The Original American In Paris

Searchinger in a Comm Box, Anderson in Audience

MUS 5 SONATA SAUVAGE MS on MIDI piano About 25", then hold under dialog - poss vary acoustic to match speakers' viewpoints.

SEARCHINGER

(in a manner somewhat like a sports commentator of the period)
The élite of Paris were invited. And came. Some came because the invitation was worded to suggest that a moving picture was to be made of them, but a few of the greatest artists came because it had been given out that a young pianist-composer who had been creating riots all over Central Europe, and the most dangerous menace to the present-day, was to play one of his compositions. A bomb was to be exploded irregardless of motion-pictures.

ANTHEIL

(CU under his breath, as if concentrating on playing)
Someone in the front row started to catcall, and then someone alongside him punched him in the jaw: a dangerous frisson of astonishment rustled thru the audience. Another man jumped up, angrily yelling "Silence! Silence!"

Knowing we were now on the edge of a riot of epic proportions - I felt the automatic under my arm as I played - these were after all the descendants of the mobs who had followed the tumbrels to the guillotine! Still, I could always shoot my way out!

As I finished the movement I glanced up at Satie, he was trying to applaud, but Milhaud was holding his arms.

SEARCHINGER

In one box above, sat Pound, Léger, Satie & Milhaud. In another Man Ray, Picasso, Cocteau & Picabia. The Prince of Monaco was also present. Elsewhere, sat James Joyce alone.

After the finish of the first movement of the 'sonata' the Champs-Elysées was the scene of the greatest musical riot since the performance of Le Sacre du Printemps 11 years ago. From that point on no one heard a note, except in the infrequent lulls: the audience shouted itself quite hoarse with both indignation with the composer or indignation with the others in the audience who prevented them from hearing.

ANDERSON

Whistling and yelling was drowned out by valiant defenders, and in the din the pianist remained a far away automatic figure playing upon a keyboard from which no one could hear a note.

ANTHEIL (CU)

Nobody remained in his seat. One wave of persons seemed about to break over the other wave. People were fighting in the aisles, yelling, clapping, hooting! Suddenly I heard Satie's shrill voice saying "Quel précision! Bravo! Bravo!!" and saw his gloved hands clapping inaudibly. By now even Milhaud was applauding.

SEARCHINGER

Pound was heard to yell "Down with the swine!" - which in French is very much worse than it sounds in English. Other than that few people heard very much of the music, but all were excited. What had happened? Had they witnest the emergence of a great new talent? Nobody knew for sure.

MUS 5 pauses, as appropriate

When Mr Antheil had finished ...

MUS 5 resumes 2nd Movt perhaps?

... a Master of Ceremonies came out to announce that motion pictures would now be taken of the audience, and would they kindly reproduce the riot which had just taken place. By now, the audience was in fighting spirit and only too willing to oblige, with the result that many famous faces were immortalised behind clapping and enthusiastic hands - those whose approval it is hardest to earn.

MUS 5 Concludes

Reasonable sized room

ANTHEIL

Paris hadn't had such a good time since Le Sacre. As Jack Benny would say "Boy, they really loved me over there!" I was notorious, therefore famous. For a time at least, I was to be the new darling of Paris.

The one slight problem was, that we had nothing to live on. By abandoning my career as a recitalist in Germany I had let go a sizeable income.

Antheil-Bok acoustic

MRS BOK

Dear George, I don't want to seem to detract from your marvellous successes in Paris. I am glad for them, sincerely. But now, having given you your opportunity to be heard you must now begin to row your own weight for you cannot go on, reaping concert plaudits & being indefinitely backed, by a woman! I expected it would bring you to a point where you would be able to make connections & then float yourself financially - but if you go on, with the developing of a piano technique as your only work, you'll be failing, as a human being & a man. I am (somewhat reluctantly) sending $500 by cable today. If you need more for the expenses of your return boat fare I will allow you to draw on my account. But you must understand that if you were my own son I'd not write differently - nor would I do more, financially - even if I could!

ANTHEIL

Yours, Mary Louise, is truly a great act of faith. You are a real and good person, and may God bless you. I have tried to, and have, helped myself financially more than you think, but I entirely agree with what you say - its just that I'm so near making that break to the place where I'll be able to support myself properly that it would prejudice all my chances if I were to have to engage in mundane work right now just to make ends meet.

In a hall

POUND (as if giving a lecture)

Antheil is supremely sensitive to the existence of music in time-space. Like Einstein, he is capable of conceiving the factor Time as affecting space relations. He does this with certain quirks that had hitherto been little used. The X Y & Z axes of analytics would appear to provide for what Antheil calls the 4th dimension of music, the "oblique". The first of his piano sonatas shows perfectly clearly what he means. And a gang of African savages would probably call it the 'hole in time-space'.

Reasonable sized room

ANTHEIL

But I doubt that any of this was intelligible to the Press, who meanwhile were clamouring to know what my next work would be.

As if a Radio interview

SEARCHINGER (but in a lighter voice)

Fernand Léger has this to say about Ballet Mécanique, the film he is preparing together with George Antheil:

LEGER (a gravely ouvrier's voice)

There is no scenario - nothing but reactions of rhythmed images. The film is constructed on 2 coefficients of interest: the variation of the speed of the projection, and the rhythm of this speed. The film is divided into 7 vertical parts which go from slow to rapid. Each of these parts possesses its proper unity due to the similitude of the groupings of image objects that resemble each other. This is done for the purpose of construction and to avoid the breaking-up of the film.

In a hall

POUND (as if giving a lecture)

With Ballet Mécanique one can conceive the possibility of organising the sounds of a factory, the various tones of grindings, or any other clangorous noisiness according to the needs of labour, and yet, with such pauses and durées, that at the end of 8 hours, the men go out not with frayed nerves, but elated - fatigued yes, but elated.

Le Sacre stands, but its cubes, solid as they are, are in proportion to the Ballet Mécanique as the proportions of architecture are to those of town-planning. Mr Antheil has used much longer durations of pure noise than any other musician has ever attempted.

Anderson neutral, Antheil in a largish room

ANTHEIL

One price of Fame is that everyone regards you as their own personal piece of public property. Since we were located above the most famous English bookshop in Paris, we became a regular feature on the artistic tourist's itinerary. I can truthfully state that on one afternoon we entertained James Joyce, T S Eliot, Maddox Ford, Hemingway, Wyndham Lewis & Ezra. They were not all friendly with one another; some would not have come if they had known the others would be present. It was one of those curious coincidences.

ANDERSON

But the fact that Hemingway was in that august gathering at all was due to George's having arranged publication of In Our Time in an influential German magazine. At the time Ernest was eking out a living as a private tutor and couldn't get anyone -myself, I regret to say, included- to read a word he had written! With that same spontaneous generosity, it was George too who fixed up the first publication of James Joyce's Chamber Music in that same magazine.

As I've said before, George was a marvellous salesman, due to his tremendous confidence in his own judgment, which he alternated with carefully adjusted applications of modesty. Joyce was very taken with him, and they were collaborating on an opera to be called Cyclops. One day he invited me to hear an aria he had just composed.

Room acoustic with Anderson as V/O

As we entered his little studio. There was something of the eagerness of a gambler in his attitude, as tho the solemn row of white & black keys was a new kind of roulette.

MUS 6 NIGHTPIECE Aria from Cyclops - MS + Nancy Hadden After c13" Continues under

I watched him from my comfortable vantage point on the old bed as he limbered his fingers - the French called him sauvage for that was the side of his character he generally showed at the piano. And yet here was a delicious and uncharacteristic tenderness. Was he allowing a new element of his musical personality to emerge?"

MUS 6 Music solo until c50"

In photographs, there was always that captivating, wistful, lonely expression in his eyes, and many were the hearts that mist a beat on seeing the snaps of him tacked up over the fireplace of Shakespeare & Company - an exquisite one by Man Ray which veiled George's prize-fighter nose in tender haze - another with his short blond hair in bangs - several of him swinging perilously from a balcony. They brought out his naughty-boy charms which all women found so tantalising.

There was an extraordinary kind of authority in George's 'keyboard manner' - which was quite natural, for even with just the 3 of us he never dropt it. Small, delicately built, he seemed almost too fragile to attack the keys, but a glance at his impassive profile, as he slightly bent his head in abstraction and at his strangely powerful short-fingered hands speeding competently up and down the keyboard, corrected this first false impression. 1'05

MUS 6 Concludes

It was curious tho that he never proceeded any further with this project. Perhaps he was ashamed of the latent Romanticism this aria had revealed?

Anderson neutral, Antheil in a largish room

ANTHEIL

I would often journey over to Montmartre to spend the afternoon in the Moulin Rouge; its atmosphere had not changed an iota since the days of Toulouse-Lautrec or even Offenbach. One day I took my courage in my hands and invited James Joyce, who was by now a close friend, to come with me. He loved it, and this inspired us to play a trick on its world-weary cocottes.

Sylvia Beach's partner, Adrienne Monnier, habitually wore a full grey ankle-length dress with a white starched collar and, she being a bit on the stout side, this for all the world resembled a nun's habit. After we'd gotten her into the Moulin Rouge I got James to start a rumour among the girls whispering that Adrienne was a real nun whom we had just lured from the nearby convent and were about to transport her to America - the white slave trade, he hinted.

Unaware of what was being said behind her back, Adrienne sat placidly, her spiritual, unmadeup face adding credibility to this sensational news. No matter how low a French fille de joie sinks, to her a nun remains completely sacred, like a pure flame that must not be mocked. As a result the girls became so outraged that our little joke back-fired, and we had to spirit poor unsuspecting Adrienne out of place before they set on us in order to rescue her!

ANDERSON

All the time, George's music was gaining ground, both with and without Ezra's double-edged blessing. But what really caused his friends concern was the absurd hyperbole in which Ezra had drest up George's claims to a seat in the front rank. Even this might have succeeded had not Ezra felt obliged to denigrate every god in the current musical pantheon in comparison.

In a hall

POUND (slightly less declamatory)

A year ago Antheil was talking vaguely of "tuning up" whole cities, of "silences 20 minutes long within the form" etcetera. One of thought it as mere or 'pure' speculation, the usual jejune aspiration of genius. Now, I do not in the least regret any then seeming hyperbole, or any comparison of Antheil & Stravinsky that I made then in the former's favour.

Les Noces, Stravinsky's latest composition, simply falls to pieces. After the Ballet Mécanique it sounds like left-over Wagner, a Russian chorale (quite good) a few scraps of Chopin, a few high notes "pianolistic".

Mr Antheil on the other hand has discovered the automatic piano, and freed it from ignominy; it is now an instrument, not the piano's poor ape. There will be a new hardness and dryness in fashion, and the old oily slickness of the Viennese school will receive diminished applause.

Neutral

ANDERSON

Nevertheless George's reception was growing more favourable as ears attuned themselves to his idiom.

Phone Booth

SCHWERKE

New York Herald Tribune, January '24. America's sky-scrapers found their musical expression here in Paris yesterday. Breaking with all traditions in the art of music, George Antheil, youthful American composer, yesterday declared war on Stravinsky and other ultra-modern exponents of the new rhythm, when he presented his Symphony for 5 Instruments before a brilliant gathering at the home of Miss Nathalie Barney. Paris critics see in him the composer who, for the first time, has broken with European traditions and created an American national music - a weird mixture of jazz and discords, almost barbaric in effect.

Anderson neutral, Antheil in a largish room

ANTHEIL

Later that year the premiere of Ballet Mécanique took place. There had been many problems, and on the way Léger & I had to part company owing to the fact that in the days before sound film there was no way of permanently registering any synchrony between picture and music.

Central to my musical conception was the Pianola. But there remained the problem of synchronisation since I really wanted more than a dozen in order to create a really intense sound. Pleyel's undertook to cut the master roll; and that cost over $400, which Mrs Bok kindly advanced.

MUS 7 Ballet Mécanique (Solo Pianola Version if available) Hold, then dialog over

ANDERSON

George himself was not present at the very first performance, which took place at Pleyel's on the very day they finished preparing the piano rolls. The young lady who had executed the work told me it had been the very dickens to do, posing immense technical problems since sometimes all the keys went down at once. This, as she demonstrated, required 2 or 3 times as much air pressure as normal - and that could only be supplied by pedalling so furious that it threatened to levitate, or at least disintegrate, the machinery!

MUSIC Peak Music & out

The reaction of a select audience of the leading critics was entirely favourable.

George's concert at the Théatre des Champs Elysées was the climax of the season. I had scarcely seen him for several months, he was so suddenly caught up in a whirl of managers and printers and important American dowagers. It had all been decided hurriedly, and George had everything staked on it. Vladimir Golschmann, one of the best conductors in town, was engaged. The tally of pianolas had by now risen to 17.

ANTHEIL

The only problem was, as Golschmann said, "it only took one to put the other 16 off!" Eventually we had to compromise and use live pianists with a single amplified pianola and an orchestra dominated by percussion. There was also one most unusual instrument, and it was that that they had all come to see.

Anderson in audience, Searchinger in Comm Booth

FX Active Buzz of pre-performance anticipation

ANDERSON

On the day of the performance Ezra was much in evidence, jumping up from his seat in the parterre like a Jack-in-a-box. He was wearing a bright blue shirt, open at the neck, and waggled his red beard at everyone he knew. The aisles were cluttered with Montparnasse celebrities: Zadkine with his dog: Derain, bulky and forbidding: Kiki, the mad queen of the quartier with her eyes painted in triangles to match her earrings. Elsewhere were to be seen Diaghilev, Honegger & Milhaud. And of course George's faithful supporter Joyce.

SEARCHINGER

The carefully upholstered Théatre des Champs Elysées vibrated to strange and beautiful sounds this afternoon, some of which were and others were not on the program arranged by Mr George Antheil ... After his First Symphony, every eye in the house was riveted on what was taking place onstage. First came Piano Movers, then Electricians. And with them they brought some small electric fans. Did the manufacturers know that they were creating the latest avantgarde musical instrument when they invented the electric fan? Never before had such humble domestic appliances shared a concert platform with the great M Golschmann, let alone 5 pianos & a battery of percussion. Come to think of it never before had the humble M Golschmann shared a concert platform with such great domestic appliances!

What was it all for? They connected microphones to fans, wires to the microphones, and then loud-speakers to the wires. The tension became acute. And a thought crossed the mind of some of the more cynical, bearing in mind recent productions by Messieurs Cocteau et Satie, that this was the performance itself!

ANDERSON

Finally, George nodded his head as a cue to Golschmann and sat down at his piano with a grim expression on his face.

MUS 8
Ballet Mécanique Disc: Telefunken 6.42196 with edits. Start with opening but after pause at 26" Xfade to near end (back-timed as appropriate) Continues under

SEARCHINGER

The audience quickly divided into 2 belligerent and opposing camps which, fortunately for the health of many music lovers, were so scattered as to be in no position to join battle. Within a few minutes, it was sheer bedlam. Above the mighty noise of the pianos and drums arose catcalls and booing, shrieking and whistling, shouts of "Voleur" mixed with "Bravo". People began to call each other names and to forget that there was any music going on at all.

ANDERSON

I suffered with George wishing that people would have at least the courtesy to stay quiet. Golschmann was plainly furious but continued to conduct imperturbably in the eye of the whirlwind. I found that even I too was beginning to catch the general fever myself, when I turned to some rowdy neighbours and yelled at them to shut up. "Ferme ta bouche, toi-méme!" they yelled back, and started whistling contemptuously. For an instant there was a curious lull in the clamor which Ezra took advantage of to leap to his feet shouting "Vous étes tous des imbéciles!"

Crossfade

SEARCHINGER

In the middle of the proceedings Mr Pound shouted something incomprehensible, and another supporter bellowed "Get out if you don't like it." This advice found considerable favour.

ANDERSON

The Ballet seemed to me like some monstrous abstract beast that was battling with the nerves of the audience, and I began to wonder which would win out. Some listeners were in obvious ecstasy, others snobbishly indifferent, yet others openly aggressive.

SEARCHINGER

The opposition reached its climax when the loud-speakers began to function. It made as much noise as a dozen airplanes, and no amount of shouting could drown it completely.

ANDERSON

To the glee of the audience, a fat bald old man who had been particularly disagreeable lashed out with his umbrella, 'struggling' to open it against the imaginary gale from the electric fans.

SEARCHINGER

His gesture was immediately copied by others until black mushrooms were sprouting all over the theatre.

MUS 8 concludes

ANDERSON

But when the Ballet was over, George got an ovation which was greater than the catcalls, for everyone was willing applaud a man who had at least had the courage of his convictions.

SEARCHINGER

And afterwards Mr Antheil was left alone to enjoy his well-earned laurel bays, the combatants filed out peacefully, secure in the sensation that all had really 'been somewhere'.

Antheil-Bok acoustic

ANTHEIL

Dear Mary Louise, I can honestly tell you that I now have the most tremendous following in Paris. Practically all of the young French intellectuals are upon my side, and I really have piles of enthusiastics of all kinds and nationalities. If this keeps up for several years I shall usurp Stravinsky's place - at any rate I can boast I have as large a paying audience now. These things are styles - perhaps next year I will be out of fashion. But I wont be. The other Americans I was telling you about - Copland, Thomson, Sessions & all the Boulangistes - are nowhere in comparison to me. However it is not my ambition to become the leading American Composer, my importance will be in writing great and true music.

MRS BOK

George, I must tell you that I detest it when you talk about "importance". I care for nothing that other people, especially your friends in Europe, have to say about you. But when I can see and hear enough to judge for myself, only then can I be certain whether or not you are a great talent. But do not work or aim for my good opinion or you will surely miss it.

MUS 9 Part of Jazz Symphony or Jazz Sonata?

ANTHEIL

I wish you could have been at the recent performance of my new String Quartet at the Comte de Polignac's, Mary Louise. The conductor Walter Damrosch was there with Ambassador Herrick. Afterwards he came over to me and there and then made me sign a paper giving him first rights to perform my Symphonie en Fa in America this autumn. If admiration is the sincerest form of flattery, then some of my claims must be justified Mary Louise! For Honegger has now followed me with Pacific 231 and I hear that Prokofieff's new ballet Le Pas d'Acier is a direct imitation of my style.

Please hold with me. Ignore reports in some newspapers that I am now writing only jazz. What I am attempting is a synthesis of American music the crude & great accents of my native land will come thru, still unpolished, but fundamentally true. Whether or not 'jazz' has a serious future, it is my duty as an artist to record the way in which Ragtime whirls like an orchestral machine, and to try to get at the definitive synthesis of passion to be found in the severe uncompromising line of our vaudeville and folk song.

MRS BOK

I don't know what views prevail in Paris, George, but I assure neither Mr Stokowski nor Mr Hoffman here has the slightest interest in coloured music, nor do I know any other serious musician who does!

Mus 9 concludes

Neutral

ANDERSON

After the Ballet Mécanique I saw less of George . He had 'arrived' and now moved very much more in Society. But each time I did I thought he seemed ill-at-ease - perhaps he saw that his fling in Paris might turn out to be as ephemeral as his vogue in Berlin.

Who knows how George's music might've developed if he had studied with Stravinsky, or even Nadia Boulanger? Rightly or wrongly, George viewed himself as already beyond that, and perversely, sneered at their distrust of traditional forms. Altho the very name of Antheil was synonymous with experimental, 'self-forming' music, George was becoming more and more preoccupied with the classical forms. As a man, he was always eager for approval, and I think subconsciously the financial implication of losing his patron led him towards an idiom of which he felt she would approve.

George really coveted the position of a Vincent D'Indy or a Saint-Saens - altho he was not yet 30. Now American society in Paris, fragile and frivolous, was perfectly willing to accord him such a position, but they forgot so easily that their assurance was worth nothing.

A new friend of mine was Aaron Copland, I asked him once, if he had ever been jealous?

COPLAND

O sure. When I first arrived I was jealous of George's piano playing - it was so brilliant; he could demonstrate so well what he wanted to do. He had all Paris by the ear. Potentially speaking, he was all they said and more, but no one could venture to dictate the best use of his talents - indeed the very violence of his own sincere desire to write original music hindered rather than helped him achieve that end. It was always my opinion that Antheil's Ballet Mécanique style is just a passing phase rather than a permanent idiom.

MUS 10 LA FEMME 100 TETES Disc: CRI SD 502 Single Movt complete, as arranged

Reasonable sized room

ANTHEIL

Aaron was, as ever, his cool perceptive self - tho of course I didn't know it at the time. The harm that Ezra's 'Treatise' had done me now began to show. Altho I was readily accepted by Americans, now that Satie was dead it became clear that there was nobody in France who had the same interested in championing my music. Moreover, I did indeed find my own idiom changing, maturing I thought. This confused the critics and brought down the wrath of Ezra upon my head.

Not in a hall

POUND (wildly but defeated)

Musical moralists have damned in my presence that very tough baby George Antheil. He has gone to hell and to Hollywood a "sub-Medean talent", he has made himself a motley and then some. Imperfectly schooled in music, in letters, in all things, he nevertheless once demanded short hard bits of SOLIDITY, rhythms hammered down, worn down so that they were indestructible and unbendable. He wanted these gristly and undeformable "monads", as definite as the / 'All angels have big feet. / Hump, diddywim tum .... Hump, bump stunt.' (Fade him during this last sentence.)

Anderson neutral, Antheil in a largish room

ANTHEIL

From the first day I met him Ezra was never to have even the slightest idea what I was really after in music. I honestly don't think he wanted to have. I think he merely wanted use me as a whip with which to lash out at all those who disagreed with him. The cruel truth is that he was already 'old hat' in 1923, fighting for the stale moth-eaten causes of the cubist age, when in fact almost all the battles had been effectively won. He was like some ridiculous of Don Quixote standing there, shouting all over a battlefield from which the armies had long gone home.

Alas I was too naive to see all this at the time. His book and everything that went with it were to cause me a lot of future grief - grief which has not been entirely dispelled to this day. Its ridiculous praise of me, and its vicious criticism of everyone else sowed the most active distaste for the very mention of my name among many contemporary critics. And in any case, nobody could have been a tenth as good as Ezra made me.

MUS 11 La Femme 100 Tétes Complete Movt

ANDERSON

1926 had been for him a golden chain of successes - a kaleidoscope of invitations to salons, dinners, concerts - each one requiring careful consideration in the context of the incessant musical politics of the capital.

But just as George's star had suddenly burst upon the Parisian firmament, so it suddenly waned. It was a most unfortunate conjunction of circumstances - for which noone was to blame. By the autumn, already exhausted, he caught pneumonia, and very nearly died. As soon as he was well enough to travel his doctor advised George that if he was ever to regain his full strength he would have to quit Paris for at least 6 months. He was heartbroken.

ANTHEIL

But that very same day Vladimir Golschmann came to see me and suggested I go to Chamonix and write a Piano Concerto. Altho I was feeling very shaky indeed, this idea appealed to me immensely, and by the time Boski & I were on the train, my brain was already teeming with ideas.

ANDERSON

But Stravinsky, who was to create so many revolutions in his life, had recently dropt the bombshell of his latest, neo-classical, Piano Concerto. This style, coming as the public were just getting used to the brutalist quality of mechanistic music, threw all everyone's cultural gears into reverse.

ANTHEIL

Whether because I was still very weak, or because I was homesick for Paris, I found that as my Piano Concerto grew it was becoming more and more neo-classical both in style and principle.

Such is the slender thread by which our existence hangs: when the premiere took place in Paris during my absence the following year I was damned beyond reprieve in a single night. My 2 principal supporters, Ezra Pound and Benoist-Mechin turned on me without mercy in the public prints. (Perhaps its coincidental, but both ended up as committed Fascists.) Meanwhile my opponents gloated silently at my downfall.

But at the time I was not worried because a new horizon had opened up for me. The Prodigal Son was to have a triumphal homecoming, and the 'Angel' who had invited me was Donald Friede, an influential New York publisher and socialite. A remarkable man in many ways, Friede star as a publisher was in the ascendant. By a rare combination of good luck & daring he had brought his small imprint to national celebrity with, amongst other things, the American edition of Radclyffe Hall's lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness. After a sensational obscenity case, in which he had succeeded in getting himself jailed, Friede won on appeal and by these tactics turned the book into a runaway best seller.