@article { , title = {Futurism in Venice, Crisis and "la musica dell'avvenire", 1924}, abstract = { In January 1924 the latest incarnation of Futurist music theatre, Il nuovo teatro futurista, began a twenty-eight city tour of the peninsula. The Venice stopover, at the Teatro Goldoni on January 25, prompted a flurry of media activity. Press reports, manifestos, and one-off periodicals advertised and then discussed the performance. Central to this Futurist-controlled discourse was the notion of la musica dell’avvenire, which built on recent technological developments to provide a way out of a perceived crisis of musical language. The Futurists positioned themselves as inhabiting a moment of transition: soothsayers of a musical future that no one else could imagine. In this article I argue that these three aspects—Futurism as a media enterprise, la musica dell’avvenire, and cultural crisis more generally—share a common impulse: as offshoots of contemporary concerns with media and technology, culture and posterity, and language and crisis, all of which had a pervasive impact on postwar Italian culture. I suggest that the Futurists sought to control media outlets in order to take charge amid a culture of crisis. Yet, in the process, their rhetoric of extremes saw a disavowal of all they were most reliant on—something that in the end proved their undoing. In particular, their futurology was contradicted by a reliance on older media, genres, and sounds, a circumstance that revealed them to be an embodiment of the crisis from which they were trying to detach themselves. I seek to excavate the aesthetic and historical issues that contributed to this deep-seated contradiction, and to illustrate the predicament at the heart of postwar 1920s Italian culture: of forging a path to the future amid the ever-present ruins of the past.}, eissn = {2155-7926}, issue = {1}, journal = {California Italian Studies}, publicationstatus = {Published}, publisher = {University of California, Berkeley}, url = {https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1431506}, volume = {4}, year = {2014}, author = {BOYD, HARRIET} }