De Stijl 2 1921-1932

[p. 455]

My ballet mécanique
Georges Antheil

My Ballet Mecanique is the new FOURTH DIMENSION of music.

My Ballet Mecanique is the first piece of music that has been composed OUT OF and FOR machines, ON EARTH.

My Ballet Mecanique is the first piece of music that has found the best forms and materials lying inert in a medium that ASVA MEDIUM is mathematically certain of becoming the greatest moving factor of the music of future generations.

My Ballet Mecanique is the first attaining of a form that is NOT TONAL.

My Ballet Mecanique is the first music ON EARTH that has its very germ of life in the new fourth-dimensional phenomena wherein TIME FUNCTIONING IN MUSIC DIFFERS FROM ORDINARY TIME and the series of deductive and also purely physical phenomena that follow it.

My Ballet Mecanique is the first TIME-FORM on earth. My Ballet Mecanique is neither tonal, nor atonal. In fact it is of no kind of tonality at all. It has nothing to do with tonality. It is made of time and sound...the two materials, FUNDAMENTAL materials, that music is made of.

In music there is nothing else, except TIME and SOUND, and the physical and psychic CONCEPT of these vibrating the human organism.

Anything else is literary, and does not belong to pure music.

For instance my ballet Mecanique has absolutely no forte or piano moments. It is MERELY PLAYED LOUD ENOUGH TO BE HEARD.

My Ballet Mécanique has nothing to do with fff or ppp. That is literary, mystical, religious, hands pressed to the heart.

Music, as I repeat a thousand times, has nothing to do with all this. Musical emotion can have no connection with the literary. It must come out of the finest things within itself.

My Ballet Mecanique comes out of the first and principle stuff of music...TIME-SPACE.

The whole problem of music today, as the whole world knows, is FORM.

I believe that all the forms today are merely parades and arrangements, derived from a tonal nuclei: section A against section B, with section C added thereto...all with slight overlappings. Parades. Various formations. Interminglings. In my eyes it is impossible to give further consideration to the tonal forms.

Likewise the atonal, which to me seems quite as tonal as the first tonal laws. Il am certain that the people who have decided that they can evolve new forms out of the tonal, will find that Beethoven, who did likewise, has finished their work for them long ago. The innocents believe that in the difference between tonality and atonality lies the phenomena out of which the new forms will be created.

For it is only out of new phenomena in art, that the nuclei of the new forms lie.

I am, perhaps, too sophisticated to try to finish that which has been absolutely finished by greater and kinder talents before me.

And with this one stroke is all of the moderne Central European music eliminated for me.

And because the music of modern France, America, and Italy relies mainly upon its charm (as Strawinsky tells me he always and fundamentally searches) and its intelligence in clearing away the mass of music rubbish that accumulated after Wagner...it is even less interesting to me. I can only recommnet it is an antidote to Central Europe...or Central Europe as an antidote to it. Kill one another by the most poisonous methods if you please...

[p. 456]

My forms are the first complete forms that have come out of the only forms out of which musical forms can be made...TIME. Is not TIME, and TIME ALONE the SOLE canvas of music? Notes, vibrations, and sound are merely our drawing pencils...our paint-box. Can you dare to deny that TIME is the sole canvas of music? Can you dare to deny that the forms come out of the canvas, and not the crayon? Can you dare to deny that the crayon is merely the human instrument for indicating the spaces EXISTING ONLY UPON THE CANVAS...BEFORE THEY ARE INDICATED.

Can you any longer dare to say that music is made of TONE ans not of TIME.

Will you any longer write music in which TIME is merely a by-product of TONALITY, or TONE.

Again I ask you...do you dare to deny that the canvas of music is TIME and not TONALITY...do you mean to say that the very spaces in which you are working, and the finished space which is your goal...does not interest you fundamentally, above all other things.

Does not its plan, and its musical phenomena in which it differs from ordinary TIME...in a word, the root of its miracle, the secret of its existence, the germ of its life, the cool beauty of its plan and mathematics, the tension of its spaces, the beating of our hearts (for our hearts do not FEEL...they BEAT), in a word the very REASON of music, the ultimate FORM...does not this interest you, EXCEPT AS A BY-PRODUCT.

IMPROVISORS!

As I have already said, my Ballet Mecanique has under no circumstances, an dat no point a single motion or motion or movement that does not come out of TIME.

For the first time on earth TIME have been USED under its fundamental principles in the single art in which it is fundamentally conceived...or better, in the single art which is fundamentally conceived out of TIME.

TIME is inflexible, rigid, beautiful!

TIME is the very stuff out of which life is made.

My Ballet Mecanique has a closer connection to life than any of the tonal music that preceded it. But it is a musical and not a literary connection.

In my Ballet Mecanique, I offer you, for the first time, music hard and beautiful as a diamond.

The Ballet Mecanique differs from the work of every living composer in that it trys to attain a single and gigantic form. All others simply write pieces that last only a few moments on after the other. They write suites, and call them sonatas, operas, symphonies...all these parades are of no consequence to me.

Some time in the future we will have forms which will not last a half hour, nor an hour, but eight hours, sixteen hours, or two days. This is not romancing. The reason lies in the fact that we have discovered THE NEW AND TRUE DIMENSION OF MUSIC AND ITS BASIC PRINCIPLES WHICH INSURE LARGER AND ALMOST ENDLESS FORMS.

The Ballet Mecanique is the first piece IN THE WORLD to be conceived in one piece without interruption, like a solid shaft of steel.

I am now writing a work which is four hours long and without interruption or the break of a second's time.

After that I shall write one which is ten hours long I started with mechanism and pieces that were only a minute long.

Even these produced hysteria and riots. The time was too short, and the nuclei too explosive. A few concerts throughout Europe and I retired to my laboratory. Now I hope to present you not with an explosion, but the FOURTH DIMENSION...THE FIRST PHYSICAL REALIZATION OF THE FOURTH DIMENSION.

I am not presenting you with an abstraction. I am presenting you with a PHYSICALITY LIKE SEXUAL INTERCOURSE.

Paris, Mai 1925.