UK Jazz News

Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners and Ensemble Klang

Wigmore Hall 17 January 2025

The stage set for The Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners. Photo by Geoff Winston (c) 2025 All Rights Reserved.

‘THE ART OF NOISE MUST NOT LIMIT ITSELF TO IMITATIVE REPRODUCTION’  declared the Futurist painter Luigi Russolo in 1913 in his radical manifesto, The Art of Noises, which challenged conventional ideas of musical composition, instrumentation and performance. Russolo sought to embrace the use of free-standing sounds in a process similar to an artist working with paint colours on a palette and, to this end, invented and fabricated mechanical sound-generating machines, intonarumori, or noise intoners.

To see and hear The Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners, led by its founder, Luciano Chessa, with its 16 intonarumori at the Wigmore Hall was quite an experience and a fitting finale to the London Contemporary Music Festival, complemented by the world premiere of a piece by Éliane Radigue in the second half. 

Luciano Chessa playing Peter Ablinger’s Noise Toner composition.’. Drawing by Geoff Winston (c) 2025 All Rights Reserved.

Ten years earlier, at Cafe Oto, we witnessed The Grand Futurist Concert of Noises with six intonarumori marking the ill-fated Futurist concert season at London’s Coliseum in 1914 which provoked public outrage. This concert is the first time so many have been assembled in London since 1914 – LINK BELOW.

The original intonarumori were fabricated between 1910 and 1913, with 27 models, each articulating a different sound encapsulated in the 6 families of sound-noise (suono-rumori) conceived by Russolo – Roarer / Burster, Whistler / Hisser, Gurgler, Croaker / Cracker, Rubber, and Hummer / Howler.

The ingeniously designed intonarumori take the form of parallelepipedal wooden boxes, each with a radiating horn attached to amplify sounds generated by operating one or two levers and a wind-up crank linked internally to a smooth or spoked wheel interacting with metal or gut strings and a drumskin. 

The intonarumori , Drawing by Geoff Winston (c) 2025 All rights reserved

The intonarumori are purely acoustic and unamplified yet laid the groundwork for the evolution of contemporary noise music, exemplified by Lou Reed’s milestone Metal Machine Music with its extremes of noise and feedback. The linear notations of Russolo’s revolutionary scores anticipated the use of graphic scores in improvised jazz and contemporary music.

Chessa’s reconstructed intonarumori are based on those fabricated in Milan in 1913 and arose from a commission for a concert in 2009 for the Performa Biennial in New York which included new works composed specially for the Orchestra, several of which were performed at this Wigmore Hall concert. With the 16 intonarumori spread all the way across the stage, the Orchestra comprised students from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama with Chessa at the conductor’s lectern.

The compositions, many of which were receiving UK premieres, ran the rich gamut of possibilities. Pauline Oliveros’ Waking the intonarumori grew from silence to accelerated activity, scraping, whistling, rhythmically clanking and grinding, climaxing with insistent mechanical beats. Paolo Buzzi’s parodic interpretation of D’Annunzio’s poem, La pioggia nel pineto, from 1916 had the massed sounds of gurglers, cracklers and howlers being steered as if a ship through heavy seas, eliciting smiles onstage. 

Then came a surprise. Jennifer Walshe walking from the back of the hall feverishly reciting the Irish language poems of the Irish ‘Guiness’ Dadaists, very much in the spirit of Marinetti’s Futurist sound poems and Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate. The delivery was absolutely captivating, with stunning vocal acrobatics. Walshe later returned to the stage with more riveting, impenetrable, machine gun vocals. Now, as only close followers of Walshe will know, the three poets employed at the Guiness factory turn out to be entirely fictional, part of Walshe’s Aisteach project, the fictional history of the musical and artistic avante-garde in Ireland, a prodigious, imaginative work which invites the defiance of belief! 

Chris Newman’sPeople had all the performers combining anthemic song with the full force of upbeat, swaying, mechanical sound-noise, while Margaret Kammerer, who delights in exploring song in experimental music contexts, used a megaphone, mirroring the cones on the machines, to project, distort and reconvene her vocalisations.

Composer Pablo Ortiz took a bow after his joyously dynamic Futurist Tango and Walshe with Neil Luck, performed dynamically in duet the lengthy Fancy Palaces (written by Walshe with Tony Conrad in 2009) with its ruminations on society’s responses to problems.

Teho Teardo’s Oh! brought out the overlapping sounds of the intonarumori in chaotic, celebratory style. Chessa went solo with a single noise toner and megaphone for specialist noise composer Peter Ablinger’s WEISS WEISSLICH 17s Intonarumori und Rauschen (White Whitish … and White Noise) written for the stroppiciato (rubbing / creasing) sound family. They then concluded with the only remaining fragment of Russolo’s Awakening of a City, with its eerie, elusive atmosphere, a great note on which to end. 

The second half was devoted to the intensely focused and meditative explorations by the trio from Ensemble Klang from the Netherlands – Joey Marijs (percussion), Anton van Houten (trombone) and Erik-Jan de With (baritone sax) – performing Éliane Radigue’s OCCAM DELTA XXIII, a three-way composing collaboration with musician Carol Robinson. The 92 years old composer has worked many times with Robinson and also with Ensemble Klang. Radigue’s scores are conveyed orally and this piece was based on the shared experience of looking out to the North Sea. The stage was set with a frame from which a large gong and two small metal sheets hung with a large cow bell hanging in the foreground. From initial passages of percussion the initiative was passed round the trio dwelling and expanding on extended notes to create an absorbing, dream-like soundscape. Robinson joined the musicians on stage to accept warm applause from the house.

The Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners was supported by Performa, Wigmore Hall and Thaddeus Ropac Gallery.

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