Images of thought, images of music

Book section : Chapter

A few years ago I was asked by the Belgian-Dutch magazine Gonzo (circus) to write a new music manifesto to mark the centenary of Luigi Russolo’s essay The Art of Noises, typically regarded as the futurist musical manifesto, and along with the aims of that genre of writing I adopted the bombastic tone of manifestos, hopefully with a tongue recognizable in my cheek and a twinkle in my eye. It began, “We demand the future of music, and a musical future. This is to say we demand new and greater thought, communication, and representation in relation to sound, in relation to each other” (Harper 2013). Demands, futures, greatness. “We.” A little while later I read it out at an event in Philadelphia also marking that centenary, where it was followed by a reading of The Art of Noises by a performance artist in character and dress as the early-twentieth-century futurist, complete with false beard. The resurrected Russolo roared his dreams and frustrations with high camp, bringing out all the absurdity and disquieting violence of his era’s aesthetics to much audience laughter. With the shades of Charlie Chaplin’s character in The Great Dictator recalling the association of futurism with fascism, this was not just the text of a manifesto but the image of one, and it was something distanced, historicized, and palpably ironic....

Authors: Harper, A

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Host title: Sonic Thinking: A Media Philosophical Approach
• Pages: 269-280
• Chapter number: 14
• Series: Thinking Media
• Place of publication: New York
• Publication date: 2017-02-23
• Edition: 1
• EISBN: 9781501327186
• ISBN-10: 1501327208
• ISBN-13: 9781501327209
• Language: English
• Subtype: Chapter