ABSTRACT
The semantic content of Italy’s modernism was futurism. Futurism started well before 1909, when, with the publication of Marinetti’s Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism, the term was used to denote a specifi c aestheticpolitical movement.1 Like Baudelaire’s Painter of Modern Life, Constantin Guy, the Italian futurists were concerned with the aesthetic problem of representing time, the motion of time. However, the principal art-form for the aesthetic representation of time is music, because sound is by defi nition concerned with and dependent upon the passing of time. A painting, by contrast with music, is primarily static whereas text, as a form of aesthetic representation, is less abstract than music. If, according to Koselleck, the experience of modernity is grounded in a specifi c semantic of historical time, music was bound to assume a particular role in the aesthetic representation of that experience. Busoni was recognised as one of the masters of musical futurism; and the infl uential pamphlet Futuristengefahr [The danger of Futurists, 1917], by the German composer Hans Pfi tzner, was a direct reply to Busoni’s theoretical writings and his new aesthetic.2
