Airplane Sonata and Death of Machines. Ballet Mécanique, in its earliest and most ambitious version, in 1924, was scored for, among other instruments, 16 player pianos playing four separate parts, 4 bass drums, 7 fire bells, a police siren, and 3 airplane propellers. It proved impossible to perform, for there was no practical way to synchronize the player pianos with anything like the precision needed. It became famous —or infamous, anyway—though, when Antheil wrote a shortened and simplified version with just one player piano; it had its premiere at Carnegie Hall in 1927, and it was such a fiasco that it wasn’t performed again for more than 60 years.

Enter a composer named Paul Lehrman, in the 1990s. He took all 1240 bars of the original score and painstakingly translated them into a MIDI file. MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is the standard computer language for controlling musical instruments. Ballet Mécanique changes its time signature more than 600 times, and the job of converting it was huge. But once that was done, any part of it could be played by any MIDI-equipped instrument, such as a Yamaha Disklavier CD-driven piano. Lehrman then prepared a click track, a recording indicating the beat, to help a conductor wearing headphones negotiate the constant time changes.

The results came together first in Massachusetts in 1999 and then at a Carnegie Hall premiere in April 2000, where eight MIDI-coordinated Disklaviers played all the player-piano parts, a woman in the middle cranked a siren, four xylophonists clattered away, and the three propellers roared through speakers from a recording made in California. The result was a big, repetitive clangor, sometimes loud, sometimes louder, sort of like a Philip Glass piece for industrial noisemakers. The New York Times called it “a riot of intertwined rhythms and noise.” For the first time the world heard what even in a watered-down version three-quarters of a century before had been considered “the acme of demented modernism,” in Virgil Thomson’s words, and had “outsacked the Sacre [Rite of Spring],” in Aaron Copland’s. Here was a living moment of the past that the past itself hadn’t experienced.

The most surprising and stirring recent high-tech step into lost time is the trip across pre-Revolutionary Russia made possible by a computer’s transformation of a collection of photographs made there around 1910, turning them from prehistoric-color curiosities into stunningly crisp and detailed portrayals of all aspects of Russian life almost a century ago in a palette as full and lifelike as any digital photograph taken today. A brass-buttoned, green-belted canal manager born in the 1820s oversees his ferry dock; three young peasant girls in multicolored homespun offer berries to visitors outside their log house; the stout emir of Bukhara sits for the camera in his richest royal blue; a merchant in a wooden stall in Samarkand displays ceiling-high stacks of multicolored silks, woolens, and

cotton fabrics—all in the brilliant hues of real life.

That the pictures were taken in color at all is itself a technological miracle. That they have been recovered by the latest techniques and made so accurate they look brand-new is another. They were shot by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, an artist and trained chemist born in 1863 who persuaded Czar Nicholas II to set him up with a private railroad car to travel across Russia, making a photographic survey of the land, its peoples, and its landmarks. He crisscrossed the country between 1909 and 1912 and again in 1915. His goal was to produce a visual record of the greatness of the empire, to be used to educate schoolchildren.

He had devised and patented his own method for making color photographs. He would take three identical photos in rapid succession on the three square thirds of a glass slide about three inches wide and nine inches long. He’d expose the first square through a red filter, the second through a green filter, and the third through a blue one. He’d then develop the film in a darkroom in his railroad car and from the resulting negatives create positive glass slides, which he would project together through red, green, and blue filters to yield a single projected image in full color, albeit usually with blurred edges and other registration problems.

Little did he know that he was catching an ancient world on the eve of its dissolution, a kaleidoscope of cultures across thousands of miles about to be forced into a single Soviet mold. He captured medieval churches and monasteries, locomotives, nomads, dam builders, cities and towns—more than 2,000 images in all. In 1918, he fled the Russian Revolution with 22 crates full of his slides and settled in Paris, where he lived until he died in 1944, at the age of 81, a month after the city’s liberation from the Nazis.

The Library of Congress bought 1903 of the pictures in 1948 and tried without much success to restore some of their faded colors in the 1980s. In the 1990s, a member of the library’s technical staff, Lynn Brooks, pushed for a new attempt to reveal the pictures’ original qualities using computer techniques, and the library hired a commercial photographer named Walter Frankhauser to do the work. He employed what he calls “digichromatography” to get it done.

First, he scanned the three negative images for each picture with a digital camera, recording a million pixels per square inch. A push of a computer key turned the resulting negatives into positives, and he then magnified the images on the computer screen and studied them for imperfections and deterioration that could be repaired with imagehandling software. Next came the hardest part: aligning the three images that combined to make each color photograph. Prokudin-Gorskii had had to work fast, especially when he was photographing people, resetting his glass plate and changing filters to get the three exposures for each shot, and the camera

was likely to jostle, making the images not align properly. To superimpose them precisely, Frankhauser used software that was unimaginable a couple of decades ago and is utterly commonplace today: Photoshop. He often worked on a picture for days to get it right. Once the alignment was perfect, he pressed a few computer keys and turned the three blackand-white positives into the red, green, and blue they represented. Finally, seeing the picture in full color, he did a last retouching to repair any further imperfections he now detected.

The results surprised everyone involved. As Verna Curtis, the library’s curator of photography, put it, “The computer allowed us to do something that ProkudinGorskii never could have imagined he could do but wanted to do. It’s a complete world out there, a world that we usually think of in black and white.” And you can step into that world yourself, at www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire . Thus do high technology and its relentless pace of change send us hurtling ever onward ... into the past.