Listening to Luigi Russollo (history of electronic music assignment)
Listening to Luigi Russolo’s Risveglio di una città (Awakening of a City) is a work by Russolo associated with his intonarumori, instruments designed around noise and mechanical-sounding textures. As an experimental music composer myself, I am naturally interested in music that treats noise, texture and repetition as things to use for composing, recording and performing. While listening to this piece, I found that my attention repeatedly shifted, between trying to identify what I was hearing and simply experiencing what the sounds were doing to me physically. The reading states that listening is an intentional process of creating meaning and identify nine modes, including kinaesthetic, causal, connotative, reduced, and critical listening. Of these, kinaesthetic listening most closely describes my experience of Russolo’s piece.
At the beginning, I hear rough, low mechanical rumbling with more abrasive buzzing and scraping textures. My first reaction is physical. Therefore Kinesthetic. The lower sounds seem heavy and grounded, while the harsher sounds seem to press or scrape against each other. I hear objects being pushed, motors and machinery struggling into motion. The papers description of kinaesthetic listening as an “imaginative sense of motor-movements” produced through sound perception. They explain that kinaesthetic perception can involve bodily sensations of tension. If I were to invent my own terminology here, I would describe this as physical-textural listening. I experience a sound that makes you imagine what it might take to imitate its shape.
As Russollo’s piece goes on, it continues the layers of noise become more ” active” with grinding, buzzing sounds pushing against one another and other noises drop in shorter bursts. There are some sounds that I hear rise and fall. This creates a sensation of acceleration and increasing activity. I find myself imagining the music spatially, one sound feels as though it is moving forward while another seems to circle, vibrate, or resist it. There are swelling changes in density, energy, texture, and perceived motion. The city seems to “wake up” because the sonic environment becomes increasingly active. This bodily way of understanding sound fits the article’s broader argument that perception is connected to sensorimotor experience and that sound can evoke imagined bodily action.
Having said this, I cannot remain entirely with kinaesthetic listening. I repeatedly shift into causal listening, asking myself what could be producing these noises. The reading describes causal listening as listening for the causes or source-events behind a sound. The rumbling suggests engines or large machinery to me and the buzzing suggests electrical or mechanical vibration or like something like a synthesizer or something in our modern age. I feel like that noise is definitely similar to the sound of synthesizers. Today that is what would create that sound. Sharper scraping sounds perhaps suggest friction between physical surfaces. Even when I know that these are intentionally produced musical sounds, my mind wanders. This is especially interesting because Russolo’s work deliberately makes the boundary between environmental noise and composed music blurry. The recording has been described as using the intonarumori to evoke the rhythms and sounds of an urban landscape coming to life.
I understand we are to pick one listening mode, however I also experience connotative listening, because these noises immediately bring up associations beyond their literal source. The reading explains that connotative listening involves associations, mental images, and feelings generated through previous experience, including impressions of movement, energy, size, material, and proximity. Russolo’s dense mechanical sounds suggest crowded streets, industrial spaces, traffic, construction, and the constant movement of a city. I do not necessarily hear a literal car or factory at every moment. Instead, the combination of textures creates a larger image of mechanical activity. The piece becomes like the physical sensation of being surrounded by an environment that is moving and making noise. I believe this would be a good soundtrack for Ezra Pounds “The Italian Years Writings” about machines and industry.
Then, I move into reduced listening. In this mode, the reading describes listening to the qualities and structural features of the sound itself rather than its everyday meaning. This may be the mode that connects most directly to how I think as an experimental composer. A mechanical rumble. A scrape can function as a gesture. A buzz can create tension. Repetition can create rhythm without a drumbeat. From this perspective, Russolo demonstrates that musical structure does not have to depend on conventional pitch or harmony. Texture, density, duration, register, and movement can organize an entire listening experience. Crtical listening makes me consider why I recognize these noises as music at all. Critical listening is defined as reflective judgment about sound and about the appropriateness of our own interpretations. My experience of Risveglio di una città moves constantly between bodily sensation, imagined sources, personal associations, attention to pure sound, and conscious evaluation. This supports one of the article’s most important ideas which is that listening modes do not have to be separate, and several can operate simultaneously on the same sound. In my opinion, the piece is most powerful when I stop trying to decide whether I am hearing “music” or “noise.” As a composer, I hear Russolo’s work as evidence that the physical elements of sound themselves can become composition. The piece does not only depict a city waking up; through kinaesthetic listening, it makes me feel its imagined movement, weight, friction, tension, and energy. I can very much so connect with this in my own personal experiences as I live on one of the busiest streets in Portland. My apartment looks out onto Hawthorne boulevard. And I am up many times late at night and I do literally hear the sound of the city waking up every morning when the sun comes up.
Picture is of Failure at revolution hall in Portland last night taken by me
#Abstractexpressionism #Electronicmusic #Experimentalmusic #Historyofelectronicmusic #LuigiRussolo #Noise #Creativity #knowledge #music