“Let us wander together through a great modern city, with the ear more attentive than the eye, and let us recognize the gurgling of water, air and gas inside metal pipes, the gentle rumbling of machinery breathing and pulsing with life, the staccato of valves, the thunder of pistons, the screeching of transmissions, the loud thumping of tram wheels on rails, the cracking of whips, the flutter of awnings and flags. We will have fun imagining our orchestra of shop roller shutters, banging doors, the hubbub of the crowd, the enormous roar of the railway station, iron foundries, textile mills, printing houses, power plants and underground railways.” (An excerpt from Luigi Russola’s Art of Noises Manifesto dating from 1913)
Intonarumori or, to use their more expressive name, noise-makers are musical instruments, which were constructed and used by Italian futurists at the beginning of the 20th Century. These instruments were created to enable their users to compose a new type of music using noises, the use of which in the sphere of music had been unthinkable until that time. This is how ululatori, rombatori, crepitatori, scrosciatori, scoppiatori, gorgogliatori, ronzatori and sibilatori came into existence. The names of these instruments can be appealingly translated as droners, roarers, screechers, rumblers, boomers, gurglers, buzzers and whistlers and they were used to create musical pieces of an unprecedented type at the time, with fitting titles such as: Waking of the City, Meeting of Cars and Planes, Meal on the Hotel Terrace or Skirmish in the Oasis. All the original intonarumori were destroyed during the Second World War and this musical avant-garde style was only revived many decades later.
Jan Kolář, a skilled joiner, musical enthusiast and jack-of-all-trades from Prague, is one of the few who has successfully recreated these instruments. Basing his work on photographs and written records from preserved sources, he was capable of making three examples of this original instrument. The instruments were restored in 2011–2012 for the OPO. They are currently used by the Ensemble of Futurist Noise Intoners (Anna Clementi, Luciano Chessa, Werner Durand, Jan Kolář, Miroslav Beinhauer, P.ST).