Ballet Mecanique
During the nineteen twenties, the world was in the midst of change. The world has just recovered from the first Great War, and jazz music was entering its state of childhood. As technology evolved, so did the music of the times. People were searching for a new style of music. What they got was something extremely radical and revolutionary. What spawned out of the romantic period was an era of groundbreaking ideas. The boundaries of what people perceived as music were stretched and pushed to its limits.
People began to create new forms of music. They stretched the style of traditional classical music and turned it on its head. One such composer, who dared to make his mark in this avant-garde style of music, was George Antheil.
George Antheil(1900-1959), was an American composer. Born in Trenton, New Jersey, he was the son of Polish immigrants. He first established a career as a concert pianist, mostly in Europe, but shortly thereafter also attracted notice for his avant-garde compositions. He was influenced strongly by such composers like Stravinsky. Antheil was one of the first modernist musicians. He is considered, in certain realms of discussion, as “the most notorious American Composer of the 1920’s (Whitesitt xvii).” Antheil spent most of his youth around Europe training as a concert pianist. In the mid twenties, he began experimenting with different sounds and mechanisms. He wrote pieces such as the Airplane Sonata, which was a piece experimenting with objects as instruments. This piece, as well as a few of his other sonatas, launched his career into the abstract. In 1924, Antheil compiled a piece of music destined to change the face of classical music, the Ballet Mecanique.
Antheil began to perform his piece to audiences in Paris. Crowds had a very angry reaction to the performance, and riots were not uncommon (Lamb 13). Antheil even mentions that a few of his close friends attended his first show and were...
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