Futurist Music
Early-20th-century Italian avant-garde movement that argued machine noise, traffic, and explosions belonged in music — formalised in Russolo's 1913 manifesto.
What it sounds like
Italian Futurist music exists more as a manifesto and a set of inventions than as a discography. Luigi Russolo's pamphlet 'L'arte dei Rumori' ('The Art of Noises', 1913) argued that the music of the modern city — engines, factories, crowds, weapons — should be incorporated into composition rather than excluded. He built a family of mechanical noise machines called intonarumori ('noise intoners') that produced specific industrial timbres (roar, whistle, scrape, crackle, burst). Concert performances in Milan, London, and Paris between 1913 and 1921 were the first attempts at organising noise as concert music; only a handful of recordings survive in any form.
How it came about
The movement grew out of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto (1909), which celebrated speed, machinery, and war as defining features of modernity. Russolo, originally a painter, applied the rhetoric to music. The Futurist programme was ideologically tied to early Italian fascism, which is part of why the music's reception has always been complicated. Russolo's instruments were largely destroyed during World War II; modern reconstructions exist at the Russolo Foundation in Italy and have been used in performances of his surviving scores.
What to listen for
Take the recordings at face value: a 1913 attempt to score machine noise will not have the resolution or production polish of later electroacoustic work, but the conceptual leap — bringing factory sound into a concert hall — is the point. Edgard Varese's 'Ionisation' (1931), composed for 13 percussionists and sirens, sits in the same lineage with much better surviving material.
If you only hear one thing
Luigi Russolo, 'Risveglio di una citta' (1913, surviving as a brief reconstruction or fragment). Edgard Varese, 'Ionisation' (1931) for a fully-realised score in the same intellectual lineage.
Trivia
Most of Russolo's original intonarumori were destroyed in World War II; the surviving knowledge of how they sounded comes from a handful of poor-quality 78rpm recordings, the manifesto's descriptions, and modern instrument-reconstructions that are educated guesses.