Search - Antheil, Ensemble Modern :: Fighting the Waves

Ballet Mechanique - sounds of the Machine Age

12/04/1999

(4 out of 5 stars)

"When not hanging out in Paris with Stravinsky, Joyce, and other 20's hipsters, Lowell, Mass native George Antheil contemplated his love for the sound machines.He spent an entire year writing a piece that couldn't be played... until recently. Ballet Mechanique was written for something like sixteen player pianos, xylophones, gongs, sirens, airplane propellors... the list sounds like the basement of a mad musical scientist than a score order. Which is just as well - the music sounds like someone set someone loose in a piano factory with a sledgehammer and a couple of tabs of microdot. The musical score was painstakingly reconstructed using MIDI, and the end result is... well, awesome. The fear it inspires is such that perhaps, had it been heard in the twenties, we'd all be living in Yurts in Eugene, Oregon, and Y2K would mean "pass the bowl, bro.""