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Show 11 itself."11 During the 1910's, Futurists were producing one-act plays that contained nonsense speech. Giacomo Balla wrote "Macchina Tipografica" (1914) where the voice imitates the sounds of a printing press using phonetic and syllabic fragments while the performers physically imitate the operation of the printer's gears and levers.I2 Developing alongside these vocal innovations were sound experiments involving machines. Luigi Russolo invented instruments such as the "Intonarumori," which created hisses, pops, grunts and other mechanical noises. The use of machines alongside the extended voice is a trend that returns with the invention of electronic music. The effects the Futurists would have on music would not be seen immediately as the growth of their radical movement was hindered by political and economic unrest in Western Europe after World War L Not until a few decades had passed, when composers such as John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen started working in the electronic medium, would the Futurists' ideas be further realized. 13 Another movement related to the development of extended vocal techniques was the Dadaist movement. During the First World War, artists gathered in Switzerland to develop ideas not welcome in their own countries. Proponents of Dada include Hugo Ball and Kurt Schwitters, who experimented with breaking down language into phonetic and syllabic pieces. Ball's poetry does not rely on semantics, rather his poems are carefully structured using repetition and other sonorous characteristics to make it memorable and artistically meaningful. Tristan Tzara wrote poems that were performed by many speakers at the same time using different texts, perhaps in different languages. 11 Anhalt, 10. David Ernst, The Evolution of Electronic Music (New York and London: Schirmer Books, 1977), xxvii. 13 Ernst, xxiii. 12 |
