This video documents Music For 16 Futurist Noise Intoners – an evening-length concert of original scores and newly commissioned compositions for the intonarumori, or ‘noise-intoners’ of 20th century Italian futurist Luigi Russolo.
As part of its celebration of the 100th anniversary of Italian Futurism, the Performa 09 biennial, in collaboration with the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) and SFMOMA, invited Luciano Chessa to direct a reconstruction project to produce accurate replicas the legendary instruments (8 noise families of 1-3 instruments each, in various registers) that Russolo built in Milan in the summer of 1913.
As the first instruments capable of creating and manipulating noises through entirely mechanical processes, the intonarumori could be considered to be ancestors to the electronic synthesizers used today.
