The 1927 concert of George Antheil's music at Carnegie Hall, hyped by the New York press to a degree that seems unimaginable today ("Ballet Mécanique to Din Ears of New York -- Makes Boiler Factory Seem as Quiet as Rural Churchyard"), was something of a fiasco. The audience responded to the airplane propellers in Ballet mécanique by throwing paper airplanes in the hall, and critic Deems Taylor famously hoisted a white flag on the end of a walking stick. Yet both Copland and Virgil Thomson considered Antheil a genius, and ...
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The 1927 concert of George Antheil's music at Carnegie Hall, hyped by the New York press to a degree that seems unimaginable today ("Ballet Mécanique to Din Ears of New York -- Makes Boiler Factory Seem as Quiet as Rural Churchyard"), was something of a fiasco. The audience responded to the airplane propellers in Ballet mécanique by throwing paper airplanes in the hall, and critic Deems Taylor famously hoisted a white flag on the end of a walking stick. Yet both Copland and Virgil Thomson considered Antheil a genius, and the memory of the concert never quite went away. Antheil made a new version of Ballet mécanique in the 1950s, losing the player piano parts and some of the electric bells, but keeping the airplane propellers and siren. Even the 1927 concert had backed off on some of the work's original specifications, which called for 16 player pianos. That version finally received its "world premiere" in 1999 in a computer realization at the University of Massachusetts, but the way was paved for it by...
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