Bad Boy Made Good

"Bad Boy Made Good," an award-winning documentary film by Tufts music faculty member and Medford resident Paul Lehrman will have its Boston-area premiere on Feb. 10 at Tufts, with the screening beginning at 8 p.m. in Room 104, Pearson Hall, located on Talbot Avenue, between Packard and College avenues.

"Bad Boy Made Good" is the story of one of the 20th Century's most notorious works of music, George Antheil's 1924 "Ballet mécanique," a piece which not only presaged many important musical movements of the second half of the century, but was so technologically advanced that it could not be performed during the composer's lifetime.

Calling for nine percussionists, two pianists, three airplane propellers, seven electric bells, a siren, and 16 synchronized player pianos, it wasn't until 1999, with the assistance of a computer, a sampler, and 16 MIDI-controlled Disklavier player pianos, that Lehrman, a composer who teaches in the Multimedia Arts program, was able to realize the Ballet mécanique as the composer envisioned it.

It has since been performed in Symphony Hall, Carnegie Hall, by the San Francisco Symphony, and in Germany, Belgium, Holland and Montreal. 

"Bad Boy Made Good" chronicles the history of the piece and its composer, and of the modern efforts to revive it. It also describes how the music is now being re-united with the film of the same name by artist Fernand Léger and photographer Man Ray.

Written and produced by Lehrman, the film was directed by Ron Frank, an award-winning documentary filmmaker in Los Angeles. Several Tufts faculty and students, including Howard Woolf and Don Schechter, were involved in early production of the film, which received initial support from Tufts' Spaulding Potter Fund for Innovative Undergraduate Education.  Released in September, 2003, the film won a Bronze Telly Award and the Audience First Prize at the New Haven Film Fest.

If Igor Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps paved the way for modern rock, then GeorgeAntheil’s Ballet mécanique made possible every genre of contemporary music with “noise”or “metal” in its name. This Futurism-inspired 25-minute (with more than 600 time-signature changes) composition was scored for 16 synchronized player pianos, two grandpianos, electronic bells, xylophones, bass drums, a siren, and three airplane propellers, butthe difficulty of synchronizing the player pianos precluded any proper performance inAntheil’s lifetime — though its 1926 Paris premiere, in revised form, prompted Sacre-likedemonstrations.

This documentary written by former Phoenix scribe Paul D. Lehrman and directed by RonFrank explains how Lehrman used a MIDI sequencer to make possible what Antheilintended. Along the way we learn how Antheil became the “bad boy” of classical music,how he hung out with Ezra Pound and James Joyce and Stravinsky and ErnestHemingway, how he drifted into obscurity following a disastrous performance of Balletmécanique in Carnegie Hall, how he subsequently became a Hollywood film composer forthe likes of Cecil B. DeMille and Nicholas Ray, and even how he teamed up with HedyLamarr to devise a torpedo-guidance system that the US Navy passed on (big mistake)before his death, of a heart attack, in 1959.

The only flaw is the poor synchronization (where’s that MIDI?) between image and sound in the interviews. And if you can’t catch the screening, there’s the two-DVD set — which includes a performance of the original score plus the 1925 Fernand Léger–Dwight Murphy film it was meant to accompany — and also a live performance of the original score by BMOP in Jordan Hall November 13.

This award-winning documentary was released in 2006 and broadcast on PBS, but somehow we just learned about it. It should be a must-have for any music lover into off-the-beaten-track music. In fact, there’s a great deal of beating going on in Antheil’s amazing cacaphonic piece: The San Francisco Examiner reviewed a performance of this newly-perfected version - which for the first time presents the work just as Antheil envisioned it in 1924 but found impossible to mount due to the technical challenges of synchronizing 16 player pianos. They said “Not since the meteor shower that wiped out the dinosaurs have you heard such a racket.”

That pretty well summarizes this noisy score, which was basically made possible by the work of MIDI expert Paul Lehrman, using a bank of Yamaha Disklaviers and some computer controls. Beside the 16 player pianos, Ballet mécanique also uses 3xylophones, 4 bass drums, two regular pianos, 7 electric bells, a tam tam, a siren, and3 airplane propellors. The latter two are played from recordings, but when Antheil tried to present his work in New York City in 1927 to follow up on its successful premiere in Paris, the siren refused to sound until it had been wound up thoroughly,and the propellers were pointed at the audience and nearly blew them away when they came on.

The documentary is a portrayal of both the forward-looking and innovative compositions and life of George Antheil, and the saga of his half-hour-long futurist noise composition which originally set Paris on its ear in 1924. Born in New Jersey, the composer who became known as the “Bad Boy of Music” was the toast of Paris, with friends including Stravinsky, Gershwin, Picasso, Hemingway, Joyce and Ezra Pound. He was present at the riot during the premiere of The Rite of Spring, but reported he wasn’t afraid because he was carrying a loaded pistol! I had forgotten that after coming back to the U.S. broke and forgotten, he was lured to Hollywood where he successfully composed music for scores of films. Also that he was paranoid and typed long single-spaced diatribes to people he didn’t like. Antheil was definitely a wild musical rebel, and the Ballet mécanique is probably his most rebellious composition.His position in music history is important and more than just a footnote.

The fascinating documentary is the main interest here. The actual performance of the original work by the student group from the U. of Massachusetts is difficult to sit thru- I admit I had to fast forward several times. The half-length score accompanying the Leger film is more palatable; the two have never been matched up before. It’s a shame the sound for the complete performance is only PCM stereo - this is a work that cries out for hi-res multichannel reproduction to make its point. Even less effective isthe standard CD that was issued with the DVDs (EMF CD 020). (See below) The Balletmécanique is the featured work here, but just in standard 44.1K CD audio - at least the video coverage added some interest to the proceedings. The CD has six other percussion selections (Track List below). The opening work by Cage and Harrison is avery early one and sounds almost staid next to the others. The second multi-player-piano piece by Richard Grayson is a premiere, and seems to be sort of a rehearsal for the 16 player pianos of the Antheil work. The movement from Mendelssohn’s “Italian”Symphony may be the most listenable thing on the CD - in its transcription for percussion reminding me of the

audiophile discs by Harold Farberman and his percussion group for F.I.M.The six extended interviews on the second DVD are some of the most worth while items I have seen in any DVD extras section. The interviewees provide not only needed tidbits about Antheil, but also interesting views into their own artistic lives. The interviews were videotaped in 2002 and several of the older artists/composers have since passed away. I once interviewed David Raksin (composer of “Laura”) and heal ways had some great stories to tell, as he does here - about not only Antheil in Hollywood, but also about George Gershwin and others. Composer Charles Amirkhanian was the executor of Antheil’s music, and describes how that came about.Benjamin Lees has a wonderful (unprintable) story about Antheil, with whom he studied for some years. Radio host Truman Rex Fisher states that he much prefers Antheil’s brand of musical iconoclasm to Charles Ives’, whose contrariness he feels not quite believable. Stanley Burnshaw - who was in his 90s - had terrific stories abou this life in Paris with the usual musical lights, including Gershwin. It was also great to see and hear the late Henry Brant, of whom I had never even seen a still photo. Hewas just as wildly innovative in his highly individual way as Antheil, being among other