The Life of the Machines

More than wars, religious and political upheaval, it was industrialization that shaped the basic feel of life in the modern era. The breakthrough of machines into everyman's life and their increasing dominance in work processes was already reflected in the painting and literature of the 19th century. But music - supposedly the most romantic of all arts - only dealt with the social, material, and intellectual implications of this transformation much later, after the First World War. The age of the machine then moved into the concert and opera halls in the twenties, a 'gloriously manly era,' as machine fetishist Fernand Léger called it. Maschinist Hopkins (1929), an opera by Schreker student Max Brand, conquered the repertoires and achieved performance figures equaled only by Krenek's Jonny spielt auf. Honegger's railroad piece Pacific 213 (1923), Alexander Mossolov's Die Eisengießerei (1926/28), and George Antheil's Ballet mécanique (1924) are considered highpoints of the musical treatment of the world of machines. Antheil used propeller noises and sirens to live up to his reputation as the iconoclastic bad boy of music: 10 years after Stravinsky's Sacre, the music world needed another scandal. The topos of machine music was a major influence (albeit less in the foreground) on a whole generation of post-romantic composers, whose intellectual inventory included jazz, as well as the archaic rhythms of Stravinsky's folkloric works, atonality, and dodecaphony. Yet, the fascination this generation of composers found in the cold lives of the machines is often interpreted too one-sidedly and too positively from the viewpoint of Russian Futurism and Suprematism. With this collection of piano works, we would like to draw attention to the extremely multifaceted, often ambivalent impact the pacemaker of modern times, as the machine was often considered to be, had on avant-garde composers basically in the first half of the 20th century.