How much food can you eat right before talking about George Antheil? That was the challenge I faced this afternoon, while setting up for my talk about Trenton’s greatest musical son. Thank you so much to the Rotary Club of Trenton, New Jersey for inviting of me. I’ve written a lot about the composer, both here and in actual print, and played more than my share of his music on the radio. I’d never been to a Rotary Club meeting before, and it was pure Americana. With a lot of food!
Here’s something I forgot I had in my own collection. I came across it yesterday in the course of my preparations (having also reread Antheil’s flamboyant autobiography, “Bad Boy of Music”). “Two Odes of John Keats” is just about perfect for October, especially as the spoken part is taken by Vincent Price! Antheil himself is at the keyboard.
Believe it or not, I also drove across the bridge at Washington’s Crossing yesterday while listening to Antheil’s overture “McKonkey’s Ferry” – a piece actually inspired by Washington’s crossing! No doubt, my crossing was infinitely more pleasurable than Washington’s.
Big doings with the @[100064825684990:2048:Rotary Club of Trenton, New Jersey] today, as I’ll be delivering a lunchtime talk about Trenton’s own George Antheil. Antheil was the avant-garde composer and super-pianist who put Paris on its ear in the 1920s. He then devoted himself to symphonies, ballets for Balanchine, and even Hollywood film scores. But he also did a lot of other things, including laying the groundwork, with actress Hedy Lamarr, for the kind frequency-hopping spread-spectrum technology that decades later would be employed for wireless phones, GPS, and Wi-Fi. Always fun to talk about Antheil, as he was such an eccentric and versatile character. I didn’t realize there would be a shout-out on the Rotary Club’s Facebook page, but here it is!
George Antheil, classical music’s original Trenton cracker, was born on this date in 1900.
The self-proclaimed “Bad Boy of Music” (the title of his autobiography) had to travel all the way to Paris to make good. It doesn’t make my transcontinental exile to Eugene, Oregon seem so bad! I hope you’ll join me for “The Lost Chord,” now on KWAX, as we divvy up the nut bread for a musical celebration of Antheil’s birthday.
Antheil’s “Ballet Mécanique” sparked one of classical music’s great riots when it was unveiled at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in 1926.
The work made preposterous demands on performers and audience alike, with its battery of player pianos, sirens, bells, and airplane propellers – all difficult to coordinate, but worth it, if they were to transform concert halls into free-for-alls and secure Antheil’s status as enfant terrible. His notoriety earned him the respect, friendship, and envy of Paris’ artistic community. From the stage, he watched as Man Ray punched a heckler in the face, as Satie cheered, “Quel precision!,” and as Ezra Pound shouted, “Shut up, you are all stupid idiots.” Pound became one of Antheil’s most ardent champions, taking a break from poetry to publish an inflammatory book, “Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony.”
Antheil speculated, perhaps facetiously, that his mechanistic nightmares may have been inspired by his having been born across the street from a noisy machine shop. In fact, a number of his works bear the boisterous imprint of the factories he knew in Trenton as a boy, including the “Airplane Sonata,” “The Death of Machines,” and the “Sonata Sauvage.”
It was all rather forward-looking. Antheil was one of the first composers to search beyond conventional instruments for musical means. He not only presaged the alien soundscapes of Edgard Varèse, but also anticipated the stupefying repetitions of minimalism – though infusing his own compositions with enough violence to prevent them from ever becoming numbing. Stravinsky was his hero. He fed off the savagery of “The Rite of Spring,” then followed the master’s subsequent hairpin turn into neoclassicism. Both artists suffered a backlash from former idolaters who felt betrayed by what was perceived as a cowardly retreat into the past.
In Antheil’s case, his reputation never recovered. The one-two punch of his Piano Concerto No. 2, transparently influenced by Bach, and the spectacular failure of his “Ballet Mécanique” to impress at its American premiere at Carnegie Hall (mostly due to faulty machinery) cast Antheil, rebel angel that he was, from the lofty heights of notoriety to the slag heap of has-beenery.
But if it is true that the remainder of his career was indeed that of a has-been, we should all be so lucky.
The composer of six symphonies, Antheil also wrote books on endocrinology and speculative war tactics, a murder mystery, a nationally syndicated column of advice to the lovelorn, and over 30 Hollywood film scores. With the actress Hedy Lamarr, he patented a torpedo guidance system that became the basis for modern Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular phone technology.
I hope you’ll join me for music by this eccentric and multitalented figure, including “Ballet Mécanique,” in all its original, uncompromising glory; then selections from his neo-classical Piano Concerto No. 2, his wartime Symphony No. 4, and dance music from his score to the ballet film noir “Specter of the Rose.”
The irony is blistering that Trenton’s own classical music station no longer hosts “The Lost Chord,” but you can still enjoy this celebration of Trenton’s (other) bad boy, thanks to the miracle of worldwide streaming. I hope you’ll be able to join me for “Antheil Establishment,” now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!
For more information, see below.
Keep in mind, KWAX is on the West Coast, so there’s a three-hour difference for the Trenton-Princeton area. Here are the respective air-times of my recorded shows (with East Coast conversions in parentheses):
PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday on KWAX at 5:00 PACIFIC TIME (8:00 PM EDT)
THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday on KWAX at 4:00 PACIFIC TIME (7:00 PM EDT)
In a post earlier today about Howard Pollack’s new Samuel Barber biography, I mentioned a meeting between Barber and Trenton’s own George Antheil. The meeting took place in Vienna in 1934. Barber was surprised by Antheil’s congeniality and touched by his genuine interest in his music. In fact, in a letter to his parents, Barber specified that he felt they had parted the best of friends. Unfortunately, the two were not to have very much contact in the future.
Interesting, then, that I should stumble across this audio for a concert with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra from 1950. The first half of the program is devoted to Barber’s “School for Scandal Overture” and Antheil’s Symphony No. 5! (Clearly, Antheil was on a Prokofiev kick at the time of its writing.)
The second half features Gershwin’s Concerto in F, with an assortment of encores, performed by Gershwin friend and acolyte, Oscar Levant. Last and least is a suite from Jerome Kern’s “Showboat.” Artur Rodzinski, notorious for packing heat on the podium, is the conductor.
A gem of a find and a remarkable coincidence that Barber and Antheil would wind up shoulder-to-shoulder on the same concert!
When they were handing out the looney, they must have found themselves with an overabundance when it came to July 8.
Today marks the birthday anniversaries of two of music’s wackiest pianist-composers.
George Antheil, self-proclaimed “Bad Boy of Music,” was born in Trenton, NJ on this date in 1900. His “Ballet Mécanique,” scored for synchronized 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 the start of a recital, he would remove a pistol from a silk holster sewn into his jacket and place it atop the piano, to telegraph the 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. Neither Antheil nor Lamarr would ever see a dime for their invention.
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. Another one of classical music’s great eccentrics, Grainger was obsessed with physical fitness. Rather than drive or take the train between towns and recitals, it was his preference to jog. He was also known to throw a ball over one side of a house, and then race around to 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. This extended to his scores, in which he eschewed Italian musical terms in favor of their English equivalents. In 1928, he married Ella Ström, from Sweden, during a concert at the Hollywood Bowl. On the program was his new work, “To a Nordic Princess.”
Lest his cultural quirks be misconstrued in an increasingly black-and-white world, Grainger’s embrace of “blue-eyed English” was as idiosyncratic as everything else in his character. He bristled against the dominance of German music, he served in the U.S. Army against Germany in WWI, he embraced music from a wide diversity of cultures, all the way to Bali, he championed works by African-Canadian-American composer R. Nathaniel Dett, and he adored Duke Ellington and George Gershwin.
Grainger 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.
Happy birthday, you wacky, wacky boys.
Grainger, “Scotch Strathspey and Reel”
Grainger orchestration of Debussy’s “Pagodes”
His imaginary ballet, “The Warriors”
Grainger plays “Molly on the Shore”
R. Nathaniel Dett’s “Juba”
Antheil, “Ballet Mécanique” – presumably in its revision, because of the use of live pianists – with the annoying Fernand Léger film
Antheil, “Jazz Symphony”
Antheil, Symphony No. 4 “1942”
Antheil, “Specter of the Rose” (from the film score, 1946)
Antheil speaks!
PHOTOS: Antheil packing heat (top), and the multifaceted Grainger
