Impacto en las zonas receptoras

'There has always been at each decisive period in this world's history some voice, some note, that represented for the time being the prevailing power. There was a time when the supreme cry of authority was the lion's roar. Then, came the voice of man. After that it was the crackle of fire ... And now, finally, there was heard in the streets of Detroit the murmur of this newest and most perfect of forces, the automobile, rushing along at the rate of 25 miles an hour. .. . It was not like any other sound ever heard in this world. It was not like the puft1 puft1 of the exhaust of gasoline in a river launch; neither is it the cry!

cry! of a working steam engine; but a long, quick, mellow gurgling sound, not harsh, not unmusical, not distressing; a note that falls with pleasure on the ear. It must be heard to be appreciated. And the sooner you hear its newest chuck! chuck! the sooner you will be in touch with civilisation's latest lisp, its newest voice ... '. 45 These words, which appeared in the News-Tribune of 04 February 1 900, suggest that reporters at least had awakened to the rhythms of modernity and that discord did not necessarily mean disapproval.

However, whilst journalists toyed with mere onomatopoeia, musicians were responding in a more concerted way to the pulse of modern technics. Classical rhythms were abandoned in favour of the meter of machines, the new impetus spawning a confidence which found startling expression. The years 1 908 and 1 909, then, were full of famous declarations and Carlyle's assertion of 1 829 seemed to be echoed in the text of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, in the manifestos of F. T. Marinetti, in the art of the Futurists and the Vorticists, in the music of Debussy and Stravinsky, and in the choreography of Vaslav Nijinsky and Serge Diaghilev. Indeed, Diaghilev' s Ballets russes of 1 909 to 1 9 1 3 were emblematic of a new attitude to technology and therefore merit a more extended examination than one might expect.

On 1 7 May, 1 909 Serge Diaghilev's first Russian Ballet opened in Paris at the Theatre du Chatelet. As Modris Eksteins notes, it caused a sensation. Opening night audiences went away dazed by the provocative displays of clashing colours, a startling new choreography, and the panache of a percussive score. However, reviews of the performances, though often favourable, displayed little understanding of the cultural phenomena influencing either the ballet or the music. Three years later, when the Ballets russes de Diaghilev arrived back in Paris, the city was still recovering from the momentous 1 909 season. Premiering was Debussy's L 'Apres-midi d'un faune, a ballet telling

the story of a Roman deity who falls in love with a young wood nymph. Attired in leotards at a time when skin-tight costumes were considered obscene, Vaslav Nijinsky provoked the audience into what Eksteins terms a 'collective salivation and swallowing' as he descended, hips

undulating, over the nymph' s scarf and quivered in simulated orgasm. (Eksteins: 2 7)

Gaston Calmette, editor of the influential Le Figaro, refused to publish the favourable review of Faune written by regular arts columnist Robert Brussel. Instead he penned a front page condemnation of the ballet: ' We are shown a lecherous faun, whose movements are filthy and bestial in their eroticism, and whose gestures are as crude as they are indecent.' (Le Figaro, May 3 1 , 1 9 1 2 in Eksteins: 27) In recounting his own impression of Faune, which he saw at its London premier on 1 7 February 1 9 1 3, Cyril Beaumont writes: 'The ballet created a sensation both for its novelty of presentation and for the questionable character of Nij insky's poses immediately preceding the fall of the curtain... I well remember the gasp that went up from the audience at Nijinsky's audacity . . . the ballet was received with rapturous enthusiasm mingled with some hisses ... ' (Beaumont: 5 1 -54) Whilst movements in Faune were either lateral, thereby breaking every tradition of classical ballet, or downright suggestive, Debussy's innovative, often zealous, and sometimes electrifying score further alienated large sections of contemporary audiences.

But Diaghilev was prepared to go further, his ballets becoming increasingly daring and challenging. Accordingly, the 1 9 1 3 season opened with Jeux, a ballet set around a tennis match. Jeux was audacious, not because of any suggestiveness, but because of its extraordinary mixture of classical and anti-classical poses, its expansive score, and its startling rhythms. Stravinsky, himself a musical reformer, was astounded, claiming that it was ' awful' (Buckle: 92) Audiences were similarly disenchanted, but their disappointment turned, in some cases, to blind rage when Le Sacre du printemps premiered two weeks later at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees on May 29, 1 9 1 3 .

The evidence suggests that Stravinsky wanted The Rite of Spring to be provocative. He knew very well that the work was progressive, writing to Diaghilev that: ' . . . we must wait a long time before the public grows accustomed to our language' (Stravinsky in Eksteins: 4 1 ) And there is also Nijinsky's correspondence to go by.

Nij insky wrote to Stavinsky on January 25, 1 9 1 3 noting that Le Sacre would be, ' for the ordinary viewer a jolting and emotional experience. ' (ibid) Certainly the music is j arring - violating the laws of harmony and rhythm. What melody there is fleeting and ephemeral, the composer' s emphasis on heavy percussion bludgeoning the audience. O n opening night, moreover, there was not a single classical movement; indeed, Nij insky's choreography was starting: a mixture of anti-classical poses (feet were turned inward), j umping, stomping, and unnatural sliding. Hunch-shouldered dancers, moreover, appeared to be weighed down by an invisible force.

Bar a few enlightened reviews, the press response was predictably hostile. Of Le Sacre 's score, one critic said that it was: 'the most discordant composition ever written' adding that 'Never has the cult of the wrong note been applied with such industry, zeal, and ferocity' (in Eksteins: 5 1 ). Another made scathing reference to 'Hottentot music ' . (Eksteins: 50) Le Sacre 's London premier, on 1 1 July 1 9 1 3, met with a similarly hostile response from the press and some members of the paying public. Many in that flrst English audience complained bitterly of splitting headaches, a response, no doubt, to the relentless, pounding musical maelstrom that is The Rite of Spring. However, Beaumont's assessment is that the English audience, like the Parisian one, was ' about equally divided in their dislike and their appreciation ' . (Beaumont: 75)

Despite the enthusiasm of Brussel, Beaumont, and others, it was not until 1 92 1 that the genesis of The Rite of Spring, and the Ballets russes generally, was properly understood. Predictably, it was T. S. Eliot who perceived the cognate forms that underpinned Stravinsky' s score and Nij insky' s choreography. I n 1 92 1 , the poet attended a

performance of Le Sacre. His biographer, Peter Ackroyd, writes: ' at

the end he stood up and cheered. ' (Ackroyd: 1 1 2) For Eliot,

Stravinsky's work, in particular, was a powerful emblem in that its abruptness and dissonance seemed to echo the rhythms of modem industrial life. Eliot himself acknowledged the seminal importance of

the work, claiming in the Dial that it metamorphosed 'the rhythm of the

steppes into the scream of the motor- horn, the rattle of machinery, the grind of wheels, the beating of iron and steel, the roar of the

underground railway, and the other barbaric cries of modem life ... ' (Eliot in Crawford: 1 39) But whilst Eliot undoubtedly uses Stravinsky' s music to underpin his own endeavours in The Waste Land, where, in accordance with the poet's emphasis on the auditory imagination, broken rhythms and fractured cadences come closest to enacting modernity' s savage ritual, the Italian Futurists had already assimilated into their work the cacophony of the city - taking as their governing symbol the roaring motor-car.46

Responding, perhaps, to Marinetti's plea to interpret 'the musical soul of crowds ... trains, tanks, automobiles, and aeroplanes' , Futurist musician Luigi Russolo pleaded for artists to cross the great modem capitals 'with [their] ears more alert than [their] eyes' . This he called for in 'The Art of Noises' and it was in this document of March 1 9 1 3 that he also claimed modem music to be 'PARALLELED BY THE MULTIPLICATION OF MACIDNES ... ' .

4

7 (Apollonio: 75) It

was here too that he called for the 'palpitation of valves, the coming and going of pistons, [and] the howl of [the mechanical] ' . Rossolo' s primary group o f preferred noises, as recorded i n 'The Art', comprises: rumbles, roars, explosions, crashes, splashes, and booms, whilst the second celebrates the whistle, the snort, and the hiss.

Of course, the motor-car did it all and so it was little wonder that the Futurist's greatest musical triumph came with the development of the composer' s infamous noise intoners. The first of these enormous instruments, unveiled in June 1 9 1 3, produced, through 1 0-whole tones, the noise of an unsilenced internal combustion engine.48 In 1 9 1 4, not

long before he offered' The Meeting of Automobiles and Aeroplanes'

at the Coliseum, Russolo gave a private performance of the noise intoners in Marinetti's home. Stravinsky and Diaghilev, keen followers of both Eastern and Western manifestations of Futurism, were in attendance. Stavinsky, who was proposing to use a noise intoner in one of his compositions, ' leapt from the divan like an exploding bedspring' when Russolo cranked up his machine, whilst, 'with a whistle of overjoyed excitement, Diaghilev quavered "Ah Ah" ... for him the highest sign of approval.' (Francesco Cangiullo in Bozzolla & Tisdall:

For the Futurists then, the motor-car was a principal ally. It seemed to suggest everything they were about and through it, as Tim Benton writes, artists like Marinetti and Russolo could realise their Nietzschean fantasies.

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(Ben ton: 1 9) Prized for all sorts of things then, the automobile's arrival unequivocally signalled that the world was to dance to a new tune: 'Let us break out...make the music lovers scream ... [i]t's no good objecting that noises are exclusively loud and disagreeable to the ear. ' (Russolo in Apollonio: 76) Of course, painters were also keen to represent the noise of the internal combustion engine, the most striking example being Charles Demuth's ' I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold' - a work completed to complement William Carlos Williams's poem 'The Great Figure' . Faithful to the poem, the painting shows a fire engine cutting a swathe through metropolitan streets. It is a blur of energy; an irresistible cacophony captured on canvas. And, despite the complaints against motor-cars and motorists which were appearing daily in the popular press from 1 900, this aesthetic was, to a significant extent, embraced by writers.

The Wind in the Willows is the first book written in English to deal with the negative effects of the motor-car, but it is impossible to fmd a literary text which flatly condemns the automobile. Indeed, whilst acknowledging the destructive potential of motor-cars, writers like Bernard Shaw, Kenneth Grahame, Ian Hay, William Carlos Williams, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, and F. Scott Fitzgerald romanticise the machine - often celebrating its noise. 50 In The Wind in the Willows, for instance, the brazen "poop-poop" of the gentlemen' s motor-car seems more o f a celebration than the ' double note of warning' it is said to be whilst in The Great Gatsby the three-noted horn of the hero' s Rolls-Royce seems to herald magnificence. Philip Meldrum, hero of Ian Hay's popular novel A Knight On Wheels,

' . . . [hears] music in the whizzing of a clutch' whilst for Septimus Smith, of Virginia W oolf' s Mrs Dalloway, the anthem of the twentieth century is the sound of horns and motors.

In Fitzgerald's fiction generally, the sounds of car horns suggest, among other things, promise and sexual potency and even the throbbing automobiles which Nick Carraway hears in New York foreground a certain libidinous drive. Moreover, the throbbing taxi of Eliot's 'The

Waste Land', from which Fitzgerald borrowed his own throbbing machines, subtley suggests the possibility of a lively, engaging sexual agency; one that otherwise idles blandly, misfires, or even stalls completely. 51

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