Antheil Ballet Mechanique

 Day 189

Antheil Ballet Mechanique

Boston Modern Orchestra Project

Gil Rose

George Antheil (1900-1959) is certainly one of the more extraordinary composers that I have covered in this project. He was an inveterate self publicist and courted controversy, His autobiography was titled Bad boy of music and if the story that he pulled a revolver from his jacket and laid it on the piano before giving a recital in order to intimidate the critics is true one can see why he was worthy of the label. He was also an inventor and, astonishingly, was granted a patent for joint work with the film star Hedy Lamarr for work on wireless telegraphy which in part led to the modern technology found in Bluetooth and WiFi.

He was a properly trained musician and studied with important figures such as Bloch. But he quickly rebelled against that formal training and started to write extremely modern and challenging works. He was particularly interested in percussive effects and the possibilities of mechanical music. The Ballet Mechanique is by far his most famous work: it is in all of the text books as an example of the extreme avant guarde. His original conception was for an ensemble of 16 synchronised player pianos, 2 grand pianos and a vast array of percussion including electric bells, propellers and a siren.  It was impossible to co-ordinate the player pianos (Stravinsky had the same problem in a proto-version of Les Noces and all later performances of the work were done in an arrangement for much smaller forces without the mechanical instruments.

it is only with the advent of computer technology that it has been possible to go back to the original concept and this performance attempts to do that. It all makes a fantastic noise.  The whole effect is like a combination of The Rite of Spring and Les Noces on steroids with two pianists playing the same piece of Bartok out of synch with each other in the next room. It is great fund for a while - the siren makes some very telling contributions - but at 30+ mins it is far too long. I did feel tempted to shout ‘please stop’ several times, but I did make it though to the end. You can tell that Antheil underneath all of the chaos, was actually a composer who knew what he was doing - but the gulf between this and the music of Stravinsky is almost too great to comprehend. I’d love to hear the piece live once, just to get the full force of the noise when everybody is going at things hammer and tongs but after that it will certainly not go into any of my playlists.