George Antheil

George Antheil (1900 – 1959) was the Bad Boy of Music, as he titled his extremely entertaining 1945 autobiography. Never at a loss for an artistic provocation, Antheil trod an idiosyncratic path that took him from being an extreme progressive in the 1920s to a middle-of-the-road neo-Romantic modernist. His most important composition was “Ballet mécanique”, a veritable cult avant-garde piece whose machine-like music is marked by repetitive structures and an elemental sound world. The original score called for 16 pianolas and an extensive percussion section – including seven xylophones and two aircraft propellors – and already reveals Antheil’s unconditional desire for progress and one-upmanship. Although George Antheil’s creative output was for a long time reduced to just this one piece, others, such as his violin sonatas, have recently been gaining greater attention. 

George Antheil was a professional musician as well as a man of diverse and other hardly believable interests and talents: He wrote a relationship advice column, detective novels, and was a military strategist and inventor who, together with the famous Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr, invented an encryption system that was much later to lay the foundation for mobile communications technology. Antheil also had the good fortune, or instinct, to be at the right place at the right time, which helped him become friends with James Joyce and Ezra Pound, as well as with Igor Stravinsky and Ernest Hemingway.

George Antheil was born the son of German immigrants in Trenton, the capital city of the US state of New Jersey, and began playing the piano at the age of 13. He made such rapid progress that he began studying piano in nearby Philadelphia in 1919/20. He also benefitted from several short periods studying composition with Ernest Bloch. Nevertheless, Antheil essentially remained an autodidact who developed a freewheeling attitude to traditional standards and categories. In those most formative years he was able to establish numerous contacts in the artistic and intellectual scene in Philadelphia and New York, which was also within easy reach, and witnessed the US premieres of works by Arnold Schönberg, Igor Stravinsky and Claude Debussy.

A trip to Europe in 1922, which began as a concert tour, proved a turning point for Antheil. After a period in Berlin, where he got to know Stravinsky, who had a huge influence on him, George Antheil spent the years between 1923 and 1928 living in Paris, where he wrote his most important works. It was also where the world premiere of “Ballet mécanique” was held in June 1926. It proved both a first-rate scandal and a success. A performance of a revised version of “Ballet mécanique” together with his “Jazz Symphony” in New York a year later was a fiasco, though, as Antheil had by then already moved stylistically towards neo-Classicism. 
Antheil spent the intervening years up until 1933 in Vienna and Berlin before returning permanently to the United States. He worked for Georges Balanchine’s ballet company in New York and for the film industry, and finally relocated to Hollywood in 1936, where he earned his living as a versatile film composer. He largely disappeared from public view in those years. Although he continued to compose standalone pieces, none of them was ever a huge success. George Antheil died in New York on 12 February 1959.