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| ballet
mécanique and other works for player pianos, percussion, and electronics |
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 George
Antheil was 23 years old when he began work on what was to be his most famous—or
infamous—piece, the Ballet pour Instruments Mécaniques et
Percussion, more commonly called the Ballet Mécanique.
Living at the heart of the literary and artistic explosion that was going
on in Paris in the 1920s, he decided to write a piece as outrageous as the
works being created around him. Enamored with the industrial age, and with
the anti-Romantic, anarchic, and Dadaist sentiments that flowed in his circle,
Antheil's conception was for a piece that celebrated machines as makers
of music. He proclaimed his piece, in an article for De Stijl, "the
first piece of music that has been composed OUT OF and FOR machines, ON
EARTH." He originally planned it as the soundtrack of a film of the
same name by American filmmaker Dudley Murphy and Dadaist artist Fernand
Léger, a film which, with its non-linearity, its jerky, repetitive
movements, and its surrealist montages, uncannily presages the more adventurous
(or annoying) music videos of the 1980s. What did the title mean? Antheil
wrote in his autobiography that it "seems to imply that it is a 'mechanical
dance' possibly to illustrate the interior of a factory," and that
is often how the piece is characterized. But, he said, "The Ballet
Mécanique had nothing to do with the actual description of factories,
machinery...l had no idea of copying a machine directly down into music,
so to speak. My idea, rather, was to warn the age in which I was living
of the simultaneous beauty and danger of its own unconscious mechanistic
philosophy." In fact, he played with rwo other titles for the piece,
"Message to Mars" and "Xylophony," before settling on
Ballet Mécanique. He was warned by friends that the title
might be misconstrued for the French term for "carpet sweeper"—balai
mécanique—but perhaps this appealed to his Dadaist side.
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| —Paul D. Lehrman | |||||||||
| I'll buy it! |  |
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BALLET MÉCANIOUE
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