Introduction: What the heck is the Ballet Mécanique???

	George Antheil and a "propellor" contraption and rack of electric bells used in the notorious 1927 Carnegie Hall performance of Ballet mécanique

In 1924, an American living in Paris named George Antheil composed a piece called Ballet mécanique. It called for three xylophones, four bass drums, a tamtam (gong), two pianos, a siren, three airplane propellors, seven electric bells, and 16 synchronized player pianos.

It was never performed with that instrumentation during the composer's lifetime. In fact, until 1999, it was never performed. But now, thanks to computers, MIDI, and microprocessor-controlled player pianos, it can be.

The world premiere of this piece, in its original instrumentation, took place in the Concert Hall at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, under the baton of Jeffrey Fischer, on Thursday, November 18, 1999.

Also on the program were several world premieres of pieces for multiple player pianos, and performances by the UMass Lowell Percussion Ensemble.

The concert was Webcast live on .org.

A CD of the music on that concert is now available on the Electronic Music Foundation label. Listen to samples of the CD here.
A video of the concert is included as an "extra" with the documentary film about the Ballet mécanique, Bad Boy Made Good.

Subsequent performances now number over two dozen:

• The second performance took place at Carnegie Hall in New York, on April 2, 2000, by the American Composers Orchestra under the baton of Dennis Russell Davies.
• The third performance was by the San Francisco Symphony, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, on June 11, 2000.
• The Hermes Ensemble then performed the piece in Antwerp, Belgium, on August 26, 2000. They performed it again on September 1, 2005.
• On March 18, 2001, the Candian premiere took place at the University of Victoria, British Columbia.
• The piece came back to Massachusetts, and was performed by Gil Rose and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project at Symphony Hall on May 3, 2001.
• In May, 2002, Ensemble '88 performed the piece (with two custom-modified grand player pianos) in Maastricht, The Netherlands.
• The German premiere was held on August 17, 2002, in Essen, as part of the Rühr Klavierfestival using MIDI files created by Dr. Jürgen Hocker and Paul Lehrman and featuring two custom-modified grand player pianos along with a host of Yamaha Disklaviers. Audience demand was so high they had to play it twice!
• The first performance of the newly-realized piece with the Murphy/Léger film "Ballet mécanique" took place on November 13, 2002, at the Percussive Arts Society's International Conference in Columbus, Ohio, and was repeated at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore on February 17, 2003.
• The Société de musique contemporaine du Québec performed the piece in Montreal on March 2, 2003.
• In March, 2004, the London Sinfonietta took Antheil's score and the Murphy/Léger film on a five-city tour of England, starting with a sold-out performance at the Royal Festival Hall. The following spring, the group took it to the continent, performing in Spain, Italy, Holland, and Belgium, as well as the UK.
• In January, 2005, it was performed by Steven Stucky (who soon after won the Pultizer Prize for composition) and Ensemble X at the Light In Winter Festival in Ithaca, NY.
• From March through May, 2006, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, played host to a massive Ballet mécanique installation, which performed the piece—using 16 grand player pianos made by QRS and robotic percussion made by the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots—twice daily with no human intervention.
• The robotic installation was mounted in December 2007 at the Wolfsonian Museum in Miami Beach, Florida, and played twice daily for ten days. Four Yamaha Disklaviers and 4 Clavinovas handled the player piano parts.
• The robotic orchestra. featuring 8 Disklaviers, provided the musical accompaniment for a new play about George Antheil and Hedy Lamarr called "Frequency Hopping," by Elyse Singer, which ran in May and June 2008, at 3-Legged Dog in New York City. Two special "Antheil's Legacy" concerts featured the first performance of the score by the robotic orchestra with the Murphy/Léger film.
• The Midwest premiere of the piece took place March 3, 2009, at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance in Chicago, with the FulcrumPoint New Music Project.
• The Ballet mécanique will return to Boston on November 13, 2009, when the Boston Modern Orchestra Project plays it again, at Jordan Hall at the New England Conservatory. The piece will be recorded for an all-Antheil SACD release in 2010.

  
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