Francesco Balilla Pratella

Francesco Balilla Pratella (Lugo, Italy February 1, 1880 – Ravenna, Italy May 17, 1955) was an Italian composer, musicologist and essayist. One of the leading advocates of futurism in Italian music, much of Pratella's own music betrays little obvious connection to the views espoused in the manifesti he authored.

Born in Lugo, and deeply impressed by the folk music he heard in his childhood in his native Romagna, now part of Emilia-Romagna. Pratella entered Pesaro Conservatory and studied with Vincenzo Cicognani and Pietro Mascagni. Pratella's professional career was largely centered in teaching and musicology; he served as director of the Liceo Musicale in Lugo from 1910 until 1927 when he accepted a post as director of the Istituto G. Verdi in Ravenna, where Pratella remained until his retirement in 1945. His interest in collecting Romagna's folk song began before his futurist period and continued after, intensifying later through Pratella's arrangements of folksongs and training of choruses. Pratella also made modern performance arrangements of early polyphonic music. From 1921 to 1925 Pratella headed the Bologna-based music publication Il Pensiero Musicale.

An early project drawn from Pratella's interest in indigenous folksong was the opera La Sina d'Varguõn (1909), which attracted the attention of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the father of Italian futurism. Pratella joined the futurist group in 1910 and became one of its most ardent activists, publishing three tracts which were combined into the pamphlet Musica Futurista in 1912. Inspired by Pratella, Luigi Russolo created his Intonarumori (Noise Intoners) in 1913 and wrote his own manifesto, The Art of Noises (1913), introducing the futurist concept of introducing noise into music. Pratella was less than enthusiastic about the Intonarumori, but he agreed to utilize their resources in his opera L'aviatore Dro (1911–1914) which was written in close collaboration with Marinetti. At the end of World War I, Pratella broke with the futurists; L'aviatore Dro opened in 1920 and proved popular with critics and audiences alike, but its impracticality and odd storyline doomed it to certain obscurity.

In his later years, Pratella occasionally turned his attention to composing for films, notably in Mother Earth (1931) and L'argine (1938). He also worked on a proposed Raccolta nazionale delle musiche italiane (National Collection of Italian Music) with Gabriele D'Annunzio, but the project was interrupted with the poet's death.

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