the life of the machines - Vladimir Stoupel

More than by war and religious and political upheavals,
the experience of life in the modern age has been
radically changed by industrialization. The intrusion
of machines into the world of man, the increasing
dominance of machines in industrial processes are
already reflected in paintings and the literature of
the nineteenth century. However, in music – the most
romantic of all the arts – a consideration of the social as
well as the material and intellectual implications of this
change took place only much later, after the First World
War. In the 1920s – that “marvelously masculine epoch,”
as the machine fetishist Fernand Léger referred to them
– the mechanical era found its way with vehemence into
the concert and opera houses. An opera like Machinist
Hopkins by Schreker-pupil Max Brand took the opera
houses by storm at the end of the 1920s and boasted
performance statistics equaled only by Krenek’s Johnny
spielt auf (“Johnny Strikes Up”); Honegger’s locomotive
piece Pacific 213 (1923) and Alexander Mossolov’s The
Iron Foundry (1926-28) caused sensations around the
world. George Antheil’s Ballet mécanique (1924) is
considered the high point of the musical occupation
with the world of the machines. The exploration of the
possibilities of the quasi-mechanical organization of
musical parameters (ostinato repetition and a blocklike
stringing together of rhythmically dominated
elements), which Antheil tried out in his previous piano
and chamber music works of the early 1920s, were
realized in it on a large scale. With the use of propeller
sounds and alarm bells, Antheil did his best to live up to
his reputation as the iconoclastic “Bad Boy of Music”:
ten years after Stravinsky’s Sacre, the musical world
needed a new scandal.
The topos of machine music exerted – also less ostensibly
– a substantial influence on the generation of the
post-Romantics to whose intellectual inventory it belonged,
as did jazz, the archaic rhythms of Stravinsky’s
folkloristic works, atonality, and dodecophony. However,
from a later point of view, the fascination of this
generation of composers for the cold life of the machines
often seems to be interpreted too one-sidedly
and too positively from the perspective of Russian
Futurism and Suprematism. The compilation of important
works of the piano repertoire primarily from the
first half of the twentieth century that is planned here
therefore desires to direct attention to the extremely
eclectic, often ambivalent attitude of the artists toward
the pulse-setters of the new rhythm of life, as the machines
were understood to be.
Antheil’s machine-inspired piano sonatas and chamber
music works of the early 1920s were written under the
impression of two dreams from 1922 in which the horrors
of the machinery of destruction of the First World
War were projected on to the apocalyptical scenery
of a new, global twilight of mankind: “Vast amounts
of dead and dying machines of some tremendous future
war on a battlefield of a final cataclysmic struggle,
ruined, overturned, blown to bits.” In contrast to
this, Władysław Szpilman’s piano suite The Life of the
Machines: “In it, the musical transfer of that which perpetuates
itself mechanically is not informed by power
and threat; rather these are good-humoredly humming,
cheeky, sometimes sardonic machines, like come-to-life
clockwork mechanisms: they attain their own individual
characteristic life, they interact.” (Günter Herzfeld) The
suite was composed in 1933 after Szpilman interrupted
his piano studies with Artur Schnabel in Berlin as a result
of the political situation, in the year of the National
Socialist seizure of power with which the countdown
began for the new world war foreseen by Antheil. For
Szpilman, the brilliant pianist and composer of Jewish
descent, it led into the purgatory of his fight for survival
in the Warsaw ghetto – brilliantly and touchingly filmed
by Roman Polanski in The Pianist.
That what Antheil asserted about the modern piano
literature after Chopin and Liszt – it “is essentially
virtuoso, exploring the limits of the modern keyboard,
as well as the limits of the composer’s invention in
the purely musical sense” – points directly to Conlon
Nancarrow, the great and for many years unrecognized
pioneer of mechanical piano music, who after being
discovered in the 1970s had a lasting influence on
America’s and Europe’s avant-garde. With his punchcard-controlled
pianolas, he defied the “natural” borders
of the living performer, and explored the field of
pianistic illusionism with ultra-virtuoso, polyrhythmic,
and polymetric cascades of sound. Few contemporary
piano virtuosos have picked up Nancarrow’s gauntlet,
have measured their technique against the piano transcriptions
of his works for pianola – and have thus provided
the proof that, a century after Scriabin, Godowsky,
Leschetitzki, Medtner, Hoffmann, and Paderewski, the
Gradus ad Parnassum has yet to be surmounted.
Frank Harders-Wuthenow
Mechanical pianos originally served only for the
reproduction of actual piano music – with results that
were far superior to the first acoustical recordings.
It was therefore logical that important pianists (for
example, Ferrucio Busoni, Josef Hofmann, and Sergei
Rachmaninoff) recorded their playing on piano rolls
(that were played back on mechanical pianos). For the
American Conlon Nancarrow this resulted in the just as
unconventional as revolutionary decision to exploit the
mechanical piano as a novel medium of composition.
With the aid of a special punching tool, he developed
a process that allowed him to compose directly on to
piano rolls (comparable to punching holes into the paper
strips or cards used on older computers). In this manner,
it was possible to realize textures with extremely fast
tempos, unusual tonal density, and complex rhythms
that went far beyond the customary playing techniques
(of the piano). With his Studies for “player piano” (i.e.,
electronic and mechanical piano), he created a unique
repertoire for this “instrument.”
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