Avant-garde composer George Antheil returns to the United States for a concert at Carnegie Hall to premiere his A Jazz Symphony and Ballet Mécanique to a somewhat bewildered audience. Ably reviewed by Provincetown Playhouse veteran and director of the New Playwrights Theatre, the Lithuanian-born Communist writer Emjo Basshe.

‘The Song of the Machine: George Antheil at Carnegie Hall’ by Emjo Basshe from the Daily Worker Saturday Supplement. Vol 4 No. 86. April 23, 1927.

(Author of “Earth” and “Adam Solitaire,” Director of the New Playwrights Theatre)

Playwright Finds Antheil’s Music Based on America, Africa, and Steel

On Sunday evening, April 11, an audience of more than 3000 people crowded into Carnegie Hall to take part in the birth or death of a new creative force in American music–George Antheil. This Trenton, N.J. youth has been hibernating in Paris the last few years, and according to reports his concerts have caused riots there and in Budapest.

The concert on Sunday night began with a String Quartet in one movement with alternating allegro-presto and andante motives. It was excellently performed by the Musical Art Quartet; but it failed to prove the composer’s contention that the tonality used is new to music or that it presented a novel problem in quartet writing. The Sonata for Violin, Piano and Drum came next with Sascha Jacobson at the violin and Mr. Antheil presiding first at the piano, then shifting to base drums. It is described by the composer as “a composite composition somewhat relative to the Picasso 1918 Cubist period.”

Futuristic Tinpan Alley.

The piano here is treated percussively against the violin which struggles heroically to maintain itself as a part of the duo. The thematic material here is often original, but snatches from such never-to-be-forgotten tidbits as “Nearer My God To Thee” and “In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree” and others are included. It was satirical, often acrid; as humorous as music usually permits itself to be. It was here that the audience began to giggle, forgetting of course, that it was laughing with the composer at the futuristic tin pan alley. Just before the end the composer abandoned the piano as inadequate and changed to the base drums, which, like most of the modern composers, he finds to be the most satisfactory of the percussion instruments.

The “Jazz Symphony,” written in 1925 for Paul Whiteman, is in one movement, and very short; but in the fifteen or so minutes that it played it gave one the feeling that at last here is a composer who has caught the beauty of pure Negro harmony. By discarding the sentimentality that has pervaded the school of music which has attempted to interpret the Negro in terms of music, he created a glorious piece of music, unforgettable and astounding. It was a double triumph, for the orchestra composed of the best Negro musicians and conducted by Allie Ross, performed the work perfectly.

America, Africa, Steel.

The tour de force of the evening, however was the “Ballet Mechanique.” Originally written to accompany a motion picture by Leger, (shown in New York this winter by the Film Associates) it was never used because the composer was not satisfied with the picture. It was planned in three parts, all allegro. Its motif is America, Africa, and Steel. The usual combination of orchestral instruments are discarded and in its place are ten concert grand pianos, one mechanical piano, xylophones, bass drums, thunder effects, an aeroplane propeller, electric bells, a contraption that imitates a riveting machine, fire sirens. Eugene Goosens conducted and a force of the best manipulators of these instruments took part.

Literally speaking “Ballet” in this case is a misnomer–this work could just as well be called a “Polytonal Poem” or a “Symphony in Dissonance,” for much of the meaning and original intention of the music is lost, since it was written to synchronize with the machine movements in the Leger picture. To those who have heard and seen both creations the music becomes more vital and understandable.

American to the Core.

In this composition Antheil discards all the laws of counterpoint, musical accent and cadence and builds up music that is American to the core: crude, bombastic, contra-lyrical. It has the vitality of the mythical pioneers of the West, its main theme is brazen and keyed in bravura style. It is a tuneful as a shoring engine, as melodious as a concrete mixer, as soothing as a factory whistle, but as important, and as inescapable. If at times it grew monotonous–not only to the stiff-shirts in the orchestra and the tier boxes, but also to the seventy-five centers in the galleries–well, millions of workers have to listen to this same theme, to the repeated argument of these engines all the days of their life. Not only listen but feed, nurse and cajole these monsters so they may keep on playing the merry tune over again. They cannot put on their ermine capes and high hats and strut to a waiting limousine.

This music is the heart beat of the machine; it is the music of our age; it is realistic, imitative, phonographic. If it doesn’t “get” you it is because you are saturated with it; if it pounds away and leaves you cold and flat in the end, don’t blame the music, lay your accusations at the door of the progenitors of this age and civilization. Its mission is not to rehabilitate you and “lift up your soul to higher planes.” In fact its charm (if you ask for it–and “music hath charm”) lies obviously in its great lack of it. The Christian Scientists are never going to adapt this music to their hymns!

Audience Is a Show.

Next to the music the most important thing at this affair was the audience in the galleries–at times it was more interesting than the music. This time there was no chance for them to sleep. Few kept their seats, they were on their toes all the time commenting, hissing, applauding, jeering, stamping their feet, shouting imprecations; they were alive! Nothing was lost to them. They participated every minute, while the dead heads below played with their platinum cuff buttons and sniffed at the perfumed bosoms of their concubines. There was certainly something symbolic, in the mass leaning forward like one man and debating whether the song emanating from the stage and filling their ears was not, after all, the bitter, bloodless, unhuman song of the workers. They knew that intellectual analysis and stop watch reasoning will never decide this point.

The critics next day smashed dozens of typewriters in the rush to condemn the prodigal for daring to go again the very old men of music. They forgot, however, that once upon a time a very great critic (his name? don’t ask!) called their very own Saint Ludwig Beethoven’s music, “Patchwork by a madman.”

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1927/1927-ny/v04-n086-new-magazine-apr-23-1927-DW-LOC.pdf