George Antheil
Ballet Mécanique (Philadelphia Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra feat. conductor: Daniel Spalding)

THE REVIEW

I once read — I don’t remember where — about a guy who disappeared for about twenty years. He told his family, job, and obligations to go to hell and started a new life. They found him in a small village — something like Bosco Trecase or similar — making a living by cheating at tressette, and no, his name wasn’t Adriano Meis. How did our guy manage to vanish? Simple: he never owned a damn mobile phone.

I think about this while listening to George Antheil’s “Ballet Mécanique.”

You say there’s no connection? Wait.

You see, we all run away, or at least we try to. The guy from Bosco Trecase from a life that had become unbearable, me from a wife and children who find “Ballet Mécanique” unlistenable, George Antheil from Trenton, New Jersey, Hedy Lamarr from a pro-Nazi husband and her dazzling beauty that hid everything else.

Yes, Hedy Lamarr is in this story (and so is the Cuban Missile Crisis, for that matter). But let’s take it step by step.

Having escaped from Trenton, George found himself in Paris to try his luck with his music. It was the 1920s and Paris was crawling with Picasso, Satie, Pound, Hemingway, Joyce, and all those crowds of geniuses and expatriates who, in those years, packed the cafés of the Rive Gauche to talk about the Future.

There was a drunk and brawling Joyce being defended by Hemingway — “Deal with him, Hemingway!” he’d shout from behind his back — there was Hemingway looking at everyone with those accountant-of-courage eyes, Cocteau with his older brother vibe, and Picasso who preferred to stay aside. And among that bunch of exiles, fugitives, and self-chosen stateless people playing at being damned while drinking French wine at someone else’s expense, Antheil was the true madman of the group. He had that thing, that kind of luminous recklessness that only exists in those who haven’t yet lost enough.

George was a pianist; he played the piano as if he wanted to break it, and the critics wrote that he beat it rather than played it. But the fact is, if you grow up in Trenton, you don’t develop an aesthetic of industrial noise as an intellectual exercise, like those who read Marinetti on the tram. You grow up in Trenton and the clamor of the factories gets into your ear at six years old and never leaves, and at some point you stop calling it noise and you start calling it music. However, it’s not said that the audience would appreciate that.

But if the audience got pissed off, for George, it wasn’t a problem. They boo you? It means you’re doing the right thing, this is the avant-garde, beauties! Besides, George knew how to keep them at bay: in Budapest, for instance, before a concert he put a pistol, in plain sight, on the piano.

But the thing he did there in Paris, the reason his name is still spoken today, is the “Ballet Mécanique”: sixteen synchronized mechanical pianos, three working airplane propellers, one siren, seven electric bells, two pianos played by humans. Soundtrack for a Dadaist film by Fernand Léger, with Man Ray behind the camera.

Now try listening to this stuff, maybe the Philadelphia Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra version conducted by Daniel Spalding (that’s the one I have) or whatever recording you can find. But not on headphones, not on your phone, not on that ten-euro Bluetooth speaker that sounds like someone’s coughing inside. You need volume. You need space. You need neighbors that already hate you, because after this there’ll be no going back.

What you’ll hear is this: Zappa before Zappa (Varèse invented nothing), Einstürzende Neubauten without the rock knick-knacks, Sun Ra without the Spirit of Mother Africa. Percussion that doesn’t flirt. Player pianos — that is, pianos played by punched rolls, no human in the middle, only mechanism and logic — intersecting in rhythmic patterns. Mechanical noises that almost sound more human than the instruments. Music that in 1924 must have seemed like the end of the world and in 2026 is still uncomfortable.

This music isn’t here for you, it’s going somewhere else, with or without you. The future had arrived and the world was already late. And in 1924, that was a political statement. Antheil lived in the era of Futurism, Taylorism, the factory as a cathedral, man as a cog. He was doing what all intelligent artists do: he was taking the dominant ideology, dismantling it down to the bolts, and reassembling it so you could look inside it.

“Here’s what you are,” said the “Ballet Mécanique.” Here’s what your world sounds like when no one pretends there’s any feeling left. It’s not music to enjoy. It’s music to go through. Like walking through a factory at three in the morning, when the machines are still running and the workers are at home and there’s only the noise of something that doesn’t need to sleep.

And after getting that far, like some random Rimbaud who gives up poetry to sell weapons in Africa, George left the avant-garde to go to Hollywood and make money with film soundtracks. He wasn’t even thirty yet, like Arthur, and like Arthur, George had nothing left to prove.

In Hollywood, he cashed in: money, success, studios fighting over him. “I can declare that my music has saved at least a couple of sure flops,” he pronounced, with no fear of contradiction.

In his spare time, he wrote: a novel whose protagonist was called Ezra Pound, his biography, “Bad Boy of Music,” full of invented stories to confuse real memories, geopolitics articles in which he lucidly anticipated the moves of Nazism and Fascism.

He got it into his head to try endocrinology. He wrote articles about how glands influence women’s personalities. It was all wrong, scientifically speaking, but that didn’t stop him. Not strange, if you’ve figured out the guy.

And here comes Hedy Lamarr.

Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, Austrian and Jewish, grew quickly tired of a boring husband, an arms dealer and Nazi sympathizer who flaunted her as a trophy at his banquets, among those people convinced they belonged to a superior race. Hedy, hidden behind her beauty, listened, smiled, and memorized. She despised those people because she understood everything those obtuse generals were saying. She was smarter than all of them put together.

So one night she escaped disguised as a maid and made it to Hollywood to become Hedy Lamarr, the most beautiful woman in the world.

Everyone said it, and it was true: her beauty left you breathless, but as for the rest, no one understood. Watch her in “Algiers”: she fills the screen and dominates it, her smile is ironic, her beauty refuses to be used, her presence alone lights up that silly film.

Blinded by her beauty, no one noticed anything else. But, once the makeup was washed off and the flashy clothes set aside, Hedy put on a lab coat. She invented things.

She decided to give a lesson to those men who marched better than they thought; she had listened well at those boring dinners. They believed she was just a stunning decorative object, but instead, she listened and understood. She decided that radio-controlled torpedoes were the solution, but those traveled on a fixed radio frequency and the Nazis would find it, jam it, and the torpedo would go blind. There had to be a signal impossible to jam. But how?

And the solution came while looking for an endocrinologist to treat her breasts.

That Hedy would take glandular advice from an endocrinologist with Antheil’s reputation might seem odd, but it isn’t, if you understand the character. And that our George, from the most beautiful and desired breasts in the world, would – immediately – move on to something else, is even less odd, if you’ve understood him.

They talked about weapons, missiles, and madmen who want to rule the world. And that they got along right away is the least strange thing.

Sitting on the floor, building models out of matchsticks, they found the solution: synchronization and the number 88!

The punched rolls of the “Ballet Mécanique” synchronized two player pianos on the same pattern — they jumped together, unpredictable to anyone from the outside; you just had to do the same with radio frequencies: transmitter and receiver jump together from one frequency to another, eighty-eight possibilities because there are eighty-eight keys on the piano, perfect synchronization. They called it “Frequency Hopping.” Music becoming weapon. Literally.

Of course, the military didn’t understand. Two Hollywood artsy types who want to steer missiles with a piano, they snapped.

Idiots!

The patent just gathered dust, and that seemed to be the end of it.

Then, in 1962, President Kennedy sent the American fleet to Cuba, to create a naval blockade to prevent the USSR from bringing its nuclear warhead missiles to the island. Someone remembered those two Hollywood guys and their keyboards that guided remote-controlled rockets no one could stop.

And what you still don’t know is that that very principle — “spread spectrum transmission” or “Frequency Hopping” — transmitter and receiver jumping together from one frequency to another — is inside every mobile phone in the world. It’s Wi-Fi. It’s Bluetooth. It’s GPS. It’s your damn mobile phone.

Almost no one knows that we owe this stuff to a crazy pianist and the most beautiful woman in the world; but I don’t think they ever really cared that much.

Oh! Do you know how they finally caught the guy from Bosco Trecase? He got it into his head to buy a mobile phone!

The sucker.

(This is the answering machine…leave a message after the beep…)