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
My collaboration in 2024 with Ballet Zürich dispensed with the eponymous film (which, in any case, Antheil was not involved with) and attempted to create embodiments through a focus on one musician (myself) and eighteen dancers. We arranged the music for solo piano and 64-channel playback to create a three-dimensional sonic experience surrounding the audience and to intensify the experience of time moving inexorably through the silences; and of the silences being relentlessly pulsed in eighth notes.
Figure 1: testing the software used for distributing the sound around the hall (Opernhaus Zürich, 2024)
Like any complex collaboration between many actors and within the administrative context of a busy opera house, this project did not permit certain types of experimentation characteristic of a research project. But using a 64-channel mixing board, 64 focused speakers, and an array of sub-woofers, we manipulated the original recording so that the sounds of the 23 instruments could be moved around the hall in real-time. This was particularly effective with the sirens, which gained in intensity by traveling through the hall in three dimensions. The pianola sounds were then set to fixed positions so that they appeared to each originate from a pre-determined location in the hall. Our purpose was an attempt to come as close as possible to Antheil’s dream of a lone pianist surrounded by mechanical instruments. Following this vision, sound engineers Paul Lehrman (Tufts University) and Raphael Paciorek (Opernhaus Zürich) created an immersive electronic “performance” of our version of Ballet mécanique. Simultaneously, I was working with the dancers and the choreographer. This video documents some of our work in rehearsals.
During the weeks leading up to the premiere, I continually experimented with new ways of performing silence. The choreography by Meryl Tankard gave primacy to Antheil’s assault on hearing as if the dancers were being attacked by walls of mechanized sound.1 This made the rests towards the end all the more remarkable, for their unexpected absences and their “loudness.”
Figure 2: Rehearsing Ballet mécanique in Zürich: my hands curl rapidly off the piano keys (inspired by Richter) to emphasize the precision start of a silence. The oversized jacket also catches the light, amplifying my gestures to the scale of the theater (author’s photo, 2024).
From the piano, I tried different means of embodying the silences, especially influenced by the Beethoven performances in Chapter 5. Gestures like Richter’s “reverse boxer” or Kissin’s “dentist” took on new strength when employed in Antheil’s modernist rests. No longer expressing Beethoven’s anguish nor the isolation of the “lonely prince,” these embodiments launched the thundering silences and granted the audience some insight into the speed of the notation and the internal pulse I was feeling (see the explanatory video above). These movements also came to embody the frenzy and restless precision of Antheil’s silences.
German composer Helmut Lachenmann writes about another “restless” silence:
The silence into which Nono’s late works lead us is a fortissimo of agitated perception. It is not the sort of silence in which human searching comes to rest, but rather one in which it is recharged with strength and the sort of restlessness which sharpens our senses and makes us impatient with the contradictions of reality. (Lachenmann, 1999, p. 27)
This fortissimo of agitated perception in Nono’s music arises from the complexity of the music, the denseness of its constant changes, and the technical difficulties of performing it. Antheil’s music is simpler, in architectonic blocks that are stacked and arranged in patterns. Yet the restlessness of the silences is very similar, sharpening our senses and heightening the contradictions of the environment. During these silences, the dancers also create (inadvertent) sounds with their moving bodies. These were intended more as markers for movement or for action rather than markers for silence but served also as a reminder of the disconnected, restless nature of these silences. Silences were also embodied by the dancers through posed attitudes, collapse, or frenetic motions. Contrary to our expectations that silence should map to stillness in the choreography, it transpired that high-intensity gestures afforded meaning to the stillness of the music, and that these gestures offered unexpected ways of communicating Antheil’s rests to the audience.
As with Cage’s 4’33”, the stillness anticipated in conventional musical performances is subverted, echoing his use of high-intensity gestures that articulate the rests in unexpected manners. In Cage’s silence, every rustle, cough, or murmur heightens the listener’s awareness, emphasizing the restlessness and connectivity of the environment, making the audience acutely aware of the sounds that are always present but seldom listened to. Similarly, Antheil’s silent intervals act not just as a negation of music but as an exposition, drawing the audience’s attention to the “noise” that surrounds the supposed stillness.
Working almost a century later than Antheil but concentrating on similar themes, the South African experimental audio artist and DJ Jacques van Zyl writes about his own music:
In a profoundly unsilent world, noise stands in for silence. Amplified to a roar, stretched, compressed and filtered, it becomes a thundering black backdrop to how small experience becomes by having to filter out detail […] On the other hand, black noise is a space—the negative roar left behind after the sudden ending of any continuous sound field. It’s not unlike the state sought in the practice of meditation, but more immanent and beyond one’s control, and commonly only of short duration. (Zyl, 2018)
Zyl’s musical idea merges with the negative roar of Antheil’s silence: the thundering black backdrop that shrinks experience. What Antheil might like us to hear is the negative roar, the ultimately uncontrollable. And that is much like experiencing Zyl’s black noise after hearing extremely loud sounds. For that reason, I contend that these silences do not serve a connecting function. They are not, without an element of knot.