"ballet mecanique" by george antheil

this is what i am looking at this evening. "ballet mecanique" by george antheil. there is no way i am actually going to attempt to sight read ANY of it, but it's definitely fun to look through. plus, i get a kick out of the covers of these older music books (i have quite a large and varied collection of them and will be writing about them in the upcoming weeks when i have any available time).

from the biographical notes:

"george antheil was born in trenton, new jersey on june 8, 1900 and died in new york february 12, 1959. he began piano instruction at an early age and studied composition with von sternberg until 1919 when he began working with ernest bloch. in 1922 antheil won the guggenhein fellowship and went to europe as a concert pianist, performing his own compositions, works of other contemporary composers as well as the classics. this concert tour resulted in his being dubbed the "bad boy" composer-pianist of america. many years later (1945) he recalled his experiences in an autobiography "bad boy of music". during 1923 antheil lived in paris in order to devote his full time to composition. his first concert caused a riot when he introduced a group of his own piano pieces. in paris his friends included gerturde stein, ezra pound, mrs. james joyce and ernest hemingway."

the ezra pound connection is only one of many reasons why i am referring to this piece. more later. oh, and if anyone has a copy of "bad boy of music" by antheil that they wouldn't mind lending, please let me know. :)

more on the piece:

"ballet mecanique, written in 1924-25 was originally intended for a film by fernand leger, but actually the film and the music proceeded separately...this work was first performed at the theatre des champs elysees, in 1926 with golschmann on the podium. the american premiere at carnegie hall in 1927 was conducted by goossens. in addition to the initial performance at the champs elysees theatre, the work was performed several times in paris. all the concerts were riotous in some way; the paris performance resulting in actual first fights among the audience while the carnegie hall performance is said to have been as scandalous as any new york witnessed."

and WHY this piece is so fascinating, from the composer's own words:

"interpretively speaking, ballet mecanique was never intended to demonstrate (as has been erronously said) "the beauty and precision of machines". rather it was to experiment with and thus, to demonstrate a new principle in music construction, that of "time-space", or in which the time principle, rather than the tonal principle, is held to be of main importance.

to demonstrate. up until strawinsky and schoenberg, most contemporary music had been constructed, architecturally speaking, on the tonal principle. a sonata allegro movement, for exmaple, spread out a tonality, departed from it in the development, returned again in the recapitulation - usually with a vengeance. it is still an excellent principle. but it neglects "time-space."

strawinsky attempted to move away from its iron grip by making his music "super-tonal" so to speak. schoenberg, going to the opposite pole, destroyed tonality entirely by removing all tonal centers in the 12 tone system.

ballet mecanique, while utilizing (subconsiously, for at the time this work was written, 12 tone-ism was unknown as such) both systems, concentrated on what i then called "the time canvas." rather than to consider musical form as a series of tonalities, atonalities with a tonal center, or a tonal center at all, it supposed that music actually takes place in time; and that, therefore, are merely his crayons, his colors. the 'time-space' principle, therefore, is an aesthetic of 'looking', so to speak, at a piece of music 'all at once.' one might propose, therefore, that it is a sort of 'fourth dimension' -al way of looking at music; its constructive principles may, or may not have been touched in this work, but they have been attempted."

wow. the only way i could ever come up with a response to that is to LISTEN (with EVERYTHING) in a way that requires my full attention. not to just the tones, the dissonance, the sounds, the airplanes, glockenspiels, pianos. not one fragment of it must escape. everything has to be as it is for the piece. only then, only when my full attention has been immersed within that18 minute period can i look up and even pretend i understood what his intention for it was. for him who composed it, for us as the listeners.