ZAJ and Futurism: from Henri Bergson to Tomás Marco

This article explores the distant but significant relation, which has been overlooked so far, between the ideals of Italian Futurism and those of ZAJ, an Spanish avant-garde musical movement of the 1960s, tracing the far-reaching line that unites Henri Bergson’s philosophy with the anarchist ideas of Georges Sorel, the way those ideas influenced Italian Futurism, as reflected on the key notions employed in their manifestos, and how some of those notions defined the artistic agenda of the Spanish movement. Tomás Marco’s collaborations with ZAJ are taken both as an implicit point of departure, given the previously analyzed connection between his musical ideas and Bergson’s thought, and as an explicit point of arrival. The article opens with a consideration of the great significance that Bergson’s philosophy had at the beginning of the twentieth century before it explores its relation to Sorel’s thinking as well as to the intellectual and aesthetic basis of Italian Futurism, and in doing so it focuses on defining the influences on and nature of certain aspects of Italian Futurism that had an impact on the Spanish movement, which is only introduced as a corollary in the final part of the text, once those connections have been justified.