Deindustrialisation and Popular Music. Giacomo Bottà
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Russolo programmatically referred to the establishment of an art of noises as a revolution in music, something
paralleled by the increasing proliferation of machinery sharing in human labour. . . . [M]achines create today such a large number of varied noises that pure sound, with its littleness and its monotony, now fails to arouse any emotion. (Russolo 1967, 5)
This is actually the only direct reference to the industry in the text; in fact, the author preferred to describe natural, urban, or warfare noises as the main inspiration for his manifesto and for the new music. However, it shows some interesting ideas, first, in putting machinery and music in parallel evolution and not in causal relation and, second, in noting the wide variety of noises machines are able to produce. These industrial ideas were, however, overshadowed by the attempt to systematise noises. The overarching aim for new music was to ‘score and regulate harmonically and rhythmically these most varied noises’ (Russolo 1967, 9) and not just to imitate them. Russolo suggested the adoption of noise in the realm of art music, its categorisation within six typologies, and its harmonic and rhythmic subordination and regulation via pitch changing.
Futurism as an art movement was interested in the celebration of power, technology, and speed over more traditional and consolidated art forms and lifestyles. It also had an initial link, thanks to its founder, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, to Benito Mussolini and to the establishment of the Fascist Party in post–World War I Italy.
The real adoption and celebration of industrial noises in art music production happened in the context of Soviet avant-garde in the years following the October Revolution. Soviet and Eastern European film-makers, painters, writers, and musicians celebrated the industry as the supreme space for the emancipation of workers and for the realisation of socialism. For instance, Arseny Avraamov wrote and performed the Symphony of Factory Sirens (Industrial Horns?) (Simfoniya gudkov, Гудковая симфония) in Baku on November 7, 1922, as a celebration of the fifth anniversary of the October Revolution. This symphony used the whole urban sonic landscape of Baku, including its military fleet, a variety of urban noises, and the sounds from the local factories, together with choirs and shouts, as orchestra; Avraamov conducted the whole from a tower, thanks to the use of flags and following an orchestral script he redacted. A second performance followed a year later, in Moscow.
Alexander Mosolov, another Soviet musician, went even further when he composed The Iron Foundry (also known as Factory: Machine Music), the first movement of a lost ballet suite entitled Stal (steel) in 1926–1927. The composition is based on orchestral sounds layering in repetitive loops and building up to simulate the noise of industrial machinery getting into action. A music critic refers to a live performance at the Liège Festival 1930 in these terms:
We have the benumbing mesmerism of uniformly repeated mechanical sounds, combined with a kind of lyrical theme, the song of steel, or possibly of man, the ironmaster. (Evans 1930)
In a recording by the Orchestre Symphonique de Paris conducted by Julius Ehrlich from the early 1930s (Orchestre Symphonique de Paris 2013), the piece is indeed dominated by the repetition of hammering metallic noises, which are produced by sheets of steel along conventional orchestral percussions. The avant-garde approached industrial noise by simulating industrial work and heavy machinery with conventional orchestral instruments, with the adoption of found sounds, and with the use of industrial hardware as instruments. Another stylistic element, whose influence can be linked to industrial work, is Motorik. This term, which will resurface in popular music criticism in connection to Krautrock, initially described the use of ostinato rhythms, for instance, in the work of composers such as Ernst Krenek and Paul Hindemith, although its origin is explained in ambivalent ways. Some critics saw it as a musical strategy already present in the work of Beethoven (Rexroth 2005, 98) and Rossini (Keitel and Neuner 1992, 305). However, some others connected the repetitive rhythm to the glorification of the modern industrial era and to the increasing role that technology played in inspiring art and classical music (Braun 1999, 168). Interestingly, some authors referred to the influence of jazz, where Motorik described the continuous excited swing drive, typical of early manifestations of this genre (Mauser 2007, 12; Laf 1954). This second connection is interesting because it demystifies the art music origin of this musical expression and links it to African American culture, possibly turning it into an expression of cultural exploitation.
As a continuous 4/4 drum pattern without breaks, Motorik resurfaced in popular music. For instance, Klaus Dinger adopted this drumming style in bands such as Kraftwerk, Neu! and La Düsseldorf and Jaki Liebezeit in nearby Cologne-based Can. For some fans, Motorik has become ‘the sound of Düsseldorf’ (for an overview of this, see Esch 2014 and Stubbs 2014a). It is a rhythm that a listener can sonically associate to motorways, railways, and waterways, which dominate the landscape of this dense and polycentric region at the core of the so-called blue banana. Dinger himself referred to this rhythm as lange gerade, long and straight, or as Apache beat, in reference to the repetitive percussion sounds of ‘Indians’ in Western movies (Dee 1998). British musician and producer Brian Eno calls it Dingerbeat and Neu!beat and considers it one of the three defining drum beats of the 1970s (Stubbs 2014b).
The shift of the term from the realm of classical to the one of popular music, however, lost this semiotic association. Popular music artists ranging from Stereolab to David Bowie, from Arcade Fire to Teksti-TV 666, have used Motorik as a referent to a specific 1970s European continental ‘Kraut’ feel and atmosphere only, denying once more the role that black music played in popular music history.
Often composers of the early twentieth century took inspiration and celebrated industrial and mechanical soundscapes, as already mentioned, through repetition, and this began to influence the understanding of cultural production in general. For instance, Walter Benjamin examined mechanical reproduction as an ambivalent force, which was able to democratise the fruition of art but at the same time deprived it of the ‘aura’ of uniqueness and authenticity (Benjamin 1963). Krakauer (1996) criticised dancing revue performances as ornament of the masses, where sexless bodies in mass perform the same mechanical moves to please masses of spectators, themselves put in order in tiers. The German thinker understood ornament as having no meaning outside itself and compared it to industrial production, where the aim of production is in production itself and in the generation of profit. However, he also stated that
the masses organized in these movements come from offices and factories: the formal principle according to which they are molded determines them in reality as well. When significant components of reality become invisible in our world, art must make do with what is left, for an aesthetic presentation is all the more real the less it dispenses with the reality outside the aesthetic sphere. No matter how low one gauges the value of the mass ornament, its degree of reality is still higher than that of artistic productions which cultivate outdated noble sentiments. (Krakauer 1996, 79)
The German author was, therefore, aware of the idiosyncratic function of repetition in contemporary cultural expressions. Even if not referring specifically to sounds, he was able to assign a specific function to it and recognise its ability to make the hidden machinery, which enables our understanding of reality, visible. However, experimenting with the industrial soundscape disappeared quickly from the horizon of art music in the Soviet Union, thanks to the arrival into power of Stalin who preferred more conventional musical expressions bound to socialist realism (Makanowitsky 1965), and elsewhere because art music and its world belong to capital cities and cultural centres (not to industrial towns) and its aesthetics moved quickly towards pre-industrial and ecological themes, a more globalised and technological urbanity, and the influence of music of non-European origin, jazz in particular.
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