California Italian Studies

This paper analyzes the reception and discussion of the new futurist music in the Florentine journal Lacerba, generally considered one of the most important avant-garde Italian literary journals in the early twentieth century. As is well known, materials published in journals help us understand the climate and the spirit of a period in its making. However, such sources must be carefully contextualized by taking into account both the authors biographical backgrounds and the historical and social milieu of the journal. This article discusses and contextualizes the thirty musical contributions that appeared in Lacerba as well as other articles that were published in the same period in the journals La Voce and Il Marzocco, which were involved in an ongoing controversy with Lacerba. Between 1913 and 1915, figures such as Marinetti, musicians Francesco Balilla Pratella and Francesco Cangiullo, painter-inventor Luigi Russolo, music critics Giannotto Bastianelli and Fausto Torrefranca, all actively participated in the raging controversy on Futurist sound and its highly innovative character. Each of the above, as a creator and/or observer, contributed to the reflection on the quality of sound, whose fruits – though mainly theoretical - broke new ground for the development music in the twentieth century.