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| George Antheil's La Femme 100 têtes |  |
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Monday 8 October 
Nicolas Hodges, pianist. Photograph © Martin Tothill This event was part of a new strand of music events which experiment with the space of Tate Modern's building and complement the Collection displays and exhibitions. George Antheil's La Femme 100 têtes is inspired by Max Ernst and was played by Nicolas Hodges on piano. It was introduced by Richard Bernas and Andrew Brighton. The live performance of this astonishing 35-minute piano suite, will be accompanied by a dynamic slide-show backdrop featuring Max Ernst's surrealist engravings. Max Ernst's surrealist classic La Femme 100 têtes was published in 1929 with a preface by André Breton. Four years later, the maverick American piano virtuoso George Antheil composed a 35-minute suite inspired by it. This performances offered a rare opportunity to experience this long-forgotten collaboration. A discussion followed the performance. A collaboration with Music Projects/London Trust, supported by Roland Berger Strategy Consultants. The Max Ernst engravings featured in the webcast are © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London. The Steinway concert piano chosen for this performance was supplied
and maintained by Steinway & Sons, London. About La Femme 100 têtes (1929) La Femme 100 têtes (The Hundred Headless Woman) was the first of three collage-novels by Max Ernst, published in Paris in 1929. In a preface to the book André Breton called Ernst 'the most magnificently haunted brain of our day'. Ernst took illustrations from numerous old books and recombined them to forge a universe of mystery, full of all the possibilities of the surreal. Against often familiar backgrounds strange figures (Loplop/Bird Superior, the Eternal Father, the hundred headless woman, anarchists, priests, lovers) carry out barely recognisable acts, in support of Breton's declared aim 'to prevent the paths of desire from becoming overgrown'. About Max Ernst Max Ernst was born in Germany in 1891. He began to study philosophy at the University of Bonn in 1909, but became increasingly preoccupied with painting. He was self-taught but influenced by van Gogh and Macke. In 1921 Ernst had his first solo exhibition in Paris. The catalogue introduction, written by the poet André Breton, set the terms for what would become a bedrock of surrealism: the principle of automatism and the exploration of the unconscious. Automatism was the term applied by the surrealists to various forms of creativity involving free association and the use of chance. In 1922 Ernst moved to Paris, where his friendship with André Breton and Paul Eluard led to active participation in the surrealist movement. The irrational imagery of his paintings was paralleled in the highly original 'collage-novels' that he developed. In them he collaged parts of engravings taken from sources such as nineteenth-century technical manuals and catalogues, creating bizarre, hallucinatory conjunctions that seemed to have passed directly from the realm of dreams. About George Antheil George Antheil was born in 1900 in Trenton, New Jersey, USA. He studied composition in New York, and the piano in Philadelphia. In 1922 he began to travel around Europe to pursue a career as a concert pianist. In Berlin he met Stravinsky who became an important influence on his compositional style. Antheil had a vivid imagination and also a strong bent for dreams. A forerunner in music of the automatic writing techniques created by the surrealists, he planned to write a 'music of the unconscious' or, as he called it, 'a dream of future music'. In 1933, inspired by Ernst's engravings in La Femme 100 têtes, Antheil composed a 35-minute suite for solo piano, transforming the book's strange and startling scenes into a unique musical collage. About Nicolas Hodges Nicolas Hodges has built up a reputation as one of the leading performers of his generation, much in demand as a recitalist and concerto soloist. He has appeared at major festivals in Britain as well as in Italy, Belgium, Germany, France and Austria. Recent engagements have included the Aldeburgh Festival with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Leonard Slatkin, and the first public concert at Tate Modern where he performed Stravinsky's Piano Concerto |
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