Antheil of New Jersey

DOROTHY RICHARDSON

EDITOR'S NOTE: The writer is neither a professional musician nor a critic of music; consequently these hrief notes are addressed to the general public rather than to the specialists in music, for it is, in the opinion of the author, to the public at large that all new genius, particularly of this kind belongs.

WHENEVER, in memory, I hear my grandfather protesting, as sedulously I practiced Chopin: "very fine, my dear, but Mendelssohn will outlive these new-fangled torturings of melody," I suffer sorrow for those who see the golden vessels into which they have poured the treasures of a lifetime give place to tin pots, brand new and empty, and I wonder over the persistence of the belief that the new is always the inferior and the rising generation always wilfully plunging into an abyss. But my grandfather's words when they were uttered evoked not pity or wonder but only wild and vain desire for words to express what it was in this new music that touched me more nearly than what I then knew of the old. What it was, I at once recognised as heavenly companionship, authentic.

Years later came just such another moment of delighted recognition, brought this time by a fragment of sound, not melody, new-fangled or otherwise, an abrupt angular little phrase flung from a music-machine into the rain-darkened street as I passed the open door of a Wonderland—Entrance Free, in the Tottenham Court Road. I cannot now remember what thoughts were engrossing me when after long wandering in the London streets 1 passed that Palace, but their interruption by a fragment of strange sound I shall never forget. It wasa profane little phrase, a capering elf. It was sudden light, leaving me shocked and delighted in a new world. The "Jazz" was as yet undiscovered that has so admirably expressed the sunny dancing quality of this new music, its inconclusiveness, its way of belonging nowhere and of refusing, as life refuses, plain statements, complete with beginning and end. And my first meeting with the stranger charmed me not only in its own right and with the charm of the unformulated, but also because it was a benison upon a joy with which I had never found, and have yet to find, a single sympathiser—joy in singing deliberately sharp or flat and joy in any kind of musical "ferment": the tuning of orchestras and that parlour game known as a Dutch concert, the simultaneous lusty singing, by all present, of a different tune; an entertainment invariably spoiled by the failure, the ear-stopping stage despair of "really musical people."

And just two years ago, when, having been long away from centres where music abounds, T was begged to go and hear George Antheil, then performing in London and said to be the foremost exponent of the very latest jazz and really a big lark, I thought I had met my opportunity of discovering something about the new movement in music. At the moment, I did not want the opportunity of discovering anything at all and I went in negative mood—to see arrive upon the platform what at first sight seemed to be negation embodied, a short square-built childlike youth as devoid of expression as a ventriloquist's dummy. A soothing presence. Here was no professional musician and most certainly no showman. An instrument, one felt, rather than a performer. There was presently a considerable amount of very cleverly experimental sound. It got neither across nor away. What did get away was a portion of the audience, a bevy of seasoned concerth ea re rs, indignant. After that we heard Antheil's own compositions. Three sonatas. I cannot remember any interval. The performance remains in my mind as the continuous getting across of a strange new force. There were no more departures. There was interest, puzzlement, patience more than willing, an intense quietude and, at the end of the third sonata—all one movement allegro ntecantco—as near a scene of wild enthusiasm as an English concert audience can get. For me there had been my moment in the Tottenham Court Road elaborated and intensified. One seemed now and again to be caught up and dancing not upon earth but in space, coming back to earth refreshed.

The artist's room buzzed with murmured phrases: modern life . . . primitive . . . barbaric . . . and so forth. Antheil when I tried to thank him, confessed himself too tired to speak. Small wonder. But presently over his "tea," milk and many buns, he talked of what is happening in modern art, of his work and of the trial it had been to him to turn away from that on which he was then engaged and play those earlier compositions—those amazing sonatas that to me had seemed the furthest word.

Since that memorable day I have learned that Antheil is a native of Trenton, New Jersey, whither, after a boyhood spent in Poland, he returned in 1911, at the age of ten, as an exponent of classical music. He went to Philadelphia to complete his studies, going on composing canons and fugues and obediently performing Chopin and Bach, until his rebellion at the age of nineteen. Some two years later he reappears playing his own compositions in the European capitals. Historic riots in almost every case. In the German and Austrian dailv press more space was given to his concerts than to the current murder trials. The tour culminated in a tremendous shindy at his concert in Paris in 1923. Paris is the testing ground of a new technique and Paris flung roses as well as stones. "Quand on entend," it was written, "ces rhythmes absolument tnusicaux on sent non seulement que ces rhythmes se meuvent dans Pespace, mais que e'est l'espace lui-meme qui se tend, et se tord, dans les formes geometriques." In Germany, Stuckenschmidt—Melos critic of the Salzburg Festival—writes of him thus: "Given the spiritual pollution of the super-expressionistic age it necessarily and abruptly follows that new effort turns to restrained and clear objectivity. The ego—I . . . is eliminated . . . the beat of electric power plants and the symbols of the switchboard find expression. The way to this music is via Igor Stravinsky . . . the best talent of today follows but does not attain him, only one goes his way and passes him: the American George Antheil, who makes the whole mass of creative work of this season entirely unimportant. His style is a vital polyrhythmical homophony. He puts together stark blocks of rhythms one behind another and smelts the whole into a marvellously clear and crystalline form." Quite so. Here no doubt is the scientific explanation of one's sense of having danced in space.

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Another critic declares that xAntheil projects his audiences through the fourth dimension. Again quite so: in Vienna while several of his audience were carried out swooning, the rest yelled the yell irrepressible that attends a first experience of a really steep toboggan run.

Anthcil's own pronouncements are simpler but none the less profound. "The solution," he writes, "of the fourth dimension lies not in a theoretic but in a physical comprehension and negotiation of space. Mathematicians have failed because they seek its solution in an abstract line that is not fluid or physical, not a model of space. Mathematics alone are insufficient. . . . Light vibrations are the weakest and most inflexible of space vibrations. Sound vibrations the strongest and most fluid of space vibrations capable of a tangible mathematic." ... "I have definite nuclei which will liberate the fourth element in dimension. I destroy the time canvas in music and liberate the oblique in rhythmical mathematics." Good news here for those who feel that the gift of Antheil's music is the sense of getting through and going forward. It is interesting to note that he looks with joy upon the future of the film inconceivably transformed and speaks of discoveries in America that will give the artist a perfect medium of space colour and time, and sees the solution of the static arts of the future in the mecanicotheatre which, "reaching the largest audience in the world will do what the infinitesimal aristocratic exhibition, the private gallery, can never do: add a new impetus to the artlife of all time." He proposes to construct machines to make new musical vibrations for the purpose of the mathematical graphing of rhythms and groups of inter-rhythms and the exact reproduction of newly calculated musical spaces. These he dreams of as enlarged to vibrate whole cities, and he believes that the "hole" in music which is opening into a fresh region "will actually project the human organism into a new dimension in time and space."

It is abundantly clear that this new-fangled music that has for so long been heard with delight or amusement, with sneers and gloomy prognostications, ceases with Antheil to be either a lark or the swan-song of our modern civilization. He is as far from classical jazz as he is from the clever musical novelties that are, as he says, so easy to manufacture. Not setting out to be original, wise only after the event of his own discoveries, he is an innocent and helpless innovator. In other words a very disturbing person. It is too late to say that he is dangerous. He has bolted with us, and there is no going back. We can banish him to the wilderness but we cannot destroy the bridge he has built. It may therefore safely be divulged that he is to be found in Paris, hard at work, still drinking milk and living like an anchorite. But by the time these notes appear he will be on his way to the States. America will have the opportunity of greeting this son of hers, of hearing the early sonatas, the Joyce opera and the Ballet Mecanique whose performance requires a cinema and sixteen pianolas.