The Ballet began to seem to me like some monstrous abstract beast, battling with the nerves of the audience, and I began to wonder which would win out….
The opposition reached its climax, though, when the loud-speaker began to function. It made as much noise as a dozen airplanes, and no amount of shouting could drown it completely. One fat bald old gentleman who had been particularly disagreeable would not be balked by this, however, and to the glee of the audience, lashed out his umbrella, opened it and pretended to be struggling against the imaginary gale of wind from the electric fans. His gesture was immediately copied by many more people in the audience until the theatre seemed decked with quite a sprinkling of black mushrooms.
Of course, when the Ballet was over, George got an ovation which was greater than the cat-calls, for everyone was willing to applaud a man who had at least accomplished something. He bowed and blushed and blushed and bowed and all his friends were very proud of him.
In the “Manifest der Musico-Mechanico” he published in De Stijl in 1924 (but wrote in Berlin in 1922), Antheil had envisioned a future music enriched with new sonics through the use of mechanical reproduction, a prediction that his experiments with synchronized multiple instruments and player-piano technology would encourage and support:
We shall see orchestral machines with a thousand new sounds, with thousands of new euphonies, as opposed to the present day’s simple sounds of strings, brass, and woodwinds. It is only a short step until all [musical performance] can be perforated onto a roll of paper. Of course, we will find sentimental people who will object that there will then be no more of these wonderful imprecisions in performance. But, dear friends, these can be added to the paper roll! Do not object; you can have what you want.
At that time the paper roll and the player piano were the most reliable mechanisms for accomplishing his ends. But the player piano, which had accounted for more than half of all pianos manufactured in the United States in 1919, was already in steep decline as the new technology of radio emerged to replace it, providing a far larger range of musical performances from an instrument that required no training or effort to operate. Five thousand radios sold in 1920 became 2.5 million sold in 1924; 30 radio stations in the United States in 1922 had become 606 radio stations in the United States by 1929. In 1932, with the disaster of the Great Depression, Americans bought only two thousand player pianos.
Player pianos might be obsolete. The player-piano roll, however, was an early system of digital control, like the punched-card control system of the early-nineteenth-century Jacquard loom from which it ultimately derived. Antheil did not forget its usefulness. “And what will the music of the future be?” he asked in an essay written in Tunis during the summer following the Paris Ballet mécanique performance. “It will be machinery… never fear that. But silent machinery, dreams, spaces which the heart cannot fill.”
His Ballet mécanique encountered a far more hostile reception in New York in 1927 than it had in Paris in 1926. Donald Friede, a wealthy young American publisher who had the unusual distinction of having been thrown successively out of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, invited Antheil to give a concert in Carnegie Hall, assumed all expenses, and assured Antheil he would make a profit on the venture. Antheil agreed and arrived with Boski in March 1927 for the 10 April event.
Boski was amazed at New York; it seemed to her both remote and ultramodern:
When I first came to New York with George on that famous Ballet Mecanique outing, we were often taken to night clubs, speakeasies, to Harlem, all of which left me with a feeling of a fascinating, rather savage land, an ancient Babylon projected into the future. The skyscrapers were like deep canyons, and New York had a particular, deep acrid smell, fanned by the wind from the river, steam heat coming out from underneath the pavement like so many fires and smoke coming from Hades….
I could not get over the “newness” of everything in N.Y. Furniture, rugs, entrance halls with doormen in elegant uniforms, the buildings all new (at least where we lived) and the smell of newness. Like tomorrow. It was really futuristic, at least the way some European artists visualized the cities of the future.
Friede, at twenty-five in 1927 a year younger than Antheil, was good at publicity and spared no expense. Ford Madox Ford wrote a profile of Antheil for Vanity Fair. Man Ray and Berenice Abbott photographed the heralded young composer. Miguel Covarrubias and William Cotton drew caricatures. James M. Cain, at that time an editorial writer for the New York World, panned the concert in advance, sight unseen, then reversed himself and praised it after meeting the Antheils and sitting through a rehearsal. “The eleven grand pianos,” Friede writes—one for Antheil, ten for his slaved counterparts—“made a magnificent picture in the huge Welte-Mignon [piano] studios…. Even the mechanical problems proved to be not too difficult. We found an electrician who undertook to make the battery of electric bells that we needed. We commissioned a wind machine with a regulation airplane propeller. And we started our search for a real fire siren.” They had more difficulty with the Jazz Symphony, since it turned out that the pianist and conductor W. C. Handy couldn’t read an orchestra score.
The concert sold out within twenty-four hours of its announcement. “Everybody wanted to meet Antheil,” Friede notes, which meant almost nightly parties during the Antheils’ entire stay in New York. The most memorable, says Friede, was at “Theodore Dreiser’s enormous studio on Fifty-seventh Street,” where Dreiser pumped Antheil dry of information about his music and his life. More intimately, a Harlem choir led by the composer and choirmaster Hall Johnson crowded into Friede’s apartment one evening and sang spirituals until guests and chorus both were exhausted.
Unintentionally, Friede had paved the way for disaster with all his publicity. “The trouble was that I was doing for a musical event what I would normally do for a book. And I did not realize that one by one I was alienating all the critics, all the people who were really important to [Antheil], all the people who had contributed toward making it possible for him to write his music without any financial worries, by turning a serious performance into a circus.”
The performance itself, on a Sunday evening, was something of a circus. The real airplane propeller in use in the performance had been aimed downstage, directly at the audience, instead of upstage, where the blast of air it generated could collide and disperse. “When it reached full power,” writes Friede, “it was disastrous. People clutched their programs, and women held onto their hats with both hands. Someone in the direct line of the wind tied a handkerchief to his cane and waved it wildly in the air in a sign of surrender.” The percussionist quickly slowed the motor, “but the damage had been done. Laughter is contagious, and besides we had spent weeks building up the fact that there had been riots in Paris at the first performance of this number. Now everybody… wanted to get into the act. The riot they put on, however, was completely synthetic. [The conductor] turned to glare at the noisemakers, and they shut up at once. Then the more conservative members of the audience decided that they had had enough. They started to leave in droves. It was an agonizing experience for Antheil, and I, back in my box once more, could not help but feel for him. I knew he wished, as I did most fervently, that we had never heard of each other.”
Antheil was devastated, not least because of the reports he knew Mrs. Bok would hear and read. He wrote to her the next day, mentioning a second concert scheduled for Wednesday that was nearly sold out as well. “The unheard-of viciousness of the critical press,” he warned his patron, “which even went as far as prevarication in minimizing even the scandal of the performance, which was a great one… has earned me… no doubt justly from their viewpoint… the suspicion of the concert agencies, and scotched for the moment my return to America this autumn under any except circus auspices.” He had, he said, “no prospect except that of a sticky summer in Paris as a recreation from all this rehearsing, hatreds, ridicule, strain of appearing in public, etc. Worse, worse, worst of all there is no prospect now of my coming over in my piano concerto next season and earning some money. They do not want that… they want sensations, and I won’t do it at any cost.”