Home 1. Introduction 2. Markers 3. Archive 4. Audible Markers 5. Visible Markers 6. Notational Markers 7. Conclusion
6.1. On Ballet mécanique 6.2. The Rests 6.3. Performing with Ballet Zürich 6.4. Markers
RELEVANT TERMINOLOGY EMPLOYED IN THIS CHAPTER
Silence is perceived stillness or quietness. There is no true silence, so in this context, silence means relative or sensed silence.
Framing can be created by the (audience) silence surrounding the work; conversely, sounds can frame silences. The edges of the frame may be indicated by markers.
Non-playing refers to the intentional absence of sound production by the performer.
Markers are signals used to impose silence, summon silence, or describe the perception of silence. Markers can also include audience rituals, architectural elements, temporality, and sensory cues that influence our experience of silence.
Markers are not exclusive to silence; they can also signal sounds, traditions, behaviors, actions.
Embodiment is the overall collection of active performer movements, gestures, postures, and facial expressions, as well as passive performer choices such as hairstyle and costume.
Gesture is the movement and alignment of arms and legs, fingers and toes, torso, head, and facial expression, in relation to the instrument.
Pianola is a self-playing instrument which operates on compressed air. The notes are controlled by rolls of paper with punched holes that activate individual keys.
The original Ballet mécanique (1924) by George Antheil is a twenty-minute composition for sixteen mechanical pianos and seven percussionists: mostly a deafening cacophony including alarm bells, airplane propellers, and a fire siren. After eighteen hectic minutes of rhythmic pandemonium, the players suddenly fall silent despite an annoying ringing bell, which seems to last interminably. Then, that too falls silent after a brief piano riff. This awesome silence is the first of many, each progressively longer and more disorienting. The silences are notated in very fast units of time and are astonishing in their effect.
Antheil’s use of brutal, measured silence gave me the idea for this dissertation. It encouraged me to question how musical silence is made visible, what it consists of, and what its attributes are. I am particularly fascinated by Antheil’s assertion about the silences that “here I had time moving without touching it” (Antheil in Whitesitt, 1989, p. 105).
This is a compelling idea: is it possible that by employing silence, a composer could be pushing time forward without acting upon it?
The markers for these silences—whether visual, as in the inert mechanical instruments on stage, or notational, as in the meticulous scoring of the rests—serve as a key focus of this chapter. These markers do more than denote absence: they actively configure the audience’s anticipation and reception of the audible, effectively making silence a palpable, agitated presence that is as precisely composed as any musical note. This chapter will investigate the role of these silences within Antheil’s work, examining how they function, not as gaps, but as integral, forceful, material components of the composition. The notated rests are emphatic and not connective; they may be described as “nots” in the performance, as sections of black noise, as alternative communications of frenetic pulse and speed.
I will use an example drawn from my own performance practice, in which I collaborated with a choreographer to find new ways of embodying both noise and silence in this artwork. The chapter concludes with a section on markers.
6.1 On Ballet mécanique
Before analyzing the silences, here is a glimpse into Antheil’s own aesthetic as a pianist and his very physical embodiments at the instrument. This description, published in his autobiography, is drawn from the time he was composing Ballet mécanique in the early 1920s:
As you […] near the home stretch, you think, “What a way to make a living!” Later, when the piece is finished and you’ve gotten up and bowed and sat down again and mopped up your brow and your all-important hands, you think, ‘I wish I were a prizefighter. This next round with the Steinway would be a lot more comfortable in fighting trunks…’ In the intermission, between group one and group two, you go to your dressing room and change every stitch you have on you: underwear, shirt, tie, socks, pants, and tails. Your other clothes are soaking wet […] You are twenty-two years old, trained down to the last pound like a boxer. You do not overeat, smoke, or drink, and you work six to eight hours a day at a piano with a special keyboard in which the keys are so hard to press down that when you come to your concert grand at night you seem, literally, to be riding a fleecy cloud, so easy is its keyboard action. Before each concert, of course, you eat nothing at all. (Antheil, 1945, pp. 3–4)
This text, exaggerated as it is, gives a clear idea of both Antheil’s disciplined practice and his onstage extravagance. The comparison to boxing is no accident, as he was notorious for his aggressive approach to the instrument and the dramatic embodiment of his musical ideas. About the composition itself, he wrote:
As I saw it, my Ballet mécanique (properly played!) was streamlined, glistening, cold, often as musically silent as interplanetary space, and also often as hot as an electric furnace, but always attempting at least to operate on new principles of construction beyond the normal fixed (since Beethoven’s Ninth and Bruckner) boundaries. […] it was a ‘try’ towards a new form, new musical conception, extending, I think, into the future. (Antheil, 1945, p. 140)
The original version of Ballet mécanique is very rarely performed. Antheil’s 1924 composition was so radical and so badly received that he felt compelled to re-write it in 1953, reducing it to a shadow of its former self. In doing so, he completely suppressed his avant-garde silences. The revised version is shorter, less hectic, more restrained in its instrumentation, and shows a strong influence of movie music (he was working in Hollywood in the 1950s). The original version was forgotten and remained unperformed until a revival in 2000. Antheil thus never got the credit he deserved for his radical rests, because no one ever heard them.1
The two existing published versions are each problematic. The 1924 original involves 16 mechanical pianos (which can be played by midi instruments now) and nearly unplayable virtuosic notations. Meanwhile, the 1953 version is fun to listen to and perform, but has been trimmed of most of its avant-garde repetitions, its very long blocks of noisy sound, and all of its silences. In 2013, the SinusTon Festival in Magdeburg, Germany, commissioned me and Paul Lehrman to make an arrangement focused on the sounds and the electronics. Subsequent versions were refined for the Société Musique Contemporaine de Québec in 2017 and Ballet Zürich in 2024.
Antheil’s mechanistic vision inspired Lehrman and me to create our new arrangement of Ballet mécanique. I took the original score and shortened parts of it, focusing on Antheil’s most intricate and virtuosic piano sound, on the detailed xylophone parts, and on the dramatic eighth-note pulse that underlies the structure. Antheil scholar and MIDI-expert Paul Lehrman created the sound files for each of the instruments. Percussion parts were based on recordings made in Jordan Hall, Boston. Others were created digitally. I recorded the piano track in 2023 at Tufts University. The result is a 23-instrument digital recording. A 24th track is the click track for the pianist, which I hear via a discreet earpiece, and that allows me to perform live in sync with the digital instruments. One of the problems that the arrangement addresses is the speed of certain instruments, which cannot be played at that tempo by human musicians. This includes my piano part, so that sometimes I assist and sometimes I am assisted by the digital performers to achieve an otherwise impossible level of virtuosity onstage.
