content was not so distant from what had already been advocated by the movement's various predecessors. The appeals of the two main statements on painting, for example, the 1910 "Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto" and the catalogue introduction for the 1912 Futurist exhibition in Paris ("The Exhibitors to the Public"), were by no means unprecedented: 18 that painting deal with modern subjects in modern dress; that it present "the simultaneousness of states of mind"; that the spectator be located in the center of the picture; that the painter "carry within himself the landscapes" intended for depiction on canvas; that imitation be rejected; that objects interpenetrate one another; that the tendency toward the "infinite" be revealed through "force-lines." 19
Though expressed with remarkable energy and revolutionary fervor, these ideas are to a marked degree derived from the artistic and theoretical contributions of symbolism, impressionism, post-impression, cubism, fauvism, and German expressionism. New, however, is the emphasis on symbols of "victorious science" and technology: airplanes, high-speed automobiles, motorcycles, trams, railroad trains, etc.-- references that lend the manifestos a palpably hard edge, sharpened by suggestions of violence, destruction, and danger (most egregiously so in the glorification of war).
These technical suggestions are all ultimately directed toward a more encompassing project: the sanctification of modern life as an embodiment of "universal dynamism." Here again one finds precedents, as much art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century concerned itself with ideas of motion and transience--for example the impressionists' interest in spontaneity, in capturing moments of passing, in abruptly juxtaposing vibrating colors that had to be actively recombined by the viewer at a distance. The critic Félix Fénéon, writing in 1886, described these developments in terms strongly anticipating those employed of the Futurists: "From the beginning, the impressionist painters, from a concern for truth that made them limit themselves to the interpretation of directly observed modern life and to landscape painted directly from nature, had seen objects as interdependent, without chromatic autonomy, sharing luminous characteristics with their neighbors." 20
Indeed, by the end of the nineteenth century the idea that flux and change were characteristic attributes of modern life had become commonplace. When Baudelaire, writing in 1863 on the relationships between modern painting and modern life, described modernity as "the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent," he already grasped the age not simply as something new but as a state of instability, propelled by change and dynamic energy (although he continues: this is "the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable"). 21 Marx similarly stressed transience in his famous maxim: "all that is solid melts into air." 22 But the roots go back to post-Kantian German idealist philosophy, to Fichte and Schelling, and from there to Schopenhauer and Hegel, eventually surfacing with renewed vigor at the turn of the century in Bergson. However different in other respects, these thinkers all comprehended reality as a process of transformation and evolution.
Such notions of the mutability and impermanence of reality led nineteenth-century thinkers to embrace music as an ideal medium for conveying fundamental truths. Music's lack of materiality--its "floating on air," in Busoni's phrase, free from attachments with the external world--made it the "transcendent" art par excellence. It was accorded the highest position among the arts--a remarkably swift ascent considering its lowly status during the eighteenth century (all the more so since at the time its subservience stemmed from exactly those qualities that later brought it preeminence). Pater's oft-cited phrase that all art "aspires to the condition of music" is but one of countless such paeans voiced by artists and writers throughout the century. 23 Music was thrust forward as a model for all the arts. Unburdened by words or literal representations, it communicated a purely symbolic meaning (and only in that evasive, nonliteral sense characteristic of the nineteenth century) through an autonomous language of pure form based on its own internal relationships; and it offered an ideal escape from the increasing materialism of modern life. 24
If music supplied a key to otherwise hidden truths, however, it did so in large measure because it was able to project a sense of pure motion: it was itself in a state of constant transformation, always becoming something other than it was, directed toward the future. And this meant, paradoxically, that it was equally suited to evoke those qualities of transience and dynamism associated with the modern. Baudelaire, in discussing correspondences among the arts in his essay on Tannhäuser, neatly linked the attributes of immateriality and flux when he described his reactions to Wagner's music: "I imagined the idea of a soul moving in a luminous environment, of an ecstasy of voluptuousness and knowledge, floating above and beyond the natural world." 25
Nineteenth-century composers, responding to such notions of unrestricted movement, began to feel hampered by the more solid, articulated musical forms inherited from the previous century. Such forms treated music "spatially," carving it up into well-defined units joined together in cohesive, architectonic groups. Composers accordingly began to rethink musical structure in terms better suited to an image of reality as flux. Forms became more ambiguous, more unstable, in a state of permanent development--an idea quite foreign to eighteenth-century composers, for whom stability and instability were joined in an unmistakable, if delicate, balance. Wagner perfectly expressed the tendency toward fluidity when he described his music as "an art of transition." 26 And the idea is still fully alive in Busoni's remark in the New Aesthetic: "all composers have drawn nearest the true nature of music in preparatory and intermediary passages (preludes and transitions)." 27
I have discussed elsewhere how the Romantic idea of music as a language of pure form and motion encouraged nineteenth-century composers to undermine the conventional tonal syntax inherited from the eighteenth century. 28 If music was to be truly free, it had to unburden itself of the constraints imposed by received conventions. The collapse of traditional tonality, so closely allied with modernism, evident in both the "neotonal" leanings of Debussy, Stravinsky, and Bartók and the atonal ones of Schoenberg, was the seemingly inevitable consequence of the Romantic idea of music's autonomy, of an art sheltered from all worldly involvement, including ultimately even a shared--and thus socially constituted--musical language.
The aesthetic orientation fostering music's preeminence had important consequences for the other arts. In literature it encouraged efforts to purge words of their ordinary meanings, often to the extent of conferring upon them a purely sonic value devoid of literal references, an idea that found typically drastic expression in Marinetti's parole in libertà, his "words set free" from syntax, punctuation, linear placement on the page, "stupid formulas," and "the logical canal of syntax." This "unchained lyricism" would--and here one hears distinct echoes from the aesthetics of musical romanticism--"bring us to the essence of material." 29
The influence of the aesthetics of autonomous music is perhaps most clearly recognizable in the visual arts, especially in painting's break with objective representation as it approached pure abstraction around 1912. The "language" of nineteenth-century painting was--like that of music (but unlike literature)--an artificial one; and it too was tied to "syntactical" conventions, in this case those of perspectival representation. Hence the prevalent idea that painting should become more like music, an autonomous pictorial language of pure colors and form, and that it should do so by renouncing all ties to external reality and objective representation. As early as 1908 the German art historian Wilhelm Worringer argued "the presupposition that the work of art, as an autonomous organism, stands beside nature on equal terms and, in its deepest and innermost essence, devoid of any connection with it, insofar as by nature is understood the visible surface of things." 30 The English critic and painter Roger Fry, writing two years later about Cézanne, mentioned "a new courage to attempt in painting that direct expression of imagined states of consciousness which has for long been relegated to music and poetry," and a year afterwards added that Cézanne had "recovered for modern art a whole lost language of form and color." 31 These views reflected the more general belief, fundamental to the whole modernist enterprise, that each art should develop its own immanent language, fashioned from its own intrinsic properties and value--a belief that, paradoxically, as often as not was felt to make these arts more like music.
Many painters were consciously aware of their debt to music. Indeed, most of those associated with abstractionism's earliest phase, whether in the Germanic, expressionistic line, like Wassily Kandinsky (then resident in Munich), or in the French cubist line, like Robert Delaunay and the Paris-based Frantisek Kupka, described their work in musical terms. Kandinsky, who often gave his paintings musical titles, such as Composition or Improvisation, remarks in a letter written to Schoenberg in 1911: "I am certain that our own modern harmony [i.e., that of painters] is not to be found in the 'geometric' way, but rather in the anti-geometric, anti-logical way. This way is that of 'dissonances' in art...in painting, therefore, just as much as in music." A few months later he adds: "How immensely fortunate (though only relatively!) musicians are in their highly advanced art, truly an art which has already had the good fortune to forego completely all purely practical aims. How long will painting have to wait for this?" 32 Delaunay, writing to Kandinsky in 1912, notes that his new "laws" were "based on studies in the transparency of color, whose similarity to musical notes drove me to discover the 'movement of color.'" 33
Kupka seems to be an exception, for in his Création dans les arts plastiques, completed in 1913 (not published until 1923), he remarks:
It would be better to treat with greater circumspection than hitherto the analogies ...between colors and sounds....The fact is that a piece of music suggests different images to each of its listeners....In other words, chromaticism in music and the musicality of colors are of value only as metaphors. Such a shame...yet another illusion goes up in smoke. 34
But Kupka is referring here to specific analogies between sound and color (about which he is no doubt correct), not to a more general analogy between the formal languages of music and abstract art. Moreover, he himself gave a musical title to the first purely abstract work he exhibited, Amorpha, Fugue in Two Color ; and shortly before its appearance, he was, as he acknowledged, intensely preoccupied with the music of J. S. Bach.
I have taken this excursion to be in a better position to understand the particular conception of music that developed within the Futurist camp. Consistent with the modernist tradition just sketched, Futurist painters also were prone to emphasize the "musicality" of their work. In the 1912 catalogue essay for the Paris exhibition, the Futurist idea of "painting of states of mind" is explained through a comparison "drawn from the evolution of music":
[we] suddenly and purposely intersect each motive with one or more other motives of which we never give the full development but merely the initial, central, or final notes.
As you see, there is with us not merely variety, but chaos and clashing of rhythms, totally opposed to one another, which we nevertheless assemble into a new harmony. 35
And there are references to prolongations of the rhythms, and to "spots, lines, zones of color...which, in accordance with a law of our interior mathematics, musically prepare and enhance the emotion of the spectator." 36 By the time this essay appeared, however, music had already assumed an explicit role within the Futurist project. This is of considerable interest, since, despite the symbolic importance music enjoyed in the development of both literary and visual modernism, almost none of the major avant-garde movements before Futurism had incorporated a specifically musical component. 37 Yet the Futurists, with their genius for defining ideas in terms equally applicable to all the arts, quickly accepted it as a central part of the movement's aesthetic platforms and artistic activities.
The first indication was Balilla Pratella's 1910 "Manifesto of Futurist Musicians." 38 Pratella was a talented and relatively successful composer of thirty, but by no means a progressive one measured within international musical circles; and by Futurist standards his initial manifesto is disappointing. It decries the "shame and filth" of Italy's musical past, and "the intellectual mediocrity, commercial baseness and misoneism" that make current Italian music inferior to that of other countries. But it provides only generalities in response: the need "to proclaim the unique concept of Futurist music, as absolutely different from music to date, and so to shape in Italy a Futurist musical taste, destroying doctrinaire, academic and soporific values." 39
Pratella's "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Music," issued the following year, offers a more concrete idea of how a Futurist music might be developed: melody and harmony should be conceived as a single element; traditional scales and modes should be rejected for the chromatic scale; tempered scales, including the chromatic, should eventually give way to microtonal scales; traditional meter should be expanded to encompass combinations of all meters and rhythms; and the orchestra should become "a sonorous universe in a state of constant mobility." 40 While none of this goes beyond Busoni, a final passage, apparently written by Marinetti and added at his insistence, more faithfully reflects the tone of the movement as a whole:
All forces of nature, tamed by man through his continued scientific discoveries, must find their reflection in composition--the musical soul of the crowds, of great industrial plants, of trains, of transatlantic liners, of armored warships, of automobiles, or airplanes. This will unite the great central motives of a musical poem with the power of the machine and the victorious reign of electricity. 41
Pratella's compositions of this period, including his Musica futuristica of 1912, offer little indication that he followed his own advice (again reminding us of Busoni). Though competently written, they are remarkably tame. Here the frequent objection of Futurism's critics--that the movement's true interest lies in its manifestos, and is thus more theoretical than artistic in nature (unless one sees the whole movement, as have some, as "performance art")--seems justified.
Pratella's manifestos nevertheless had a critical role. They were read by the Futurist painter Luigi Russolo, who, taking them seriously, succeeded in imagining a truly Futurist music. Russolo was an artist of some significance--he was one of the five signatories of the two Futurist painting manifestos and the Paris exhibition essay --and his career effectively illustrates the importance that musical thinking, in both its literal and metaphorical sense, played within the movement. Indeed, the re of Russolo as theorist-musician is fully comprehensible only in relation to his work as a painter.
Of the five painters who signed the Futurist painting manifestos, Russolo had the most short-lived reputation. He nevertheless held a privileged place in the early stages of the movement, exhibiting actively with Boccioni and the others. His earliest extant paintings, such as Profumo (Perfume), which dates from 1910 (earlier works were apparently destroyed by the artist), are relatively conservative, with a decided art nouveau flavor; yet they show a fascination with creating impressions of motion on two-dimensional surfaces. Profumo depicts a woman's head in profile, enveloped in swirling linear movements that extend the swirls of her hair. Interest in dynamism becomes more explicit in Riassunto dei movimenti di una donna (Synopsis of a woman's movements) of 1912, whose title re appears to execute a turn suggested through blurred and overlapping multiple images (a technique much favored by Boccioni at the time), arranged in a circular pattern.
Particularly revealing, given the artist's later turn to music, is the slightly earlier La Musica (Music; 1911-12), a canvas over seven feet in height depicting a multihanded pianist, positioned near the bottom and playing on an oversized keyboard, out of which a massive, snake-like arabesque rises upwards in a turning motion. Interacting with this shape, numerous mask-like faces seem to move toward the surface of the canvas as the endpoints of columnar projections thrusting toward the center from various locations. Russolo's own discussion is telling: "In this picture the painter has attempted to translate into painting the melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, polyphonic, and chromatic impressions that comprise the totality of a musical experience." 42 Here there is no doubt of a conscious effort to translate musical effects into painterly ones.
Given this interest, and the ties binding music to nonrepresentational painting, it is not surprising that Russolo was attracted to pure abstraction. His Automobile in corsa (Speeding automobile) of 1913, though still containing a distorted, if identifiable, car-like shape, is largely dominated by continuous, brightly colored abstract wedges forming a dynamic leftward thrust. Finally, Le case continuano in cielo (The houses continue into the sky), dating from the same year, is entirely abstract, projecting motion through geometrical shapes that extend both upward and outward in space, encircling one another. A painting of considerable character and originality, it has been termed Russolo's "masterpiece." 43
Yet it was nevertheless his last painting. Thereafter, as if fearing that his search for an autonomous pictorial language had reached a point of termination, Russolo gave up painting and turned to music. The first evidence was the pamphlet l'Arte dei rumori (The art of noises), published by the Direzione del Movimento Futurista in Milan in March 1913. This remarkable document offers a fundamentally new conception of the kinds of sounds appropriate to music and, no less significant, of music's relationship to its physical and human environment. It proposed, in short, no less than a reformulation of what music should be.
Though Russolo begins by describing his ideas as "a logical consequence" of Pratella's, what follows reveals fundamental differences. 44 Pratella, echoing Busoni, understood the expansion of musical resources as an extension, rather than rejection, of the essential sonic and organizational structures of Western music. Pure pitched sound is retained, but extended microtonally beyond the twelve-tone chromatic scale; and metrical rhythm is retained, but redefined as a complex network encompassing all possible meters.
Russolo's proposals are far more drastic. After sketching the evolution of Western music from the Greeks to the present, he notes that, despite all change and diversity, this music has always remained tied to pitched sounds associated specifically with music. He continues:
This limited circle of pure sounds must be broken, and the infinite variety of "noise-sound" conquered. Besides, everyone will acknowledge that all [musical] sound carries within it a development of sensations that are already familiar and exhausted, and which predispose the listener to boredom in spite of the efforts of all the innovatory musicians. We Futurists have deeply loved and enjoyed the harmonies of the great masters. For many years Beethoven and Wagner shook our nerves and hearts. Now we are satiated and we find far more enjoyment in the combination of the noises of trams, backfiring motors, carriages and bawling crowds than in rehearing, for example, the "Eroica" or the "Pastoral." 45
No mere extension, this proposes that we open up music to embrace all possible sounds.
To experience something of the sonorous richness this would provide, Russolo recommends that we traverse a modern city with "our ears more alert than our eyes," adhering to the complex sounds of motors, throbbing valves, pounding pistons, screeching gears, the flapping of awnings and flags, the noise of metal shutters and store windows, doors slamming, the roar of railroad stations, forges, mills, printing presses, power stations, and subways. The goal is not to achieve a realistic imitation of the noises of real life, but to "attune and regulate" such sounds for specifically musical purposes. 46 The noises are not transformed into ordinary musical tones, however, but are analyzed so that they can be manipulated in a controlled way:
To fix the pitch of noises does not mean to take away from them all the irregularity of tempo and intensity that characterizes their vibrations, but rather to give definite gradation or pitch to the stronger and more predominant of these vibrations. Indeed, noise is differentiated from musical sound merely in that the vibrations that produce it are confused and irregular, both in tempo and in intensity. Every noise has a note--sometimes even a chord--that predominates in the ensemble of its irregular vibrations. Because of this predominant note it becomes possible to fix the pitch of a given note, that is, to give it not a single pitch but a variety of pitches, without losing its characteristic quality--its distinguishing timbre. Thus certain noises produced by rotary motion may offer a complete ascending or descending chromatic scale by merely increasing or decreasing the speed of the motion. 47
To realize his project Russolo devised a threefold plan: to select, coordinate, and control noises, for which purpose he distinguishes six noise "families" (the number was later increased) ranging from "rumbles" and "whispers" to "screeches" and "shouts"; to employ new instruments to be designed and constructed by Russolo, subsequently to be named intonarumori, which can produce these noise-sounds mechanically and modify them through a continuum of microtonal increments; and to create a Futurist orchestra composed entirely of such instruments. 48 With the help of his assistant Ugo Piatti, Russolo managed to complete an initial set of noise instruments within the year; and the first public concert featuring his own compositions for intonarumori ensemble was held in April 1914, in Milan. A month later a second concert took place in Genoa, and a month thereafter, a series of twelve in the London Coliseum.
Not surprisingly, these concerts attracted considerable public attention, though perhaps less as musical events than as quasi-theatrical occasions. 49 A subsequently arranged international tour, extending to Moscow, was organized but then cancelled due to the outbreak of World War I. 50 Despite attempts to revive Futurist music after the war, Russolo's "new musical reality" never reached full fruition. One factor was the misguided effort to enhance the commercial appeal of the intonarumori by combining them with traditional orchestral instruments, condemning them to a merely decorative function. But in any event, by the 1930s Russolo was essentially a forgotten man.
Just what Russolo's music actually sounded like unfortunately remains a mystery. 51 As if jinxed by the music's visionary and theoretically engendered nature, its material traces--both scores and instruments--have virtually all disappeared, having been either lost or destroyed in World War II. A 1921 recording of two brief pieces featuring intonarumori tells disappointingly little. The sound is poor, and the compositions (by Luigi's brother Antonio, a professional musician) are meager in quality. The noise-makers moreover are combined with and subordinated to traditional instruments, rendering them scarcely audible. 52
More suggestive, indeed tantalizingly so, is the only other surviving compositional artifact: two pages of score from Russolo's composition Risveglio di una città (The awakening of a city), reproduced to accompany an article by the composer published in 1913. This piece, with a title echoing one of Futurism's major paintings, La città che sale (The city rises) by Russolo's friend Boccioni (coincidentally, the painting owned by Busoni), 53 was performed at the first intonarumori concert. It offers at least some indication of just how unprecedented this music was. Notated on standard music paper, the score designates pitches with continuous lines rather than traditional noteheads; and movement from one pitch to another occurs as often as not by continuous glissando-like motion rather than discrete step, giving rise to unbroken pitch transformations quite foreign to previous Western music. One cannot reconstruct the exact effect, of course, since the sounds of the instruments are unknown. But this music was evidently composed according to fundamentally different organizational principles, with the primary focus placed on timbre and timbral groupings, and on changes in registration and in dynamic and density levels, rather than on conventional tonal and rhythmic relationships. The rhythmic aspect nevertheless seems surprisingly tame: the score is notated in 3/4 time, with clearly indicated beats and barlines, marked off on the page according to a strict grid of spatial-durational correspondences. Important musical changes are carefully aligned, occurring on rather than off the beats. The score nevertheless has a decidedly graphic appearance, quite different from the look of traditional music, somewhat resembling Krzysztof Penderecki's scores from the 1960s. Whatever this music may have sounded like, it looked like "the music of the future." 54
Eighty years later it is easy to recognize--as many have--the historical significance of Russolo's Futurist experiment. As forerunner of such phenomena as the "mechanistically" inspired compositions of the 1920s--e.g., Artur Honegger's Pacific 231 and Alexandr Mosolov's The Iron Foundry, Edgard Varèse's "sound-liberated" compositions, especially the all percussion Ionisation , John Cage's 1940s noise-dominated works for prepared piano, and textually organized music of the 1960s by Penderecki and György Ligeti--Russolo's work initiated an important and enduring line in twentieth-century music, regardless of specific, much less acknowledged influence. (Except for Cage, none of the composers mentioned admitted influence; and Varése flatly denied it.)
As for the impact of Russolo's Futurist music on the larger "Futurist moment" in which it appeared, it was admittedly minor measured by the response of other composers of the period. Viewed within the larger musical and cultural context, however, Russolo's manifesto and music marked a moment of considerable significance. To a far greater extent than any of his contemporaries, Russolo gave expression--by implication if not direct statement--to a remarkable idea: that with the abandonment of traditional tonality everything became musically possible--not just nontriadic harmonies or nonmetric rhythm, but any kind of sonic structure whatever. No longer in possession of a common language founded on purely formal conventions, music relinquished the sole basis for limiting itself to a "specifically musical" kind of material. Music could be whatever one wanted it to be.
Yet if Russolo's manifesto seems to imply that any sonic event can be called "music," his actual musical realizations were from all appearances--the fragment of score, reports of concerts, etc.--considerably less radical than their theoretical foundations. To judge from the two pages of Risveglio di una città, for example, Russolo confined his work to a carefully prescribed and regulated body of sounds that, though consisting entirely of "noise," was nevertheless created especially for musical purposes. The concerts were also traditional in layout, featuring a sequence of previously announced compositions, presented as "works of art." They even had the appearance of traditional affairs: photographs reveal an all-male orchestra in formal attire, seated in ordered arrangement.
There are nevertheless intriguing suggestions in Russolo's manifesto for the far reaching implications of linking music with noise, almost reaching the point of an equation of music with life that is reminiscent of Cage. Toward the end of the tract, the following appears:
Every manifestation of life is accompanied by noise. Noise, therefore, is familiar to our ear and has the power to conjure up life itself.  Noise, however, reaching us in a confused and irregular way from the irregular confusion of our life, never entirely reveals itself to us, and keeps innumerable surprises in reserve. We are therefore certain that by selecting, coordinating, and dominating all noises we can enrich men with a new and unsuspected sensual pleasure. 55
The last sentence, with its reference to human domination and control, pulls back somewhat, but the implication of the preceding is clear: that music, rendered "alien" by an "overfamiliar" grammar, must now become as "confused and irregular" as life itself. This represents the last stage in music's century-old search to develop a language of ever greater expressive immediacy. In an extraordinary moment of dialectical reversal, the romantic idea of "music as a world apart," having been pushed to its logical consequences, concedes to the idea of "music as part of the world." 56
Russolo's undertaking, with its negation of specifically "musical" sound, can again be illuminated by considering a corresponding development in contemporary painting: the rejection of all exterior content. The widespread appearance of purely abstract art in 1912 encouraged several painters to strip down the content of their work to what Kasimir Malevich a few years later called "the zero of form," apparently denying everything previously held necessary to the definition of "painting," including even its craft. The evolution of both Piet Mondrian and Malevich during this period can be viewed in this light, though their reasons for such a radical reduction of painterly conventions were quite different.
The most telling example is this connection, however, is Marcel Duchamp, an artist much concerned with movement and transformation, and himself influenced by Futurist painting. Thierry de Duve, in a study of Duchamp's "passage" to the readymade, has interpreted the artist's retreat from painting as a final response to a series of historical abandonments undergone by painting in its search for a purely pictorial language free of external representation: the abandonment of chiaroscuro in Manet, linear perspective in Cézanne, empirically experienced space in Picasso, and, in a culminating convergence around 1912, objective representation in several artists, including Kandinsky, Mondrian, Delaunay, Kupka, and Malevich. These abandonments both mirrored and promoted the rejection of a particular, traditionally established conception of painting, ultimately leading to pure abstractionism.
While acknowledging that Duchamp's work was never fully abstract, de Duve maintains that "the question of abstraction" was essential to it. Instead of redefining painting as abstraction, however, Duchamp extended the series of abandonments a final step, abandoning painting altogether and along with it the name of "painting" (de Duve stresses a Duchamp 1912 diary entry: "Marcel, no more painting; go get a job."). 57 This decision was publicly announced in his first exhibition of a readymade, the Bicycle Wheel of 1913. For de Duve this final abandonment was
the paradoxically historical condition for the survival of painting, the reprieve that comes from its name being unpronounceable for a while it was the "invention" of the readymade that would confirm this revelation. Duchamp abandoned painting for the first time, or, to be more precise, he abandoned painting as a making and seeing, as an artisanal pleasure, an "olfactory masturbation." But he did not abandon the paradoxical contract that tied him to the history of painting; rather, he reduced the act of painting to nothing more than the enunciation of the contract itself: to name the death of painting and its survival all at once, to name the broken pact and the new pact that, since Manet at least, were part of the rhythm of the destiny of an avant-garde painter, and, by a supplementary turn of the crew, to name the name. 58
Although one cannot claim that Russolo created the first "musical readymade" (that honor, I suppose, would belong to Cage), I believe that his "Art of Noises," which appeared in the same year as Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel, can be read as providing the theoretical basis. It seems to advocate something Russolo the composer was never able, or wished, to realize: a vision of music that, inseparable from nonmusic, comes to us "like life itself." Like Duchamp's readymade, Russolo's manifesto responds to a series of abandonments: monotonality in Wagner, the triad in Scriabin, tonal centricity in Schoenberg, metrical rhythm in Stravinsky. Having reached the zero degree of form, the art of music gives way to the art of noise.
There are several intriguing ties linking Duchamp to Russolo. In 1913, the same year as Russolo, Duchamp abandoned painting and turned to "nonart," his "readymade" matching the former's "noise"; and shortly before this abandonment he produced a painting of a musical performance, The Sonata of 1911, as Russolo did with his La Musica of the same year. But most remarkable, Duchamp also turned to musical composition in breaking away from painting, though less intensely and exclusively than Russolo. Among various excursions into aural-musical territory throughout Duchamp's career, three dating from the time of the abandonment of painting are particularly relevant, especially since they appear to deny the boundaries separating painting from music. One is a drawing executed on music paper of a bicyclist, who defines--as if in analogy to a melodic line--a path of motion extending across the staves. Another, never realized, consists simply of the self-injunction to "make a painting of frequency."
Most suggestive however is the third, an actual musical composition entitled Eratum Musical, produced in 1913, the year of the first readymade, and conceived in conjunction with the early stages of the Large Glass, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (yet another form of nonpainting). Purely conceptual in intent (Duchamp himself remarked that a performance would be "useless"), the work exists in two versions, one for three voices and one "for a designated music instrument (player piano, mechanical organs or other new instruments for which the virtuoso intermediary is suppressed)." (Cahill's "Dynamophone," so enthusiastically described by Busoni, would have been--conceptually--ideal.) Both versions exploit a chance procedure: a limited number of pitches is selected (25 in one, 89 in the other) and placed in sequence by a random procedure that establishes their order for a given realization (in the vocal piece the pitches are indicated on separate pieces of paper, placed in a hat, shaken, and removed one-by-one). 59 Apparently after the abandonment of objective pictorial representation, visual art too can become anything you want it to be.
In view of the simultaneous turn by both Russolo and Duchamp to a "foreign" artistic enterprise, the former's closing words in "The Art of Noises" take on particular interest:
I am not a musician, I have therefore no acoustic predilections, nor any works to defend. I am a Futurist painter using a much loved art to project my determination to renew everything. And so, bolder than a professional musician could be, unconcerned by my apparent incompetence and convinced that all rights and all possibilities open up to daring, I have been able to initiate the great renewal of music through the Art of Noises. 60