ABSTRACT
Notions of the mutability and impermanence of reality led nineteenth-century thinkers to embrace music as an ideal medium for conveying fundamental truths. Nineteenth-century composers, responding to such notions of unrestricted movement, began to feel hampered by the more solid, articulated musical forms inherited from the previous century. Such forms treated music "spatially," carving it up into well-defined units joined together in cohesive, architectonic groups. The aesthetic orientation fostering music's preeminence had important consequences for the other arts. The influence of the aesthetics of autonomous music is perhaps most clearly recognizable in the visual arts, especially in painting's break with objective representation as it approached pure abstraction around 1912. The aesthetic orientation fostering music's preeminence had important consequences for the other arts. As for the impact of Russolo's Futurist music on the larger "Futurist moment" in which it appeared, it was admittedly minor measured by the response of other composers of the period.
