# The Criterion/Volume 4/Number 4/Antheil, 1924-1926

I
THANKS to a rare stroke of discretion, or rather two strokes on the part of two patrons of music, it has been possible (Paris, June to July, 1926) to hear most of the work of George Antheil in sequence, and thereby to revise, videlicet augment, one's estimate of this composer.
I see no reason to retract any of the claims made for him in an earlier Criterion notice. He has very greatly consolidated his position, and, during the past two years made important advances.
The new works demanding attention are:
* A symphony for five instruments (flute, bassoon, trumpet, trombone and alto.), the initiation, very possibly, of a new phase of chamber music, with Mr. Antheil in the role of Watteau, or some tonal equivalent.
* A string quartette, presented by The Quattuor Krettly, rather more difficult of analysis than the symphony, unless one has biographical data as follows: in 1924 Mr. Antheil made a string quartette. It was hastily produced, the author kept tearing it to pieces and re-doing it, up to the day of the concert, and finally 'reformed it altogether'.
It had, at the start, what his elders (the present writer included) used to regard as form (i.e. as that element is discernable in Mr. Antheil's own 1st Violin Sonata). The said element seemed to annoy Mr. Antheil, and he proceeded to remove it in the interest of some more arcane principle of unity.
This process of elimination had begun in the 2nd Violin Sonata. It continued in the early quartette to the final effacement of same, and the present quartette, now after several performances approved by so good a musician as ​Monsieur Krettly, is manifestly what Mr. Antheil was driving at two and a half years ago.
Krettly has got used to it. I console myself with the thought that Keats was at first considered incomprehensible because he omitted various moral fervours and axioms which the eighteenth century had got used to finding in poesy . . . in the favour of some element . . . conceivable to himself.
Technically Mr. Antheil has, in this quartette, avoided the smaller clichés. The polyphonic element in his composition continues its development in the Symphony in F (eighty-five instruments), and in this partially conservative work the composer shows his ample ability for dealing with the full orchestra. He avoids various habitual conclusions, and commits numerous innovations in the details of orchestration. It is a symphony on more or less accepted lines (voices from the audience murmuring: ‘reactionnaire sans le savoir’), a symphony with the usual slush left out, or even ‘a symphony debunked’. We suppose this is what Mr. Koussevitzky means when he complains that, ‘It is all here’ (tapping his forehead), ‘it has no heart’).
It should in any case terminate discussion of Mr. Antheil’s musical competence, and has, indeed, largely done so.
If none of the above works would have ‘made’ Mr. Antheil’s reputation, they all go to making it solid, and to establish the copiousness of his talents. None of them would give a reason for discussing him in a periodical not exclusively devoted to music; a competent musical chronicle would however record an innovation in chamber music, an addition to the literature of the string quartette, and a new symphony for large orchestra, which latter is a means ready to hand, and needing, probably, nutriment.
II
With the Ballet Mecanique we emerge into a wider ​circle of reference. I mean that this work definitely takes music out of the concert hall, meaning thereby that it deals with a phase of life not hitherto tackled by musicians and freighted before the act with reference to already existing musical reference.
Three years ago Antheil was talking vaguely of ‘tuning up’ whole cities, of ‘silences twenty minutes long in the form’, etc. One thought of it as mere or ‘pure’ speculation, the usual jejune aspiration of genius, and ‘one’ (one, at least, of those who heard the vague talk) dismissed it from his mind.
Now, after the three years, I do not in the least regret any then seeming hyperbole, or any comparison of Antheil and Stravinsky that I then made in the former’s favour.
With the performance of the Ballet Mecanique one can conceive the possibility of organising the sounds of a factory, let us say of boiler-plate or any other clangorous noisiness, the actual sounds of the labour, the various tones of the grindings; according to the needs of the work, and yet, with such pauses and durées, that at the end of the eight hours, the men go out not with frayed nerves, but elated—fatigued, yes, but elated.
I mean that we have here the chance, a mode, a music that no mere loudness can obliterate, but that serves us, as the primitive chanteys for rowing, for hauling on cables; ‘Blow the man down’ and such like; have served savages or simpler ages, for labours, ashore and afloat. And this is definitely a new musical act; a new grip on life by the art, a new period, a bigger break with the habits of acceptance than any made by Bach or by Beethoven, an age coming into its own, an art coming into its own, ‘and no mean labour’.
The ‘Sacre’ stands, but its cubes, solid as they are, are in proportion to the Ballet Mecanique as the proportions of architecture are to those of town-planning.
Technically, the fact is, that Mr. Antheil has used ​longer durations than any other musician has ever attempted to use . . . much longer durations.
‘Noces’ falls to pieces. After the Ballet it sounds like a few scraps of Wagner, a Russian chorale (quite good) a few scraps of Chopin, a few high notes ‘pianolistic’.
Technically, Mr. Antheil has discovered the Pleyela, and freed it from ignominy; it is now an instrument, not the piano’s poor ape. (I skip the details of the innovation.)
If in the Ballet Antheil has mastered these long ‘durées’, these larger chunks of time, in the third Violin Sonata, he has made a less obvious gain, for this Sonata thinks in time’s razor edge. Whether this shows incontestably on its written pages, I cannot say, but it does show in its playing by the composer and by Miss Olga Rudge, who has borne the brunt of presentation in all three sonatas.
This is not a simple question of playing ‘in time’ or even ‘in time with each other’.
It means that, via Stravinsky and Antheil and possibly one other composer, we are brought to a closer conception of time, to a faster beat, to a closer realisation or, shall we say, ‘decomposition’ of the musical atom.
The mind, even the musician’s mind, is conditioned by contemporary things, our minimum, in a time when the old atom is ‘bombarded’ by electricity, when chemical atoms and elements are more strictly considered, is no longer the minimum of the sixteenth century pre-chemists. Both this composer and this executant, starting with the forces and iterations of the 1st Violin Sonata have acquired—perhaps only half-consciously—a new precision. There is something new in violin writing and in violin playing. Violinists of larger reputation who looked at the earlier sonata and walked away, those who thought it ‘bizarre’, will possibly awake and find themselves a little out of date, and the initiative of the first performer, may in time receive its reward. There will be a new hardness and dryness in fashion, and the old oily slickness of the Viennese school ​will receive diminished applause. There may even be found those of severer taste who will prefer the distinct outline of a Ballet Mechanique as shown by the Pleyela role alone, or with the meagre allowance of mechanical sound offered on June 19th, to the seduction of cymbals and xylophones (July performance), or who will at least find it easier to comprehend in the former way, at the start, awaiting the composer’s next move, and believing that the vitality of music is in its lateral rather than its perpendicular movement.