George Antheil

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George Antheil

George Antheil (July 8, 1900, Trenton, New Jersey – February 12, 1959, New York City) was an American avant-garde composer, pianist, author and inventor.

Contents

[edit] Early life

Antheil was born Georg Carl Johann Antheil and grew up in a family of German-Polish immigrants in Trenton, New Jersey.[1] His father owned a local shoe store in Trenton.[2][3] Antheil was raised bilingually, writing music, prose and poetry from an early age, and never formally graduated from high school or college.[3] According Antheil's autobiography "The Bad Boy of music", he was "so crazy about music", that his mother sent him to the countryside where no pianos were available. Undeterred, George simply arranged for a local music store to deliver a piano.[4] His somewhat unreliable memoir mythologized his origins as a futurist, and emphasized his upbringing near a noisy machine shop and an ominous prison.[2][5] George's younger brother was Henry W. Antheil, Jr., a diplomatic courier who was killed over the Baltic Sea by the Soviets on June 14, 1940.

Antheil started studying the piano at the age of six, and in 1916, traveled regularly to Philadelphia to study under Constantine von Sternberg, a former pupil of Franz Liszt.[3] From Sternberg he received formal composition training in the European tradition, but his trip to the city exposed him to new art, including Dadaism.[6] In 1919, he began to work with the more progressive Ernest Bloch in New York.[3][6][7] Initially Bloch had been skeptical and had rejected him describing Antheil's compositions as "empty" and "pretentious"; however, the teacher was won over by Antheil's enthusiasm and energy, and helped him financially as he attempted to complete an aborted first symphony.[3][8] Antheil's trips to New York also permitted him to meet important figures of the modernist movement including the musicians Leo Ornstein and Paul Rosenfeld, the painter John Marin, photographer Alfred Stieglitz and the editor of the "Little Review" Margaret Anderson.[6] At age 19, Antheil was invited to spend the weekend with Anderson and a group of friends; he stayed six months, and the group, who included Georgette Leblanc, former companion of Maurice Maeterlinck, were to become influential in Antheil's career. Anderson described him as short with an oddly-shaped nose, who played "a compelling mechanical music", and used "the piano exclusively as an instrument of percussion, making it sound like a xylophone or a cymballo." A workaholic, during this period he worked on songs, a piano concerto and a work that came to be known as "the Mechanisms".[9]

Around this time, von Sternberg introduced Antheil to his patron of the next two decades: Mary Louise Curtis Bok, later the founder of the Curtis Institute of Music.[9] Assured by von Sternberg of Antheil's genius and good character, Bok gave him a monthly stipend of $150, and arranged for him to study at the Philadelphia Settlement Music School. Though she came to disapprove of his behavior and his work, for the next twenty years she continued to respond favorably to his constant begging letters.[8][9] Despite her support being vital to his career, Antheil's autobiography barely acknowledged her, failing to recognize the length and extent of her support.[10]

[edit] Berlin and Paris

Antheil continued to study modernist compositions by Igor Stravinsky and members of the Les Six group of French composers. In 1921, he wrote his first in a series of technology-based works, the solo piano Second Sonata, "The Airplane". Other works in the group included the Sonata Sauvage (1922-3) and Third Sonata, "Death of Machines" (1923), "Mechanisms" (ca 1923).[11]

Igor Stravinsky

While the first was composed in the US, the later were written on the Continent, as on May 30 1922, Antheil sailed for Europe to make his name as "a new ultra-modern pianist composer" and a "futurist terrible."[12][13] He had engaged Leo Ornstein's manager, and opened his European career with a concert at Wigmore Hall. The concert featured works by Debussy and Stravinsky, as well as his own compositions.[12] He spent a year in Berlin, planning to work with Artur Schnabel, and gave concerts in Budapest, Vienna and at the Donaueschingen Festival. As he had desired, he achieved notoriety, but often had to pay the concert expenses out of his own pocket. His financial situation was not helped by Mrs. Bok's reduction of his stipend by 50 percent, though she often responded to requests to fund specific aspects his concerts.[12] He met Boski Markus, a Hungarian and the niece of the Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler who became his companion and whom he married in 1925.[14][15]

In the fall of 1922, Antheil took advantage of a chance meeting to introduce himself to his idol Stravinsky in Berlin. They established a warm intimacy and the more established composer encouraged Antheil to move to Paris.[16][17] The couple arrived in Paris in June 1923, in time to attend the premiere of Stravinsky's ballet "Les Noces", but the relationship with Stravinsky did not survive for long: Stravinsky cut the younger man dead having discovered that Antheil had boasted that Stravinsky admired his work. The breech devastated Antheil, and was not ultimately repaired until 1941, when Stravinsky sent the family tickets to a concert he was giving in Hollywood.[2][17]

Despite the inauspicious start, Antheil found Paris, at the time a center of musical and artistic innovation, to be a "green tender morning" compared to the "black night" of Berlin.[18] The couple lived in a one bedroom apartment above Sylvia Beach's bookshop Shakespeare and Company.[15][19] Beach described him "as fellow with bangs, a squished nose and a big mouth with a grin in it. A regular American high school boy."[20] She was very supportive, and introduced Antheil to her circle of friends and customers including Eric Satie, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Virgil Thompson and Ernest Hemingway. Joyce and Pound were soon talking of an opera collaboration.[21] Pound, in particular, was to become an extravagant supporter and promoter of Antheil and his work, comparing him variously to Stravinsky and James Cagney, and describing him as breaking down music to its "musical atom". Pound introduced Antheil to Jean Cocteau who in turn helped launch Antheil into the musical salons of Paris, and commissioned him to write three violin sonatas for his companion, Olga Rudge. In 1924 Pound published "Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony", as part of his campaign to boost Antheil's reputation. The book may have done Antheil more harm that good, and the composer was to distance himself from it in his memoir.[22][23][24] The young artists would attend Antheil’s performances and shout support if the crowd was rude.[citation needed] Natalie Barney helped produce some original works, including the First String Quartet in 1926.[25]

Antheil was asked to make his Paris debut at the opening of the Ballets Suédois, an important Paris social event. He programmed several recent compositions, including the "Airplane Sonata", the "Sonata Sauvage" and "Mechanism". Halfway through his performance a riot broke out, much the Antheil's delight. According to Antheil "People were fighting in the aisles, yelling, clapping, hooting! Pandenonium!... the police entered, and any number of surrealists, society personages, and people of all descriptions were arrested...Paris hadn't had such a good time since the premiere of Stravinsky's 'Sacre du Printemps.'[26] The riot was filmed and may in fact have been engineered as the Marcel L'Herbier movie L'Inhumaine needed a riot scene set in a concert hall. In the audience were Erik Satie, Darius Milhaud, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Picabia; Antheil was delighted when Satie and Milhaud praised his music.[23][26]

12, Rue de l'Odéon, Antheil's home in Paris

Reactions to his first performances were cool at best. His technique was loud, brazen, and percussive. Critics wrote that he hit the piano rather than played it, and indeed he often injured himself by doing so. Audiences in Budapest got so restless sometimes that Antheil would pull a pistol from his jacket and lay it on the piano to make people pay attention.[citation needed]

Antheil’s best-known composition is Ballet Mécanique. The "ballet" was originally conceived to be accompanied by an film by experimental filmmakers Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy,[27] though the nature of the collaboration is mysterious.[28] In the event, the first productions of Antheil's work in 1925 and 1926 did not include the film, which turned out to be half as long as the score.[27] Antheil described his "first major work" 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."[29] The work was scored for multiple strident and percussive instruments, including eight pianolas, doorbells, typewriter keys, sirens, with periods of music and silence interludes set against the roar of the airplane propellers.[30] Antheil described as "by far my most radical work... It is the rhythm of machinery, presented as beautifully as an artist knows how."[31] The Léger-Murphy film and Antheil's score were finally performed together at the Museum of Modern Art in 1935.[27]

Antheil assiduously promoted the work, and engineering his own supposed "disappearance" while on a visit to Africa just before a semi-private preview of the work, went on without him,[32] The official première in 1926 was sponsored by an American patroness who at the end of the concert was tossed in a blanket by three baronesses and a duke.[1] The work enraged some of the concert-goers whose objections were drowned out by the cacophonous music.[25] The following year, Antheil rented New York's Carnegie Hall in order to present an entire concert devoted to his works including the American debut of "Ballet Méchanique" in a scaled-down version. He commissioned elaborate backdrops of skyscrapers and machines, and engaged an African American orchestra to premiere his "Jazz Symphony".[27][33] The concert started well, but according to the concert's promoter and producer when the wind machine was turned on "all hell, in a minor way, broke loose." During the gale, audience members clutched their programs and their hats, one "tied a handkerchief to his cane and waved it wildly in the air in a sign of surrender." Much to the amusement of the audience, the untested siren failed to sound on cue, despite frantic cranking and reached its climax only after the end of the performance, as the audience were clapping and leaving the hall.[34] American critics were hostile, calling the concert "a bitter disappointment" and dismissing the "Ballet Mécanique" as "boring, artless, and naive" and Antheil's hoped-for riots failed to materialize. The failure of the Ballet affected him deeply and he never fully recovered his reputation during his lifetime.[35] A modified version of the work, for percussion, four pianos, and a recording of an airplane motor, was made in 1954.[1]

In the late 1920s, Antheil moved to Germany, where he wrote music for the ballet and theatre, and where in 1930 he premiered his first opera "Transatlantic".[27] This work, which involved American politics and gangsters, was a success at the Frankfurt Opera.[1] In 1933, the rise of the Nazis made Antheil's avant-garde music unwelcome in Germany, and at the height of the Depression, he returned to the US and settled in New York. He reentered American life with enthusiasm, organizing concerts, working on committees with Aaron Copland and Wallingford Riegger, and writing film scores and an opera "Helen Retires" about Helen of Troy. His music had moved away from more extreme aspects of modernism, and by 1930 neoromantic aspects were discernable in his work.[1][36]

[edit] Hollywood

Antheil went to Hollywood in 1936 and became a sought-after film composer, writing more than thirty scores for directors as Cecil B. DeMille and Nicholas Ray,[1][7] including "The Scoundrel" (1935) and "The Plainsman" (1936).[24] However, he found the industry hostile to modern music, complaining that it was a "closed proposition", and describing most background scores as "unmitigated tripe". He became increasingly dependent on more independent producers such as Ben Hecht to give him work, such as Angels Over Broadway (1940) and Spectre Of The Rose (1946).[37] During this time, Antheil continued to compose, including writing six symphonies; his later works were in a more romantic style and influenced by Prokofiev and Shostakovich, as well as American music including jazz. By 1945, his creative career was largely over.[1][24][38]

It is likely that Antheil's most frequently heard composition was the theme he wrote for the 1957-1970 CBS television program The 20th Century, which was narrated by Walter Cronkite. The theme was heard in many American homes every Sunday night for 13 years at the opening and closing of the program.[citation needed]

[edit] Other interests

Apart from music, Antheil had many other pursuits. In 1930, and as "Stacy Bishop", he wrote a murder mystery called "Death in the Dark" with a character based on Ezra Pound.[1][24] He was the film music reporter and critic for the magazine "Modern Music" from 1936-1940, writing columns considered lively and thoughtful, noting the comings and goings of musicians and composers during an era when the industry was flirting with more "modern" scores for films. He was disappointed however, "Hollywood, after a grand splurge with new composers and new ideas, has settled back into into its old grind of producing easy and sure-fire scores."[37]

Hedy Lamarr

Antheil wrote a nationally syndicated newspaper relationship advice column, as well as regular columns in magazines such as "Esquire" and "Coronet". He considered himself an expert on female endocrinology, and a series of articles about how to determine the availability of women based on glandular effects on their appearance, with titles such as "The Glandbook for the Questing Male".[1][39] Antheil's interest in this area brought him into contact with the actress Hedy Lamarr, who sought his advice about how she might enhanced her upper torso. He suggested glandular extracts, but their conversation then moved on to torpedoes. Lamarr had fled her Austrian munitions-making husband, and coming to the US had become fiercely pro-American. Together they conceived and patented a frequency-hopping torpedo guidance system: Lamarr contributed the knowledge of torpedo control gained from her husband and Antheil a method of controlling the spread spectrum sequences using a player-piano mechanism similar to those used in the "Ballet Méchanique".[39][40] Despite the initial enthusiasm of the US Navy, the invention received little attention at first; and the importance of Antheil and Lamarr's discovery was only acknowledged in the 1990s.[39]

He also wrote books, including an autobiography Bad Boy of Music (1945).

[edit] Later life

Antheil composed until he died of a heart attack in New York. His legacy included two accomplished students, Henry Brant and Benjamin Lees. His children were Peter and an illegitimate son, Chris Beaumont.

Large collections of Antheil works exist at the Music Division of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, Princeton University, Columbia University, UCLA, and Stanford University.

[edit] Selected works

[edit] Opera

[edit] Orchestral

  • Ballet Mécanique (1923–25, revised 1952–53)
  • Capital of the World Suite (ca. 1955)
  • Concerto for Chamber Orchestra
  • Decatur at Algiers (1943)
  • Hot-time Dance (1948)
  • Jazz Symphony (1925)
  • McKonkey's Ferry (1948)
  • Piano Concerto No. 1 (1922)
  • Piano Concerto No. 2 (1926)
  • Serenade for Strings No. 1
  • Symphony for 5 Instruments (1922–23, second version 1923)
  • Symphony No. 1 "Zingareska" (1920–22, rev. 1923)
  • Symphony No. 2 (1931–38, rev. 1943)
  • Symphony No. 3 "American" (1936–39, rev. 1946)
  • Symphony No. 4 "1942" (1942)
  • Symphony No. 5 "Tragic" (1945–46, withdrawn)
  • Symphony No. 5 "Joyous" (1947-48)
  • Symphony No. 6 "After Delacroix" (1947-48)
  • Tom Sawyer - California Overture (1949)
  • Violin Concerto (1946)

[edit] Chamber/Instrumental

  • Piano Sonata No. 1
  • Piano Sonata No. 2
  • Piano Sonata No. 3 (1947)
  • Piano Sonata No. 4 (1948)
  • String Quartet No. 1 (1924)
  • String Quartet No. 2 (1927)
  • String Quartet No. 3 (1948)[41]
  • Trumpet Sonata (1951)
  • Violin Sonata No. 1
  • Violin Sonata No. 2
  • Violin Sonata No. 3
  • Violin Sonata No. 4 (1948)
  • Violin Sonatina (1945)

[edit] Film

Of his many film scores, Dementia (1955), which contains no dialog, only music, is believed by many to be his finest.

[edit] Written works

  • Death In the Dark, a crime novel edited and published by T. S. Eliot (1930)
  • Everyman His Own Detective: A Study of Glandular Criminology, New York City: Stackpole Sons (1937)
  • "The Shape of the War to Come", a pamphlet (1940)
  • Bad Boy of Music, Garden City, New York: Doubleday (1945; various reprints and languages)

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i Greene, David Mason (1985). Greene's biographical encyclopedia of composers. Reproducing Piano Roll Fnd.,. pp. 1297-98. ISBN 9780385142786. http://books.google.ca/books?id=m3S7PIxe0mwC&pg=PA1297. 
  2. ^ a b c Garafola 2005, p. 256
  3. ^ a b c d e Crunden 2000, p. 313
  4. ^ Guy Livingston, "George Antheil's Childhood in Trenton", English text of article originally published in German as "Der Mann hinter dem Mythos: George Antheils amerikanische Kindheit", trans. Esther Dubielzig. Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 162, no. 5 (September-October 2001): 18–21.
  5. ^ Oja 2000, pp. 73-74
  6. ^ a b c Oja 2000, p. 74
  7. ^ a b Linda Whitesitt, Charles Amirkhanian, and Susan C. Cook, "Antheil, George [Georg] (Carl Johann)", The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (London: Macmillan Publishers; New York: Grove's Dictionaries of Music, 2001)
  8. ^ a b Johnson 2002, p. 2
  9. ^ a b c Crunden 2000, p. 314
  10. ^ Whitesitt, Linda (Spring, 1984). "Book review: Bad Boy of Music by George Antheil; Charles Amirkhanian". American Music 2 (1): 110-11. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3051969. 
  11. ^ Oja 2000, pp. 74-75
  12. ^ a b c Crunden 2000, p. 315
  13. ^ Oja 2000, p. 75
  14. ^ Wilhelm 2008, p. 267
  15. ^ a b Monnier, Adrienne (1996). The very rich hours of Adrienne Monnier. U of Nebraska Press. pp. 495. ISBN 9780803282278. http://books.google.ca/books?id=JcH7g0vj1B0C&pg=PA495. 
  16. ^ Crunden 2000, pp. 315-17
  17. ^ a b White, Eric Walter (1985). Stravinsky, the composer and his works. University of California Press. pp. 80-84. ISBN 9780520039858. http://books.google.ca/books?id=p3gjrxSRphoC&pg=PA83. 
  18. ^ Fitch 1985, p. 148
  19. ^ Wilhelm 2008, p. 268
  20. ^ Meister, Barbara (2006). Music musique: French & American piano composition in the Jazz Age. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. p. 115. ISBN 0-253-34608-8. http://books.google.ca/books?id=WAxLixiOakUC&pg=PA115. 
  21. ^ Fitch 1985, pp. 150-51
  22. ^ Albright 2004, p. 70
  23. ^ a b Fitch 1985, pp. 156-57
  24. ^ a b c d Adams, Stephen J. (2005). "Antheil, George (1900-1959) and "Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony"". in Tryphonopoulos, Demetres P. and Adams, Stephen. The Ezra Pound encyclopedia. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 13-15. ISBN 9780313304484. http://books.google.ca/books?id=ttMlqGMYCsIC&pg=PA13. 
  25. ^ a b Suzanne Rodriguez Wild Heart: A Life: Natalie Clifford Barney and the Decadence of Literary Paris (New York: HarperCollins, 2002): 249. ISBN 0-06-093780-7.
  26. ^ a b Garafola 2005, p. 257
  27. ^ a b c d e Garafola 2005, p. 258
  28. ^ Oja 2000, p. 190
  29. ^ Oja, Carol (2000). "George Antheil's Ballet Mécanique and Transatlantic Modernism". in Ludington, Townsend. A modern mosaic: art and modernism in the United States. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. p. 185. ISBN 0-8078-4891-3. 
  30. ^ Albright 2004, p. 69-70, 386
  31. ^ Oja 2000, p. 64
  32. ^ Fitch 1985, pp. 192-93
  33. ^ Oja 2000, p. 176
  34. ^ Oja 2000, p. 71
  35. ^ Oja 2000, p. 195
  36. ^ Garafola 2005, p. 260
  37. ^ a b Marks, Martin Miller (1997). Music and the silent film: contexts and case studies, 1895-1924. Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Oxford University Press. pp. 14-16. ISBN 0-19-506891-2. http://books.google.ca/books?id=ALbz24g5aOAC&pg=PA14. 
  38. ^ Crunden 2000, p. 320
  39. ^ a b c Abelson, Harold; Ledeen, Ken (2008). Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion. Lewis, Harry. Addison-Wesley. pp. 278-80. ISBN 9780137135592. http://books.google.ca/books?id=Y7DOltmSGjgC&pg=PA278&lpg=PA278. 
  40. ^ Albright 2004, p. 69
  41. ^ Naxos.com (http://www.naxos.com/mainsite/blurbs_reviews.asp?item_code=8.559354&catNum=559354&filetype=About%20this%20Recording&language=English)

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