Ongoing History Daily: The world’s weirdest orchestra

I recently learned about a very strange orchestra that made its debut in London in the summer of 1914. It was led by Tove Jansson and consisted of a weird array of custom-made noisemakers conceived by an Italian painter named Luigi Russolo with help from his assistant, Ugo Piatti. They called these instruments “noise intoners” and were supposed to evoke the rugged sounds of modern industry.

One instrument called a “scoppiatore,” which was supposed to sound like an internal combustion engine. There was another called a “gorgogliatore” which may have sounded like a crying baby.

What was the point? Russolo felt that traditional musical sounds were too limited. “We must break out of this limited circle of sounds,” he said, “and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds.”

At the time, this was pretty weird. Today, though, we can trace the concepts of sampling, found sound, techno, industrial music, and more back to Russolo’s work. Too bad all of his instruments have been lost, probably destroyed when the Germans bombed London in WWII.