When worlds collide! On George Antheil’s birthday, here are some recorded recollections of Jerome Moross of Trenton’s “Bad Boy of Music.” Antheil, one of the great eccentrics, was most notorious for his “Ballet Mécanique,” a clangorous work for player pianos, electric bells, sirens, and airplane propellers, that caused the audience at its premiere in Paris in 1926 to take the place apart.
Moross was composer of the film score for “The Big Country” and the musical theater piece “The Golden Apple” (which yielded the standard “Lazy Afternoon”). When Moross refers to Benny, he of course means his good friend, Bernard Herrmann, with whom he used to sneak into rehearsals of Carnegie Hall concerts, and who later wrote the music for “Citizen Kane,” “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” “Jason and the Argonauts,” and Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver.”
Antheil eventually wound up in California himself, where his musical language settled down, so that he earned his bread writing film scores and symphonies, as well as books, newspaper articles, and magazine columns on a wide variety of subjects, including war correspondence, murder mysteries, advice to the lovelorn, glandular criminology and bust enhancement (!).
It was the latter topic that attracted actress Hedy Lamarr for what started out as a consultation. It turned out Lamarr was also every inch the Renaissance person, and soon they were partnering on a frequency-hopping device conceived to prevent the enemy from blocking Allied torpedoes. They offered it to the military, which never used it. In recent years, it has been claimed (perhaps overstated) that their invention anticipated modern spread-spectrum communications technology.
It’s a small world after all – from Trenton to New York to the Champs-Élysées to Hollywood. Happy birthday, George Antheil!
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Moross talks Antheil
https://archive.org/details/AM_1979_06_19
The Ben Hecht film he refers to is the ballet noir “Specter of the Rose”
Antheil’s “Ballet Mécanique”
His Symphony No. 4