Shall We Dance

The text and the video excerpt below document Philippe Langlois’s book, Les cloches d’Atlantis, Musique électroacoustique et cinéma, Archéologie et histoire d’un art sonore, éditions mf, Paris, 2012.

Noises then break the boundary that separates them from the real world and melt insidiously into the music. This idea can be found in the sound of the pistons alone creating the rhythmic basis of the music in the engine room of the liner carrying Fred Astaire to Europe in Shall we Dance – L’entreprenant Monsieur Petrov – (1937) by Mark Sandrich, where “the machine noises of a liner, of its connecting rods and its pistons, skilfully recreated, then edited and organised, become a genuine musique concrète over which Fred Astaire, a Russian classical dancer won over by jazz, superimposes the sound of his tap dancing. This piece of rhythmic noises is, moreover, inserted, like a percussion solo, between the refrains of a Gershwin song, played and sung in a more classical manner”.