100th Anniversary Art of Noises manifesto

Today is an auspicious day! One hundred years ago today, futurist artist and musician Luigi Russolo published the Art of Noises manifesto as a letter to fellow composer Francesco Balilla Pratella. It is a document that has resonated down the last century and still has revolutionary potential today.

“We must replace the limited variety of timbres of orchestral instruments by the infinite variety of timbres of noises”. (Russolo  March 11th 1913)

In this one sentence we can see not only a call for a radical re-imagining of musical practice, but the beginnings of field recording as a compositional art form and the genesis of an idea that would eventually lead to acoustic ecology. The “infinite variety of timbres of noises” referred to not only includes human noise making, but that of the biological and geological worlds in which the human is present.

And so, Happy Birthday “Art of Noises”  – watch out for more posts today detailing the various events and happenings that are happening around Europe to mark the occasion.