Ballet Mécanique

The Ballet Mécanique (1924) was a project of the American composer George Antheil (who lived in Paris) and the filmmaker Fernand Léger, with the participation of Man Ray.

From a musical point of view, it was a piece for mechanical instruments that play without human intervention. Given the times, it's a typically Dadaist idea, as is the film itself. However, it's difficult to say which of the two worked on the other's work. Léger claimed to have started the film as early as 1923, but other sources say he contacted Antheil when the latter was already composing the music.

Similarly, it's difficult to understand what went wrong, but there must not have been much communication between the two because, in the end, the music lasted 30 minutes and the film only 17.

Perhaps Antheil got carried away, but it's undeniable that the two works are connected. At the film's premiere, without music, in Vienna in 1924, explicit reference was made to Antheil's music.
Since then, however, the two works have been presented separately, with one exception in 1935, when the film was accompanied by a live piano reduction. The main difficulty seems to lie in the fact that with the means of the time, it was impossible to synchronize film and music of this type, even if performed by human instrumentalists, which was not the composer's intention. These intentions, however, were destined to remain on paper simply because at the time it was not possible to build mechanisms that, even if not connected, remained perfectly synchronized over long periods.

In concert, the ballet is created by mechanical musical instruments: automatic pianos, electric bells, mechanical marimbas, propeller motors, and other machines.
As you might imagine, such an instrumentation cannot produce a traditional score. The piece is extremely percussive and full of off-pitch sounds.

The 1927 orchestration includes 18 player pianos (automatic roll pianos) in four parts, two normal pianos, three xylophones, seven electric bells, three propeller motors, a siren, four speakers, and a tam-tam. That same year, Antheil arranged the first part for roll piano, which was performed at the "Deutsche Kammermusik Baden-Baden 1927" (the roll has since been lost), while in 1953 he created a shortened version with a reduced ensemble.

The film and score were only assembled in the 1990s. The 1927 version was only performed in 1999 by the University of Massachusetts and the Lowell Percussion Ensemble using MIDI systems with a central computer that sent the data to all the machines, ensuring synchronization. In practice, it was a gigantic MIDI file with 1,240 measures, 630 tempo changes, and approximately 200,000 notes (NB: divided into 24 parts).

In 2000, the music and the film were definitively brought together, and a DVD has also been available since 2005.

What we show you in this first video is the "live" performance. of music, with machines that perform the score live without the film, installed in 2006 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC and created by Paul Lehrman and LEMUR (League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots).
The video is about 41 MB, but it's worth it: the piece is historic and full of energy.

The second video is the original 1924 film, restored.

Su wikipedia trovate anche una breve analisi musicale del brano. Qui un sito dedicato all’opera.

George Antheil – Ballet Mécanique in una esecuzione totalmente meccanica (MIDI)

This is the original film, restored

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