BALLET MECANIQUE

As a companion to the ultra-machine-like approach of George Antheil, the self-proclaimed "Bad Boy of Music" of the 20th century, a conference-cum-bantering session from the Flemish scientist Jean-Paul Van Bendegem, a melting pot of sciences, maths & music.

Ballet Mécanique (1924), the original version of which we propose to re-enact (slightly revamped), was an attempt by the American composer George Antheil, the painter Fernand Léger, and the director Dudley Murphy to offer a multimedia experience before there was even a name for it.

In common with Edgar Varèse – although he was the author of a work that was much more uneven - the American George Antheil incarnated in France the very model of a "futurist" composer, thanks to his outrageous and impassioned attitude. An ephemeral friend of Stravinsky, admired by James Joyce and Jean Cocteau and adored by Ezra Pound, who hyped the composer to high heaven, the brilliant "Bad Boy of Music" (as he dubbed himself in his autobiography), dreamed up a wildly engine-like work, the most mercilessly mechanical score imaginable, outmatching the Noces by Igor Stravinsky, by which he had just been thunderstruck. Where Stravinsky had deployed four pianos, Antheil opted for 16. Sixteen mechanical pianos flanked by helicopter blades, sirens, eight bells, three xylophones and numerous percussion instruments. The form was cast in one piece "like a tree made of steel, while the style was at times cool and glistening and at other times burning like an electric oven". More: "With Ballet Mécanique, I am offering you for the first time music that is as hard and beautiful as a diamond ", he dared to write. But the best laid plans of mice and men... : the 16 unsynchronisable mechanical pianos were reduced to a single one, while four authentic pianists were recruited. On the opening night, the wigs of the audience members sitting in the front row were blown off by the helicopter blades, the sirens could not be stopped, it was omnishambolic. In the year 1952, the more restrained and neo-classical composer returned to the music and rearranged it to produce a lighter rhythm. What we are now offering is more or less the original idealistic and madly startling version of 1924, in keeping with the first manuscript. The sole difference is that the 16 mechanical pianos have given way to a horde of 16 synthesisers. Stravinsky's dissonance stretched to the limit, the unflagging repetition, the chemistry at work in the machine-like heavy-handedness and the lightening speed – all of these ingredients succeed in making the Ballet Mécanique a wholly unique work in the history of the 20th century

As for Fernand Léger's specially commissioned film it will never be produced at the same time as Antheil musical work. From what ever angle it is tackled, the final cut fails to match the score. We will be offering a seven-minute extract, very slightly altered to obtain two or three points of intersection with the musical form. Léger was an enthusiastic participant in the adventure, during a period plagued by doubt, where the power of cinema rendered him somewhat inhibited and despairing when it came to painting: he had seen the Roue by Abel Gance and the films by Chaplin. It was then that he was struck by the idea of a "simultaneous" lyrical form (a typically futurist expression) of the moving image, dominated by extracts and close-ups.

He wrote: "No script. A series of rhythmical images, nothing else [...]. We persist until the observer's eye and spirit cannot stand any more, exhausting the entertainment value until it becomes positively unbearable."

Tag : Percussion