George Antheil, "Ballet Mécanique" (1953 Version)

COMPOSER'S NOTES
on 1952-53 RE-EDITING

This "Ballet Mecanique" was originally written as a score to the first abstract motion picture of that name. However, since it was soon discovered that one could not synchronize a motion picture score thatt closely, (during 1924-25), it was written as an independent piece.

I have confined this editing mostly to cutting. Repetitous [sic] measures, intended to synchronize only with the film, have been cut out abundantly, reducing the playing time from the original of more than a half hour to less than eighteen minutes. The player piano has been deleted entirely, its role give to the pianos. The eight original pianos have been cut down to four; the four original xylophones to two, etc. But its basic character has, I hope, remained. It has merely been made more concise.

Interpretively speaking, BALLET MECANIQUE was never intended to demonstrate (as has been erronously [sic] said) "the beauty and precision of machines". Rather it was to experiment with and thus, to demonstrate a new principle in music construction, that of "Time-Space", or in which the time principle, rather than the tonal principle, is held to be of main importance.

To demonstrate. Up until Strawinsky and Schoenberg, most contemporary music had been constructed, architecturally speaking, on the tonal principle. A sonata allegro movement, for example, spread out a tonality, departed from it in the development, returned again in the recapitulation -- usually with a vengeance. It is still an excellent principle. But it neglects "Time-Space".

Strawinsky attempted to move away from its iron grip by making his music "super-tonal" so to speak. Schoenberg, going to the opposite pole, destroyed tonality entirely by removing all tonal centers in the 12 tone system.

BALLET MECANIQUE, while utilizing (subconsciouly, for at the time this work was written, 12 tone-ism was unknown as such) both systems, concentrated on what I then called "the time canvas". Rather than to consider musical form as a series of tonalities, atonalities with a tonal center, or a tonal center at all, it supposed that music actually takes place in time; and that, therefore, time is the real construction principle, "stuff of music", as it unreels. It is the musician's "canvas". The tones which he uses, therefore, are merely his crayons, his colors. The "Time-Space" principle, therefore, is an aesthetic of "looking", so to speak, at a piece of music "all at once". One might propose, therefore, that it is a sort of "Fourth Dimension"-al way of looking at music; its constructive principles may, or may not have been touched in this work, but they have been attempted.

I always hesitate to give any "program" to any piece of music, preferring to have it speak for itself. However, and if this piece had any program beyond that outlined above, it would be towards the barbaric and mystic splendor of modern civilization; mathematics of the universe in which the abstraction of "the human sould" lives. More locally, the first "theme" may be considered that of mechanical scientific civilization; the second and third barbaric ones, not unrelated to the American continent, Indian, Negro. These plus the mathematical 2,3,4,5,6,7,8,7,6,5,4,3,2 principle, and "Time-Space" make up the musical body and spiritual outline of this work, written so many years ago. It has seemed strange, yet prophetic, to delve back into these pages written as a youth of 23-24.

George Antheil,
March 1953