Ruidos y susurros de las vanguardias - Medialab Prado

arrived to us fragmentarily. One example is the music of the futurist movement,
whose scores and sound documents that have survived do not reflect the radical
nature of its texts and manifestos. This does not explain that they did not know
how to apply it; for example with Luigi Russolo's Intonarumori, an experimental
instrument created by himself and Ugo Piatti, whose functioning had to be
explained in the book The Art of Noise (key work to understand Sound Art), was
used in several concerts, but did not survive World War II. The only 78 rpm
recording is commercial and the intonarumori was left as an anecdotal
background of a conventional orchestra. It was necessary, on the occasion of an
exhibition about L. Russolo in 1977 (organized by G.F. Maffina), to take the
initiative to reconstruct his intonarumori, which was finally carried out by M. Abate
and P. Verardo for the ASAC Biennale di Venezia. This allowed to interpret the
only existing score by L. Russolo (fragment of Awakening of a City - Risveglio di
una città -, published in Lacerba in 1914). This reconstruction and performance
(though limited) has served - in turn- to confirm the influence and rupture of futurist
proposals. This can also be applied to Marinetti's pieces for the Radio, his Five
Radio Syntheses of 1933 have been reinterpreted later on, and is a precursor in
the use of silence and sound collage.
But not everything has been historical reconstruction, there have been other
initiatives that have attempted to update these proposals with the contemporary
view, to take them out of their museum display cases and give them new
meanings. This avant-garde revisiting has taken place especially when there is a
historical recording of the author and the objective is not to interpret what was
interpreted, but to provide a new validity with our time. An example of this is the
Ursonate (1922-32) by Kurt Schwitters. This key piece in phonetic and Dadaist
poetry was recorded by the author in the 1930's, and the objective was not to
repeat it, to do again what had been done, it is a piece in process, in continuous
evolution as his own work was, changing throughout a ten-year period (like his
merzbau). The participant artists in the SchwittCD are the results of the 12-hour
long event entitled "MERZmuseum", made in September 1999, as a contribution
to the project "Art Barns", and with the collaboration of the Kunstradio of Austria.
The accomplishments were broadcasted by different media, from a private
Webcam, by telephone or via snail mail, creating as a whole a merz online (or
Merzmuseum) that reflected the simultaneity of different media, as Schwitters
worked in the past. His work was reinterpreted with the greatest freedom by
updating his work with new points of view, from nonsense to the cyberspace.
Another example in this line is Walter Ruttmann's work Weekend (1930), a
pioneering piece of the beginning of the sound cinema, where the author used
optical sound film - just begun to be used in filmmaking- to make a "film for your
ears", since there were no images but the film-like assembly of recorded sounds
he heard in a weekend, the work was conceived to be radio broadcasted. With this
piece, Ruttmann transfers to sound his research on the pure cinema (music for
the eyes), resulting in an antecedent of concrete music, the sound landscape and
also of the combination of different sound sources. This led different DJ's to pay a
tribute with new Weekend remixed - based on Ruttmann's work.
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With all these referents, which range from reconstruction to recreation of the
avant-garde movements, our research group has initiated this project with the
purpose of recovering other artistic-sound works that we believe essential and
pioneering of what we called today Sound Art, and that are as well, the
antecedents of an Intermedia Art, aimed at new means of expression, arisen in
the own interrelation between the different disciplines.
Different criteria have been used in the selection of the works; in the first place that
these sound pieces were lost or destroyed and that they had not been
reconstructed previously, if they ever existed, so that we could offer another
interpretation. Secondly, that the works to reconstruct contained new aspects in
their contribution to Sound Art and which somehow they were antecedent of
present movements: sound landscape, radio art, disc manipulation, public
activism, phonetic poetry, sculpture and sound installation, etc. We also believed
appropriate to include in a CD some unpublished sound documents made by the
avant-garde authors themselves, with the purpose of presenting with more detail
these original contributions. Likewise, we have introduced other reconstructions
of the vanguard not carried out by us (like the futurist opera Victory over the Sun),
given the interest of the work resulting from a collaborative work of poet, musician
and plastic artist. Indeed, this collective connection has extended in our project as
we have had the collaboration of people and organizations external to the group,
which has enriched and improved it. Without them it would have not been the
same.
With the avant-garde movements we have tried to recover some -isms not very
well known and give them their voice (specially in the Spanish and Latin-
American context), since we think that they have been silenced in many
anthologies for example of sound poetry and we were indebted with them.
Our research work has ranged from the search of the original sources - as
archaeologists- so as to approach from these fragments (drawings, texts,
photographs, testimonies) the imagination of their reconstruction, with the
difficulties of a present context which is not the same, and with means that can
hardly be the same. This process - between ideological and technical - has
involved a trip of reflection and rethinking, of discovering and feeling in our hands
and ears the influence of the passion to take part and open its sounds, as if they
suddenly came back to life.
Between the reconstruction and the recreation or from the version to the
perversion, we have taken special care to respect the authors; perhaps we have
reinvented them without intention, with our interested view. Our approach
intended to give them back their voice, and continue the debate, because where
there is noise there is life - said Russolo- and the whisper teaches us to know how
to listen to what remains unnoticed.
Miguel Molina Alarcón
Futurism (1909-1944)
For many authors, the futurist movement clearly initiates the concept of artistic
Avant-garde, understood as a direct intervention in society to transform and