In 1909, Filippo Tomasso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto was published on the front page of Le Figaro in Paris. The mind reels to imagine any artistic manifesto being published on the front page of any daily periodical today. In their last remaining years, print publications might consider it, though. Marinetti’s manifesto certainly made for provocative copy:
- Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man.
- …
- We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.
- We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.
Interesting that “scorn for women” and the imperative to “fight feminism” is just as urgent as destroying the museums. Seems to be a common trope. But there is no need to dwell on Marinetti, the nascent fascist, or his screed. What does remain relevant is the lineage from Marinetti to Francesco Balilla Pratella (1880-1955), who wrote his own manifesto (Futurista Musica), to Luigi Russolo (1885-1947), who wrote his own manifesto (l’Arte dei Rumori), to Pierre Schaeffer and the birth of musique concrète.
Musique concrète moved far beyond these forebears. An engineer at heart, Schaeffer was interested in analyzing, organizing, and combining sound objects (objets sonores). He wanted to reverse the traditional operation of music composition: rather than produce a score (representation) that would describe a realization, resulting in sound, musique concrète would begin with the concrete sound objects themselves, to be organized according to their perceptual properties, thereby giving rise to an abstract description of form.
