Ballet Mécanique

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Ballet Mécanique (1924) was American composer George Antheil's most famous work. It was written to be as loud and as percussive as possible, in line with Italian Futurist ideas of the time. The "ballet" was intended as music for a film of the same title by Dudley Murphy and Fernand Léger; it was never used as such, but it found life as a concert piece instead.

The original orchestration called for 16 pianolas (player pianos), 2 pianos, 3 xylophones, 7 electric bells, 3 airplane propellers, siren, 4 bass drums, and tam-tam. Some parts are doubled to give more sound. Unfortunately, since technology of the 1920s was unable to keep 16 mechanical pianos synchronized, the Paris premiere in 1926 featured another version for 1 pianola and 10 pianos. The American premiere was the following year at Carnegie Hall in New York. The "ballet" has since existed in many variations of length and instrumentations. The original music was not performed until 1999, at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. ^[1]

The music itself seems like a continuous onslaught of indecipherable chords. The meter stays constant rarely for more than 3 measures, so the listener is distracted from larger divisions of the music but focuses on the driving rhythm of the individual beats. The mechanically accurate pulse progresses relentlessly for a full thirty minutes, yet the piece as a whole is not without structure. Hidden within it are punctuations of development, recapitulation, cadenzas, and coda, among many other things. The following are some points of interest that the listener may explore:

Measure 14 – The logic behind the pianolas is made apparent. With a difficult 8 on 5 figure, only machines could play this consistently and accurately.

M 93 – The passage is built from parallel, consonant chords. We get something of a recognizable pentatonic tune. It is immediately followed with a major passage, harmonized with chromatic neighbor tones.

M 112 – The notation in the piano with two note heads connected by the vertical line indicates that all black or white notes in that range are played.

M 142 – The irregular pulse in the pianola recalls the first movement of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Antheil did admire Stravinsky and adopt elements of his style.

M 154 – Starting here is something of a pianola cadenza. It displays mechanical prowess in things that humans could never play.

M 156 – The gentle syncopation in duple meter feels of swing or ragtime.

M 256 – The human piano players are made to play 8 on 5.

M 260 – Xylophones are playing 6 notes at a time.

M 283 – The chaos escalates until 328, a bridge into a new section with new ideas.

M 403 – The first section returns.

M 454 – The siren returns after a long absence, reinforcing the commonality with early sections of the piece.

M 530 – A bitonal passage with melodies in the xylophones and pianolas.

M 622 – Xylophones and pianolas play a miniature round.

M 649 – Return of a pentatonic melody.

M 700 – The round is further developed with the pentatonic melody.

M 944 – The regular switching between duple and triple meter actually gives a sense of importance to time signature.

M 1134 – The start of a very long coda. Note how the pianola continues to “think” in eighth notes, even through extended rests.

Other notes of interest:

The present tempo marking (quarter = 152) with thirty-second notes was at the physical limit of what mechanical instruments could handle. The pianola played three rolls at 8.5 feet per minute. The tempo was probably doubled due to a manufacturing error on the rolls, but Antheil kept them anyway.

The airplane propellers were new to the concert stage. They were used in Antheil's earlier success, the "Airplane Sonata."