The second section will turn to ‘avant-garde sound’ to address a fascination with and dependence on emergent technologies of sound production from the late nineteenth century through to the mid-twentieth. It will look first at the theatrical experiments of the Italian Futurists and the fervour with which they met the modern city and all of the sounds it generated. Because of their excitement in and fascination for the new possibilities of making and hearing sound, the Futurists often not only undertook the elucidation of new theoretical perspectives but also revelled in the making of sound-saturated performances.
‘Avant-garde sound’ is also concerned with the new machinery of sound – developments in communication engineering – and how these inventions changed both sound production and what Mark Grimshaw has called ‘the dynamic relationship between sound and memory, experience, imagination, affect, and cross-modality’. We will look, too, at how these inventions found their way into theories of performance, as well as emerged as contributors to stage practice. A case study about Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo’s orchestra of intonamuri will examine how noise and silence entered a sonic performance vocabulary, a topic that will be further developed in a discussion of John Cage’s imagination of the ‘future of music’. Two further case studies, of Jean Cocteau’s The Human Voice and Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, will consider the impacts, on-stage and in the audience, of specific technological developments: the telephone and the tape recorder.
Reference:
Grimshaw, Mark (2017). ‘The Privatisation of Sound Space’, in Marcel Cobussen, Vincent Meelberg and Barry Truax (eds), The Routledge Companion to Sounding Art, 467–84, New York: Routledge.
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