Excerpts from Francesco Balilla Pratella’s manifesto from 1911

…

I address myself to the young, who are necessarily athirst for things that are new, alive, and contemporary.

…

Vegetating musical lyceums, conservatories, and academies are snares for the young and for art. In these pools of impotence, masters and professors, illustrious idiocies, perpetuate traditionalism and struggle against any effort to enlarge the field of music.

…

From this stem a prudent repression and the constriction of any free or daring tendency; the continuous mortification of breakaway intelligence; unconditional support for the mediocrities who know how to copy and flatter; the prostitution of the great glories from the musical past, turned into insidious offensive weapons against budding talent; the restriction of study to empty acrobatics that are discussed in the perpetual agony of a culture hopelessly backward and already dead.

…

In their rising careers, they avail themselves of that solemn swindle which is called well made music, a counterfeit of true and great music, a worthless copy sold to a public that allows itself to be cheated by its own will.

…

Futurism, which is a rebellion of the life of intuition and feeling, a palpitating and impetuous spring-time, inevitably declares war against doctrines, individuals, or works that repeat, prolong, or praise the past at the expense of the future.

…

CONCLUSIONS

Convince young composers to desert musical lyceums, conservatories, and academies, and to consider free study as the only means of regeneration.

…

Keep away from commercial and academic environments, disdaining them, and instead preferring a modest life over the large profits which mean that art has to sell out.

Free one’s own musical sensibility from all influence or imitation of the past; feel and sing with the spirit facing toward the future, drawing one’s inspiration and aesthetics from nature, in all its present human and extra-human phenomena; exalt the man-symbol perennially renewing itself in the various aspects of modern life and in its infinite, intimate relations with nature.

Destroy the bias in favour of “well made” music—rhetoric and impotence—and proclaim a unique concept of Futurist music, something absolutely different from what has been done until now.

…

Provoke among audiences an ever growing hostility against the exhumation of old works which impede the appearance of innovative composers, and instead support and praise everything in music that seems original and revolutionary, considering it an honor to receive abuse and irony from opportunists and moribund people.