Futurism in Venice, Crisis and "la musica dell'avvenire", 1924

BOYD, HARRIET

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.

Citation

BOYD, H. (2014). Futurism in Venice, Crisis and "la musica dell'avvenire", 1924. California Italian Studies, 4(1),

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jan 13, 2014
• Online Publication Date: Mar 3, 2014
• Publication Date: Mar 3, 2014
• Deposit Date: Nov 5, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 7, 2020
• Journal: California Italian Studies
• Electronic ISSN: 2155-7926
• Publisher: University of California, Berkeley
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 4
• Issue: 1
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1431506
• Publisher URL: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3xt580tr#main
• Additional Information: The journal issue was published in March 2014, but there was backlog with the dating, meaning that it was listed as being a 2013 issue. I can provide further evidence from the journal editors if required.