We’ll be breaking bad on today’s Noontime Concert on The Classical Network. I hope you’ll join me for music by Trenton’s own George Antheil.
Antheil, the self-proclaimed “Bad Boy of Music,” was born in Trenton, NJ, in 1900. His “Ballet mécanique,” for synchronized player pianos, siren, electronic bells, xylophones and airplane propellers, caused a riot at its Paris premiere in 1926.
We’ll hear a live concert performance of Antheil’s magnum opus, arranged for solo piano and eight loudspeakers, by Guy Livingston. Livingston, who makes his home in Paris, is one of the foremost authorities on Antheil and his music, having recorded the composer’s Piano Concerto No. 2, for New World Records, and an album of “The Lost Piano Sonatas,” for the Wergo label, from which we will also be sampling. In 2003, Livingston was artistic director of a George Antheil festival in Trenton.
This performance took place at Tufts University in March, as part of a two-day festival, “The Film Music of George Antheil: The ‘Bad Boy’ in Paris and Hollywood.” The festival included the first American screening of a restored print of the experimental film “Ballet mécanique” by Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy.
At the time of the composer’s greatest success, Antheil and his wife lived in a one-bedroom apartment above Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Company bookshop, a favorite haunt of Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce. Relishing his notoriety, Antheil carried a pistol, in a silk holster sewn into his jacket, which he would ostentatiously place on the piano prior to commencing a recital.
Later, he was co-holder of a patent with actress Hedy Lamarr for a communications system based on frequency-hopping, as applied to radio-controlled torpedoes. Though the idea of spread spectrum became the basis for modern cell phone technology, neither Antheil nor Lamarr ever saw a dime for their invention.
In his spare time, Antheil wrote a column of advice to the lovelorn for Esquire magazine, a couple of murder mysteries and a book on criminal endocrinology.
It will be all-Antheil in the noon hour today. Then stick around for Ottorino Respighi’s rarely-heard lyric poem for soloists, chorus and orchestra, “La Primavera,” and Dame Ethyl Smyth’s “Serenade in D major,” among our featured works, from 12 to 4 p.m. EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
