In defence of noise music

It’s curious to consider what a venerable old thing noise music is. That this most singularly untameable of musics – the place where melody, harmony and pulse all go to die – is an Edwardian invention. It first arrived in this country 110 years ago when futurists Filippo Marinetti and Luigi Russolo set up camp at the London Coliseum a month before the start of the first world war and, over ten consecutive nights, blasted the West End audience with their ‘noise-tuners’ or intonarumori, alongside diverse variety acts.

I say blasted but making a decent racket was the one thing these homemade instruments were incapable of doing. ‘It could have been drowned easily by a good tympanist,’ noted the Musical Times. The artist C.R.W. Nevinson – and Marinetti’s occasional co-conspirator – said ‘it was one of the funniest shows ever put on in London’. For all the efforts of Russolo’s ten squat, multicoloured boxes, with their massive cones jutting out of the front and drum skins, metal wires and motors inside, the sound was feeble.

Marinetti had primed the public for outrage. A few years earlier, he delivered a lecture – in French – in which he denounced ‘the worm-eaten traditions’ of England to a rapt, and packed, Wigmore Hall. The newspapers could not get enough of his insults: the Times felt it necessary to address futurism in a leader and Marinetti even got his byline in the Daily Mail. By the time Russolo’s ‘howlers’, ‘gurglers’, ‘hissers’ and ‘rustlers’ had arrived, avant-garde fatigue had perhaps set in. ‘Take the baby ’ome, can’t yer?’ heckled someone at the opening night. Sensing the public were about to start chucking stuff at the stage, the venue manager cut the performance short.