visual dimension is a strong signifier of the industrial condition; however, its most debated and regulated features invest other senses, such as smell and sound. Industrial cities can smell of coal, gas, various chemicals used in production; of final products; and of a combination of the above. Modern cities began to tackle vapours and smells from sewers in the nineteenth century, and urban planning started taking into account the origin and entity of certain smells because of their supposed dangerous effects on health. For instance, Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet’s study on Parisian sewers (1824), motivated both by medical and social purposes, offers an amazing example of the attempt to identify, understand, and classify smells by ethnographic means (Lindner 2004). New York City’s Metropolitan Board of Health has tried to limit and control the city’s bad smells since 1866. However, common knowledge, superstitions, and beliefs connected to smells, beside smells themselves, continued affecting the perception and reputation of certain districts, especially the ones where industrial production settled (Kiechle 2016). It is only in the early 1970s, nearly a century later, that, as seen in the previous chapter, Sheffield was able to boast smokeless air all over the city, thanks to the Clean Air Act and after decades of attempting to tame this problem.
Along the centuries, regulations also affected industrial soundscapes; however, production by heavy machinery continued making mechanical noise, mostly repetitive, rhythm-like noise, only lately accompanied by swift digital robotic bleeps and bloops. While smells were increasingly controlled and tamed by technology along the years, noise spiraled both in intensity and in sonic palette. Noises represent a sharp and distinctive feature of the industrial city and of its imaginary, and it is only by physically moving heavy production elsewhere that the industrial soundscape can be muted. Funnily enough, it is with music that factories tried to provide an antidote to noise. Music gave only a partial solution to noise pollution in providing working rhythms and maintaining productivity, but it definitely constructed a social feeling on tedious factory floors and a means for resistance among workers (Korczynski 2014, 2007).
Today, it is only cars that provide the lo-fi keynote sound of urban living. Noise can be understood as the main element of the industrial city’s material existence and sensorial experience. Noise was also one of the forging elements of the twentieth century. It was a constant interlocutor for music production throughout the century; however, there are two competing narratives in reference to this. The first is connected to the art world of contemporary classical music and to the avant-garde use of noise and found sounds in the context of music composition and of music work. The second is defined by popular culture and by the continuous intermission of mediated sounds in popular music. References to real places, locations, and individual stories have often enriched these two narratives, and musicians have justified their production in various ways.
Art Music and Industrial Noise
I use the concept of art music to refer to classical music production of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Understanding itself solely as art, this music output has mostly used the industrial world as inspiration or reflected upon some of its aspects, such as repetition, from the aesthetic point of view. Rarely has an industrial city played a significant role in the evolution of industry-inspired art music. It is mostly in capital cities and cultural centres that art music flourished in the twentieth century. A few exceptions can be made: that of Milan, Italy, where futurist music was first conceived and Darmstadt, Germany, where serial music developed.
Luigi Russolo published L’arte dei Rumori (The Art of Noise) in 1913. Russolo was an Italian futurist painter who wrote this manifesto of futurist music as a letter to musicologist and musician Balilla Pratella, who himself had written a text about musica futurista. Futurismo belonged to the wave of avant-garde art movements that spread around Europe especially after the First World War and shared with the others the tendency to redact manifestos. Inspired by a concert of Pratella, Russolo programmatically referred to the establishment of an art of noises as a revolution in music, something
paralleled by the increasing proliferation of machinery sharing in human labour. . . . [M]achines create today such a large number of varied noises that pure sound, with its littleness and its monotony, now fails to arouse any emotion. (Russolo 1967, 5)
This is actually the only direct reference to the industry in the text; in fact, the author preferred to describe natural, urban, or warfare noises as the main inspiration for his manifesto and for the new music. However, it shows some interesting ideas, first, in putting machinery and music in parallel evolution and not in causal relation and, second, in noting the wide variety of noises machines are able to produce. These industrial ideas were, however, overshadowed by the attempt to systematise noises. The overarching aim for new music was to ‘score and regulate harmonically and rhythmically these most varied noises’ (Russolo 1967, 9) and not just to imitate them. Russolo suggested the adoption of noise in the realm of art music, its categorisation within six typologies, and its harmonic and rhythmic subordination and regulation via pitch changing.
Futurism as an art movement was interested in the celebration of power, technology, and speed over more traditional and consolidated art forms and lifestyles. It also had an initial link, thanks to its founder, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, to Benito Mussolini and to the establishment of the Fascist Party in post–World War I Italy.
The real adoption and celebration of industrial noises in art music production happened in the context of Soviet avant-garde in the years following the October Revolution. Soviet and Eastern European film-makers, painters, writers, and musicians celebrated the industry as the supreme space for the emancipation of workers and for the realisation of socialism. For instance, Arseny Avraamov wrote and performed the Symphony of Factory Sirens (Industrial Horns?) (Simfoniya gudkov, Гудковая симфония) in Baku on November 7, 1922, as a celebration of the fifth anniversary of the October Revolution. This symphony used the whole urban sonic landscape of Baku, including its military fleet, a variety of urban noises, and the sounds from the local factories, together with choirs and shouts, as orchestra; Avraamov conducted the whole from a tower, thanks to the use of flags and following an orchestral script he redacted. A second performance followed a year later, in Moscow.
Alexander Mosolov, another Soviet musician, went even further when he composed The Iron Foundry (also known as Factory: Machine Music), the first movement of a lost ballet suite entitled Stal (steel) in 1926–1927. The composition is based on orchestral sounds layering in repetitive loops and building up to simulate the noise of industrial machinery getting into action. A music critic refers to a live performance at the Liège Festival 1930 in these terms:
We have the benumbing mesmerism of uniformly repeated mechanical sounds, combined with a kind of lyrical theme, the song of steel, or possibly of man, the ironmaster. (Evans 1930)
In a recording by the Orchestre Symphonique de Paris conducted by Julius Ehrlich from the early 1930s (Orchestre Symphonique de Paris 2013), the piece is indeed dominated by the repetition of hammering metallic noises, which are produced by sheets of steel along conventional orchestral percussions. The avant-garde approached industrial noise by simulating industrial work and heavy machinery with conventional orchestral instruments, with the adoption of found sounds, and with the use of industrial hardware as instruments. Another stylistic element, whose influence can be linked to industrial work, is Motorik. This term, which will resurface in popular music criticism in connection to Krautrock, initially described the use of ostinato rhythms, for instance, in the work of composers such as Ernst Krenek and Paul Hindemith, although its origin is explained in ambivalent ways. Some critics saw it as a musical strategy already present in the work of Beethoven (Rexroth 2005, 98) and Rossini (Keitel and Neuner 1992, 305). However, some others connected the repetitive rhythm to the glorification of the modern industrial era and to the increasing role that technology played in inspiring art and classical music (Braun 1999, 168). Interestingly, some authors referred to the influence of jazz, where Motorik described the continuous excited swing drive, typical of early manifestations of this genre (Mauser
