{"pk":40481,"title":"Futurism in Venice, Crisis and “la musica dell’avvenire,” 1924*","subtitle":null,"abstract":"In January 1924 the latest incarnation of Futurist music theatre, Il Nuovo Teatro Futurista, began a twenty-eight city tour of the peninsula. The Venice stopover, at the Teatro Goldoni on January 25, prompted a flurry of media activity. Press reports, manifestos, and one-off periodicals advertized and then discussed the performance. Central to this Futurist-controlled discourse was the notion of \nla musica dell’avvenire\n, one that built on recent technological developments to provide a way out of a perceived crisis of musical language. The Futurists positioned themselves as inhabiting a moment of transition: soothsayers of a musical future that no one else could imagine. In this article I argue that these three aspects—Futurism as a media enterprise, \nla musica dell’avvenire,\n and cultural crisis—share a common impulse, as offshoots of contemporary concerns with media and technology, culture and posterity, and language and crisis, all of which had a pervasive import in postwar Italian culture. I suggest that the Futurists sought to control media networks, so as to take charge amid a culture of crisis. Yet in the process, their rhetoric of extremes saw a disavowal of all they were most reliant on—something that in the end proved their undoing. In particular, their futurology was contradicted by a reliance on older media, genres, and sounds, which revealed them to be an embodiment of the crisis from which they were trying to detach themselves. I seek to excavate the aesthetic and historical stakes that contributed to this deep-seated contradiction, and to illustrate the predicament at the heart of postwar 1920s Italian culture: of forging a path to the future amid the ever-present ruins of the past.","language":"en","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Music Theatre, Futurism, Venice, Crisis"},{"word":"music"},{"word":"cultural history"}],"section":"Futurist Sound","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3xt580tr","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Harriet","middle_name":"","last_name":"Boyd","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Oxford","department":"None"}],"date_submitted":"2013-05-29T07:43:35Z","date_accepted":"2013-05-29T07:43:35Z","date_published":"2014-03-03T05:05:41Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cisj/article/40481/galley/30425/download/"}]}