I am torn between writing about American composer George Antheil’s life and writing about his music. Each contains such wild improbabilities that one cannot help but be intrigued and amused by the delightful eccentricities of both. I wonder if the connection between the two might not be crime—of both the literal and musical sort.
Take, for instance, Antheil’s introduction to music as a very young child, living with his parents across the street from the New Jersey State Penitentiary in Trenton, where he was born in 1900. A pair of old maids moved into the house next door and began pounding away on the piano in shifts day and night. When they finally stopped, it was discovered that the noise had been a cover for a tunneling operation to the prison that led to one of the most sensational jailbreaks in New Jersey’s history. This bizarre occurrence was the source of Antheil’s initial love of a certain kind of piano playing and music. As early as 1921, he announced his desire to become “noted and notorious…as a new ultramodern pianist composer.” Is it any wonder that he went on to scandalize the music world with violent piano compositions such as Sonata Sauvage, The Death of Machines, and the Airplane Sonata that caused riots in several European cities?
Like an inhabitant of the institution across from his childhood home, Antheil seemed to enjoy the danger of near escapes. The riots that his music provoked led him to obtain a pistol. “A real one!” he gleefully recounted. “I bought a small 32 automatic, for which I had a silken holster made to fit under my arm. Thereafter I would publicly produce my ugly little automatic, in approved American gangster fashion, and place it on the piano in full view before each recital. I never had any more trouble until the Nazis.” How can you not like a man like this?
Well, perhaps by listening to his music especially if you are not fond of incessantly pounding rhythms and unresolved dissonances. The strident tendency in Antheil’s music reached its apogee in his most infamous piece, Ballet Mecanique, which rocked the Parisian music world in 1926 with another riot. Naxos has released a new recording of this “classic,” along with others of his works, performed by the Philadelphia Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra, under Daniel Spalding. Antheil threw airplane propellers, electric buzzers, percussion, and sirens into this cacophonous exercise in pure rhythm. (Anyone who has sat through an evening of Japanese drumming would understand the experience and its visceral thrill.) The futurists, Dadaists, and other ultra-modernists fell into raptures, and the rest were appropriately appalled. As a result, Antheil was a made man, an enfant terrible, or, as he called himself in the title of his highly amusing autobiography, the Bad Boy of Music. He stood shoulder to shoulder in Paris with his friends, Ezra Pound, Picasso, James Joyce, Fernand Leger, and the rest of the avant-garde. As Pound wrote, he was “the first American or America-born musician to be taken seriously.” At the same time, Aaron Copeland said that Antheil possessed “the greatest gift of any young American now writing.”
However, Antheil’s fame came at a price. The New York premiere of his ballet turned into a fiasco due to the power of the large airplane propellers that blew the front-row patrons from their seats. Not even the American avant-garde was amused. Antheil was written off as a charlatan. He retreated first to Europe and then to Hollywood, where he wrote a distinguished group of film scores, including The Plainsman, Spectre of the Rose, Knock on Any Door, and The Pride and the Passion. His reputation as a serious classical artist dwindled to that of a one-work composer. He came to regret this deeply. In 1945, he reflected, “It is terrible when I think that… [with the Ballet Mecanique] I am still included in the chapter on young American composers. Because of this, the Ballet Mecanique has become for me what the C-sharp Prelude must have been for Rachmaninov—to put it plainly, my nightmare.” Also, Antheil claimed that the work was misunderstood: “I had no idea of copying a machine directly down into music, so to speak. My idea, rather, was to warn the age in which I was living of the simultaneous beauty and danger of its own unconscious mechanistic philosophy, aesthetic.” His later music proves the authenticity of this remark.
In fact, after 1926, Antheil turned away from his early radical experiments because, musically speaking, he had to. Ballet Mecanique is as far as one can go in its direction. Adding another propeller or two leads nowhere. So Antheil followed his idol, Stravinsky, into neoclassicism. Works from this period, such as Symphony for Five Instruments and Concert for Chamber Orchestra, can also be heard on the Naxos CD.
After his move to Hollywood in 1935, Antheil underwent another major reevaluation. He delved into the classics—Beethoven, Mahler, and Sibelius (“I discovered, for instance, that Sibelius was not so bad after all. How effete my tastes had become in Paris”)—and concluded “that no young artist starts the world all over again for himself but merely continues…the heritage of the past, pushing if possible on a little further.” Antheil’s path in this direction was provided by other Russian models, particularly Shostakovitch and Prokofiev. On them, he based his new orchestral works, including his last three symphonies.
The financial difficulties Antheil had to endure because of his notoriety turned him to a number of curious nonmusical pursuits that link him again with the crime theme. In 1930, T.S. Eliot edited and published Antheil’s crime novel, Death in the Dark, about the murder of a concert agent. Antheil became an expert in the field of endocrinology as it relates to criminal behavior. He was consulted by a number of police departments and won an honorary life membership in the Paris police force for his study of glandular disturbances in criminals. He published Every Man His Own Detective, intriguingly subtitled, “X marks the gland where the criminal is found.”
In other writing pursuits, Antheil produced The Shape of the War to Come, published in June 1939, in which he predicted the events of World War II with astonishing precision. He missed Pearl Harbor by only a month. The editor of the Los Angeles Daily News was sufficiently impressed to make him the paper’s war correspondent. Other wartime activities included designing a radio-controlled torpedo with actress Hedy Lamarr, with whom he shared the patent. He also syndicated a column of advice to the lovelorn, “Boy Advises Girl.” Some claim Antheil inspired Nathaniel West’s novel Miss Lonely Hearts.
Thanks to two ongoing recorded cycles of Antheil’s six numbered symphonies—there are two unnumbered ones—the now-emerging secret is that during this time of relative obscurity, Antheil wrote a good deal of very fine music. Naxos has released a CD offering Symphonies Nos. 4 and 6, with McKonkey’s Ferry, played by the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine, under Theodore Kuchar. And the CPO label gives us two CDs with Symphonies Nos. 1 and 2, with the Archipelago (if you love high jinks in music, listen to this cross between George Gershwin and Xavier Cougat), and Symphonies Nos. 4 and 5, brilliantly played by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, under American conductor Hugo Wolff. These works bear out the verdict of the American composer and critic Virgil Thomson that “the bad boy became a good boy.” By this, he meant that Antheil’s later works entered the mainstream of music with their melodic richness, orchestral virtuosity, and classical forms.
Because Antheil’s life is so interesting, I have left no room for my detailed notes on his symphonies. There is no doubt that they rely heavily on their Russian models (one critic suggested that instead of calling Antheil an American Shostakovitch, Shostakovitch ought to be called a Russian Antheil). In brief, this is good, high-spirited, and imaginative music, though not great by its own points of reference—Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Shostakovitch. If you enjoy the rambunctious, boisterous, and brilliant, give this bad boy a second chance. We all deserve one, and you won’t regret it.