In defence of noise music

It’s curious to consider what a venerable old thing noise music is. That this most singularly untameable of musics – the place where melody, harmony and pulse all go to die – is an Edwardian invention. It first arrived in this country 110 years ago when futurists Filippo Marinetti and Luigi Russolo set up camp at the London Coliseum a month before the start of the first world war and, over ten consecutive nights, blasted the West End audience with their ‘noise-tuners’ or intonarumori, alongside diverse variety acts.

I say blasted but making a decent racket was the one thing these homemade instruments were incapable of doing. ‘It could have been drowned easily by a good tympanist,’ noted the Musical Times. The artist C.R.W. Nevinson – and Marinetti’s occasional co-conspirator – said ‘it was one of the funniest shows ever put on in London’. For all the efforts of Russolo’s ten squat, multicoloured boxes, with their massive cones jutting out of the front and drum skins, metal wires and motors inside, the sound was feeble.