Noise for Airports

Machines to Piss Them Off

This weekend, I was at the New England Conservatory to see a performance of George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique. The piece, originally written in 1924, called for a siren, several electric bells, two airplane propellers, a set of xylophones, a pair of live pianists, some bass drums, and sixteen player pianos. Syncing the pianos proved impossible at the time, so eventually the piece was performed with a single player piano. In the 1990s, Paul Lehrman and Schirmer revisited the piece with MIDI, used the magic of computers to sync up the pianos, and the rest is history (or a series of concerts).

There is a certain pleasure in being able to finally play a piece as the artist “intended”—Antheil never heard the piece as originally scored. But, of course, “intent” is a tricky thing. What do you do if an artist intends something that is not possible? The modern, MIDI-enabled Yamaha Disklaviers are not the same instruments as the player pianos of the 1920s. They can be synced together, and they are certainly pianos, but they do not function in at all the same way as the pneumatic contraptions Antheil would have known. One effect of this, I realized part way through the performance, was that Antheil had no way of knowing what 16 player pianos playing in sync would sound like.

It turns out, sort of muddy. The performance I saw had just 8 Disklaviers (the player piano part is written for four voices, with four pianos each, but we just had two pianos per voice), but even so, when all those sustain pedals are down and the pianos are hammering away, it sounds like mush. The rapid-fire melodies and clangorous chords just form a sort of “mrrrrrrr”-sounding backdrop to the much more lively playing of expert xylophonists and noisy sirens and bells. Antheil wouldn’t have known this—by intending something not possible, he had no way of evaluating its sound.

Not that I minded the muddiness. What it made plain to me, though, was how Antheil’s concern was not so much sonic as spectacular. The idea of sixteen player pianos bashing away at once is more important than the sound of them. As a contrast, take Conlon Nancarrow’s pieces: they play tons of notes, with the sustain down (and in a few cases call for two player pianos at once). However, Nancarrow modified his pianos, putting metal strips on the hammers of one, lacquered leather and tacks on the hammers of the other. These modifications resulted from actual experience with the sounds of his pieces, and a concern for them as sounds. The hardened hammers made for more clearly defined attacks that stand out above the muddy resonance of sustained notes.

As Paul Lehrman told it in a talk before the concert, Antheil wanted to cause a riot. He was considered an enfant terrible of the music world, known for putting a gun on top of his piano before a performance, so people wouldn’t leave. (And his eventual autobiography would be titled Bad Boy of Music.) The piece was to be premiered at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, where Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring had caused riots a decade earlier. Listening to the piece, the riot-causing intent is quite legible—the siren sounds totally outrageous, the electric bells unreasonably loud. He succeeded, solidifying his reputation as a guy who liked to piss people off. Unfortunately, the US premiere in New York was advertised as a guaranteed riot, and the folks who showed up, apparently un-enraged by Antheil’s musical tantrum, didn’t riot. This solidified Antheil’s reputation as a guy who liked to piss people off, but not always how he intended.

My advisor, who was at the concert, asked me whether Antheil had some over-arching theory of mechanization in music. Player pianos, sirens, electric bells, and airplane propellors would seem to indicate that he had at least some predilection for the mechanical. (Not to mention the xylophone parts, which, according to Paul Lehrman, though played by very dextrous humans, were originally intended for xylophone-playing machines.) It seems that, for Antheil, using machines was just a means to provoke (although this is almost surely an over-generalization). The pianos bash away, and at one point, the human performers are silent while the pianos play solo, with excruciatingly long silences. The conductor stands somewhat helpless, while the audience waits for the inscrutable machines to get on with it.

Turning over all kinds of musical agency to these machines, Antheil seems to consider this dynamic of machine control as something to exploit to provocative ends. (Ironically enough, as he was eventually unable to control his player pianos enough to get them in sync, and at the New York premiere, an inexperienced siren player missed his cue, sending wailing noise through the rapidly emptying house.)

Ballet Mécanique was originally conceived as the score to a film of the same name by Fernand Léger. The two ended up going in separate directions and producing independent works (the film is about 15 minutes, the score about 30), but various attempts have been made to match up some of the music with the film. Embedded below (dashboard people, you’ll have to go to the actual site), you can watch the film in two parts and hear the piece, as recorded with a single player piano.

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