How Art Inspired a Better Bomb
After looking at some of the images and videos and artists we've discussed in class over the last two weeks, I somehow fell into a fit of Faulknerian stream of consciousness (only fitting as it was a favoured style of Burroughs, Miller, T.S. Eliot, and more of the writer-contemporaries of these artists). Through the looking-glass door and down the yellow-brick hyperlinked road that is the web, this is where I landed.
George Antheil, a composer and contemporary and collaborator of Jean Cocteau (whose film Orpheus was very avant-garde and inspired One Hit Wonder a-ha's "Take on Me" video, a marvelous piece of rotoscopic animation - see how it all goes in circles), is perhaps best known for his "Ballet Mechanique", a score originally designed to accompany a piece by a couple of French experimental filmmakers. Antheil described his piece as "Scored for countless numbers of player pianos. All percussive. Like machines. All efficiency. No LOVE. Written without sympathy. Written cold as an army operates. Revolutionary as nothing has been revolutionary." Although Antheil planned it for 16 specially synchronized player pianos, 2 grand pianos, electronic bells, xylophones, bass drums, a siren and three airplane propellers, difficulties with the synchronization resulted in a rewrite for a single pianola and multiple human pianists. The piece consisted of periods of music and silence interludes set against the roar of the airplane propellers.
So what does this have to do with a better bomb, you ask? At one point Antheil teamed up with actress Hedy Lamarr, one of the top stars of 1930s and 1940s Hollywood. Lamarr had left her husband, who ran a munitions factory, in Austria and fled to the U.S. Lamarr's knowledge of torpedo control from her bomb-making husband matched up with Antheil's knowledge of systems to control player piano mechanisms like he had used in "Ballet Mechanique". Together they devised and patented a frequency-hopping torpedo guidance system that proved quite useful to the U.S. Navy.
For once, instead of torpedoes destroying great works of art, a work of art served to create a better torpedo. Now that's revolutionary as nothing has been revolutionary.
George Antheil, a composer and contemporary and collaborator of Jean Cocteau (whose film Orpheus was very avant-garde and inspired One Hit Wonder a-ha's "Take on Me" video, a marvelous piece of rotoscopic animation - see how it all goes in circles), is perhaps best known for his "Ballet Mechanique", a score originally designed to accompany a piece by a couple of French experimental filmmakers. Antheil described his piece as "Scored for countless numbers of player pianos. All percussive. Like machines. All efficiency. No LOVE. Written without sympathy. Written cold as an army operates. Revolutionary as nothing has been revolutionary." Although Antheil planned it for 16 specially synchronized player pianos, 2 grand pianos, electronic bells, xylophones, bass drums, a siren and three airplane propellers, difficulties with the synchronization resulted in a rewrite for a single pianola and multiple human pianists. The piece consisted of periods of music and silence interludes set against the roar of the airplane propellers.
So what does this have to do with a better bomb, you ask? At one point Antheil teamed up with actress Hedy Lamarr, one of the top stars of 1930s and 1940s Hollywood. Lamarr had left her husband, who ran a munitions factory, in Austria and fled to the U.S. Lamarr's knowledge of torpedo control from her bomb-making husband matched up with Antheil's knowledge of systems to control player piano mechanisms like he had used in "Ballet Mechanique". Together they devised and patented a frequency-hopping torpedo guidance system that proved quite useful to the U.S. Navy.
For once, instead of torpedoes destroying great works of art, a work of art served to create a better torpedo. Now that's revolutionary as nothing has been revolutionary.
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