Musical Futurism

Text: Helmut Mauró, April 2025
Translation: Clive Williams

Rarely in the history of art have things been as turbulent as in the first half of the 20th century, when one style, one art revolution followed hard on the heels of another, and individualism contrasted with socialist views. In music, German Romanticism, the French Impressionists, the Expressionists, the representatives of a new functionalism, the twelve-tone composers, the Futurists – all of them bombarded the public, often simultaneouly, and many of these directions proved to be less significant in retrospect. Who knows a work or at least the name of a Russian Futurist today?

Programme highlights to close the season: in this edition of the five-week festival, the great Hamburg orchestras and star guests explore the theme of »Future«. The music of Futurism will be featured in a piano recital by pianist Lukas Geniušas on 28 May 2025.

For example, there was Alexei Vladimirovich Stanchinsky (1888-1914), who wrote his first piano pieces at the age of 19, spent a year in a mental hospital soon afterwards and then went on to compose his most important works: piano sonatas, sketches, preludes in canon form. His search for new forms of expression beyond existing boundaries is what unites him with the Futurists. The innovations could embody a return to old tonal systems or techniques such as church modes or counterpoint, but the music had to sound different.

Alexander Scriabin sounded very different at the time. His atonal composition technique may seem almost conventional today, but for Stanchinsky, 17 years Scriabin’s senior, his music stood for courage, freedom and a new beginning – a window into an un-dreamt of future.

Something else Stanchinsky had in common with the Futurists was his penchant for poetry, his literary work. His fondness for catchy, even folksy sounds, on the other hand, clearly set him apart from the revolutionaries. He was a musician and not an abstract musical thinker, so he always tried to do both: to combine the musically comprehensible with a new mode of expression. We don’t know whether he would have evolved towards more abstract musical forms: he died in 1914, aged only 26, after crossing a river in autumn.

Arthur Vincent Lourié (1891-1966) was quite different. Born in St Petersburg as Naum Israilevich Lurya, he was so taken by the workof Arthur Schopenhauer and Vincent van Gogh that he fraternised with them by changing his name. Lourié is regarded as the first and most important representative of Russian Futurism, and he too is largely forgotten today.

At the conservatory in his home town, he was one of the great young hopefuls at the piano alongside Sergei Prokofiev, who was the same age. But he clashed with the professor of composition Alexander Glazunov, left the institute without passing his exams and threw in his lot with the Futurists. Compromise was alien to him, with the result he later fell out with them as well as with his colleague Igor Stravinsky, whom he once been friends with.

The term Futurism is familiar in the visual arts, but rarely heard in music. There are books on the music of the early 20th century, several hundred pages long, that don’t use this term even once. What was called Futurism in the period before the First World War, with hopeful anticipation at the time and astonished retrospection today, turns out on closer inspection to be less an era in the history of art and culture than a term for different attempts to understand and celebrate a newly designed, technologically advanced world.

Futurism is the passionate embrace of modernity, an emotionally inflamed belief in progress that turned into its opposite a hundred years later: scepticism towards technology, longing for nature and fear of the future. Of course, all this existed before the First World War as well, and even more so after the war, when the economy and social structures began to collapse. It marks the birth of the «good old days«, which of course never really existed, or only for the chosen few – but were an emotional phenomenon nonetheless. In his melancholy opera »Der Rosenkavalier«, premiered at Dresden’s Semperoper in January 1911, the composer Richard Strauss evocatively depicted the demise of this golden era.

Two months later, Italian composer Francesco Balilla Pratella published the »Manifesto tecnico della Musica futurista« with its demand that future music should echo the »anima musicale«, the musical soul of the masses, factories, railways, ocean liners, tanks, automobiles and aeroplanes.

Two years earlier, on 20 February 1909, the Italian lawyer and poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti had already published an appeal entitled »Le Futurisme« in the Parisian daily paper Le Figaro which caused a sensation. It is a brilliant pamphlet, written with verve and anger, in carefree youthful euphoria, and with a grand revolutionary gesture. And yet the writing is remarkably poetic. »We want to sing about the love of danger, about familiarity with energy and audacity« is the first demand. »We declare that the splendour of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose bodywork is adorned with large pipes that resemble snakes with explosive breath.«

But this text also contains mindsets that anticipate later political developments, above all hostility towards intellectuals and contempt for academics and cultural institutions: »From Italy we hurl our manifesto into the world, full of rousing and igniting fervour, with which we are founding Futurism today: our aim is to free this country from the cancer of professors, archaeologists, tour guides and antiquarians.« Museums are cemeteries, public dormitories, slaughterhouses for painters and sculptors. The joy of technology is joined by the desire for violence: »We praise the aggressive movement, the feverish sleeplessness, the running step, the salto mortale, the clip on the ear and the punch in the face« Life should be a battle, war should be heroic, music realistically brutal. »Bruitism« is thus the name of the Futuristic sound, in Italian »rumorismo«.

Musikalisch Bedeutsames bleibt von den italienischen Futuristen wenig, auch wenn der Komponist Francesco Balilla Pratella eine Systematik mit Vierteltonreihen entwickelt, der Maler und Musiker Luigi Russolo eine musikalische Systematik der Geräusche versucht und mit eigens dafür konstruierten Instrumenten aufwartet. Zu seinen Darbietungen in Mailand und Paris erscheinen immerhin Igor Strawinsky, Sergei Djagilew, Darius Milhaud und Maurice Ravel. Nachhaltige Ergebnisse im Sinne des musikalischen Futurismus finden sich am ehesten bei Edgar Varèse, in dessen »Hyperprism« von 1923 oder der »Ionisation« von 1931. Das Ende des Futurismus in Italien ist mit dem Eintritt des Landes in den Zweiten Weltkrieg 1940 gegeben und mit dem Tod Marinettis 1944. Der hatte sich inzwischen ganz dem italienischen Faschismus verschrieben.

The programme overlaps between Futurism and fascism are obvious, and they also apply to another form of totalitarianism: socialism, as bloodily fought for in the Russian October Revolution under Lenin’s leadership. The Russian Futurists were involved right from the start: they considered Marinetti too bourgeois, and a lecture tour of his to Moscow ended with verbal attacks and abuse. The most prominent contemporary poet of the time, Vladimir Mayakovsky, wrote in his »Marching Poems«: »To recognise or not to recognise? This question did not exist for me or for other Moscow Futurists. That was our revolution!«

The first better-known work of Russian Futurism is the opera »Victory over the Sun«, performed in December 1913, a joint work by the poets Alexei Kruchonych and Velimir Khlebnikov, painter-musician Mikhail Matyushin and the painter Kazimir Malevich. The work was a by-product of the first Futurist pan-Russian congress »Singers of the Future’, held in 1913 in Uusikirkko, now Polyany. In terms of content, the opera follows the programme of the congress manifesto, according to which the destruction of the old is a prerequisite for everything new. Strangely enough, the old is symbolised here by the sun, which usually stands for the dawn of the new.

The proclamation of the Russian Futurist Congress comes close in tone to Marinetti’s manifesto. »We herewith proclaim the rights of singers and artists by tearing the ears of those who shiver with cold under the mud of cowardice and immobility. Destroy: the melodious Russian language, which has been castrated and erased by the languages of the gods of criticism and literature. Destroy: the traditional way of thinking. Destroy: the elegance, lightness and beauty of artists and writers who are nothing but cheap whores.«

The opera’s libretto was largely written by Alexei Kruchonych, who incorporated in it elements of the »Zaum« phonetic language he had developed. Malevich’s stage design provided Cubist and visionary forms, emphasised by large spotlights. Mikhail Matyushin’s music features the use of quarter-tones, as propagated by the Italian Futurists and, before them, by pianist and theorist Ferruccio Busoni, as well as the targeted use of noises such as the imitation of a rattling aeroplane propeller.

The later film director Dsiga Vertov also worked in the direction of bruitistic music in his »Laboratory of Hearing«, in which he recorded sounds with phonographs and combined them into «documentary compositions and musical-literary word montages«. In the Moscow Trade Union Palace, a sound orchestra with instruments made up of engines, turbines, sirens and horns performed with the Ingenieuristen, while theatre producers Vsevolod Meyerhold and Nikolai Foregger used machines, metal rods and broken glass in some of their performances.

The Russian Futurists also organised the big celebration on 1 May 1918; they were part of the cultural brigades and their propaganda activities in rural areas, and they took on official positions in state cultural bodies: Arthur Vincent Lourié, for instance, was appointed People’s Commissar for Music. Just two years later, the political winds changed: the revolutionary euphoria gave way to strict planning for the future, Futurism evaporated and experimentation had to be justified by content with a clear ideological purpose. Arseni Avraamov created a »Symphony of Sirens« as a work for the workforce – the new genre was called »production music« – for which he envisaged an entire neighbourhood as a venue. The instruments were machines, aircraft engines, ship sirens, lorries and machine guns. And then everyone, musicians and audience, joined in and sang »The Internationale« together.

There were still experimenters like Mikhail Matyushin, who studied the relationship between light, colour and sound at the State Institute of the Arts. In small private performances in his flat, he created productions from paintings, light effects and sounds – a playful researcher who was still tolerated. But political pressure was on the increase. Arthur Lourié did not return to the Soviet Union after an official trip to Berlin in 1922. By 1932 at the latest, the State only permitted one style of art: Socialist Realism. Everything else was considered to be formalism, intellectualism. The most prominent victim of the new cultural policy was the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who nonetheless tried to depict in his symphonies how an  artist suffered from the moral code imposed on him. Strangely, Sergei Prokofiev, who had left Russia in 1918, moved back to Moscow in 1932 in the midst of this political climate. In the end, he too was accused of formalism. What madness.

This article appeared in the Elbphilharmonie Magazine (Issue 2/25).