New version of Ballet Mécanique with mechanized propellers and bells
conceived and realized by LOGOS Foundation.
(About Godfried-Willem Raes from LOGOS and their musicals robots, have a look here and here)
   
George Antheil (08.07.1900 - 12.02.1959) was a great admiror of the futurists ideas. Hence he introduced quite a variety of industrial noises in his orchestral music. The ballet mecanique, a ballet for machines, prescribes no less than three airplane propellers on stage together with a battery of seven industrial electric bells, some 16 player pianos, a siren and percussion. It was written between 1923 and 1924. All too often, orchestras performing this music fake these essential components either by subsituting them with percussion instruments, or even worse, by sampled sounds reproduced on loudspeaker channels. Needless to say that this goes against the composers original intentions, although during his entire lifetime he never got these components working as conceived. Just like Igor Strawinsky in his original version of Les Noces, he even never got the player piano's to play in sync... Nowadays it ought to become possible to realize all those ancient dreams, even though the composer during his lifetime has compromised his own ideas on many occasions. In some performances of the Ballet, large fans have been used and -as these devices are pretty noiseless- the composer had the players hold sticks against the blades... This clearly doesn't lead to anything like an airplane sound However, having working real airplane propellers on stage was and still is, not a trivial undertaking. The construction of these elements, such that they can safely be used in performances, was confined to the Logos Foundation as a collaborative project with the Ictus ensemble.