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Description
Mike Patton is an artist who transcends musical categories. He sings and collaborateswith several experimental rock groups, performs selections of Italian pop music, and he composes music for films and video games. While listening to his music one can hear the fusion of many genres and that he frequently draws his musical ideas from the principles of Italian futurism. A multidisciplinary movement that emerged in the early twentieth century, futurism celebrated the relationship humans and technology and called for noise as an integral part of a musical composition. In his manifesto The Art of Noises, futurist composer Luigi Russolo advocated for the study of the unlimited varieties of noise and their musical possibilities. Futurism's noise resounded well into the twentieth-century avant-garde and the tradition of American experimentalism. Composers such as Edgard Varèse, Henry Cowell, and John Cage echoed many of the sentiments posed by Russolo and championed for the appropriation of noises as musical sounds in their writings and compositions. Futurist noise continues to have a presence in the works of contemporary composers of experimental music. While living in Italy, Patton studied the futurist poet F. T. Marinetti's The Futurist Cookbook and was inspired to compose Pranzo Oltranzista, which is a contemporary expression of the futurist aesthetic. The aim of this study is to examine the historical, cultural, and aesthetic developments of noise in experimental music and its relationship to the Italian futurism movement. Specifically, I will study the relationship between Mike Patton's Pranzo Oltranzista and F. T. Marinetti's The Futurist Cookbook as they relate to the futurist's exploration of the musical element of noise.
