Album Notes

The world premiere recording of "The loudest piece of concert music in history," George Antheil's original, notorious, never-played-this-way-in-his-lifetime Ballet Mécanique.

Composed in 1924 for two pianos, four bass drums, three xylophones, a tam-tam, a siren, three airplane propellors, seven or so electric bells, and 16 synchronized player pianos, it called for technology that would not exist for 75 years. Other, lesser versions of the piece have been performed, but this recording, by a "crack ensemble" (the Boston Globe) of students in Massachusetts, started a movement that has now seen the piece performed by major symphony orchestras all over the world.

Here's the review from England's The Wire:

American composer George Antheil (1900-59) is best remembered for a handful of audacious works from the 1920s. However, his shortlived commitment to modernism is nowadays unfairly perceived as superficial by those who claim his "'iconoclastic' pieces sound like squibs". Antheil returned to neoclassicism and went on to develop his own post-Copland Americana as well as producing Hollywood scores for the likes of directors Fritz Lang and Nicholas Ray.

The Antheil piece that set fists flying during its premiere in 20s Paris, where he had relocated, was Ballet mécanique, a post-Futurist response to "the simultaneous beauty and danger" of the Industrial Age. Originally a soundtrack to Fernand Léger's film of the same name, it soon took on a life of its own, launching the young Antheil's international career on a wave of notoriety.

Due to problems synchronising player pianos, the 1924 original was deemed unplayable, so a couple of scaled down alternatives were created by the composer. Thanks, though, to digital technology (read all about it in the excellent sleevenotes) and Paul Lehrman's dedicated team, it finally received its first performance proper in November 1999 by The University Of Massachusetts Lowell Percussion Ensemble, armed with three xylophones, four bass drums, tamtam, two pianos, siren, seven bells, three airplane propellers and 16 player pianos. And a squib it most certainly is not.

Shorter works by John Cage and Lou Harrison, Richard Grayson, Amadeo Roldán and Felix Mendelssohn were also performed that night and are included on the disc, but it's Antheil's work that you'll be returning to. If Holst's Mars was the bringer of war, then Ballet Mécanique sounds like war itself. It's a 30-minute, brutalist behemoth bristling with dense polyrhythms (the score includes more than 600 changes of time signature), demented gamelan, wailing siren and exhilarating industrial noise. The rapid swirls of player piano anticipate Nancarrow's Studies, while the strident repetition looks forward to American minimalism. In the buildup to the coda there's even an unexpected use of silence.

This is Antheil's centenary year, so now is a fine time to reappraise his music. Start with this awesome blast from the past.

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Read more about the story behind this record at www.antheil.org.