It’s got have something to do with that Buck Moon.
July 8 marks the birthdays of two of music’s looniest pianist-composers.
George Antheil, self-proclaimed “Bad Boy of Music,” was born in Trenton on this date in 1900. Antheil’s “Ballet Mécanique,” scored for player pianos, airplane propellers, siren and electric bells, inspired one of the great classical music riots at its Paris premiere in 1926.
Antheil would practice the piano with such ferocity that he would have to pause, periodically, to thrust his hands into two fish bowls filled with ice water. Before commencing a recital, he would remove a pistol from a silk holster sewn into his jacket and ostentatiously place it atop the piano, to send a message that he would brook no nonsense.
Later, he became a Hollywood film composer, a war correspondent, the author of a column of advice to the lovelorn, an expert in endocrinology, and co-inventor, with actress Hedy Lamarr, of a frequency-hopping system for the guidance of Allied torpedoes that would become the basis for modern spread-spectrum communications technology.
In 1944, he scored a notable success with his Symphony No. 4, after it was taken up by Leopold Stokowski and later Sir Eugene Goossens, who recorded it. Antheil was also the author of a bestselling autobiography, “Bad Boy of Music.” He died of a heart attack at the age of 59. A third recorded cycle of his symphonies is currently underway, on the Chandos label. Not bad for a boy from Trenton.
Wouldn’t you know, Percy Aldridge Grainger was also born on this date, outside Melbourne, Australia, in 1882. Grainger, one of classical music’s great eccentrics, was an outstanding pianist and an innovative composer, who also happened to be obsessed with physical fitness. Rather than drive or take the train between towns and engagements, it was his preference to jog. He was also known to throw a ball over one side of a house, and then race around the other side to catch it.
Enamored with Nordic culture, he went out of his way to use only Anglo-Saxon words, avoiding in his letters anything of Norman or Latin origin. However, the dominance of German music rankled him, and he loved Duke Ellington.
He was unusually close to his mother and exhibited sadomasochistic tendencies. He donated whips and blood-stained clothes to the Grainger Museum, which he founded in 1932. (His request to have his skeleton displayed – posthumously, of course – was denied.)
Later, while living in White Plains, NY, he experimented with electronics and “machine music,” in a sense paralleling an obsession of Antheil, who besides “Ballet Mécanique,” wrote such works as “Airplane Sonata” and “Death of Machines.”
Sadly, only the tiniest portion of Grainger’s output is known by the general public, and he is celebrated as the composer of such folksy trifles as “Country Gardens,” “Molly on the Shore,” and “Shepherd’s Hey.” But Grainger’s treatment of harmony and rhythm could be highly original. He was a brilliant musician, and wholly unconventional in more ways than one.
Grainger died in White Plains in 1961 at the age of 78. His remains, including his skeleton, rest in Adelaide.
Antheil and Grainger. What are the odds? Blame it on that old devil moon.
Two peas in a pod: George Antheil, smoking, and Percy Grainger, smoking hot, in self-designed “toweling clothes”
