Expansion of Musical Material – Futurism and Beyond

Let's start with expansion of musical material. Let's go back to the beginning of 20th century and try to imagine what music meant back then. For example, this piece by Richard Strauss is composed in 1915, and the video below is a recent performance of that Symphony by Oslo Philharmonic (2020), which was performed in 2019.

In the beginning of 20th century we had a quite concrete understanding of what music is and what kind of sounds were musical. We had an understanding of what kind of musical instruments that we could use to make musical sounds. Of course, some composers were disagreeing with that, such as Luigi Russolo. Around the same time in 1913, Luigi Russolo released his futurist manifesto (1913). The beginning of the 20th century is an interesting time to do that, because at that time, our cities are quite different than today. The cities are loud were loud with industrial noises. We have been in the industrial revolution for quite a while at that time. We could imagine that the soundscape of our daily lives in the beginning of 20th century, were quite noisy. As Luigi Russolo mentions in the Art of Noise (1913):

Luigi Russolo suggests further that:

The video below (BBC Radio 3, 2009) is an example from Luigi Russolo's futurist intonarumori. These are devices that are made to make a variety of noises, performed in a musical way. We could call them noise instruments, and those instruments have been proposed in the beginning of 20th century as a way of expanding our sound palette for musical practices.

This was the expansion of our musical material.