Classic Ross Amico

Tag: George Antheil

NJ Capital Philharmonic Orchestra Debut

Is it possible that I am still asleep and dreaming? For the first time since the restructuring of the paper, one of my stories has actually hit the front page, a seemingly regular occurrence under the old system.

But conductor Daniel Spalding and I both presented cases for the importance of heightened exposure for the New Jersey Capital Philharmonic Orchestra, as it is about to commence its first complete season. The orchestra, rising from the ashes of the Greater Trenton Symphony, will perform at the Trenton War Memorial Saturday night at 8.

The program will include works by Beethoven, Shostakovich and American composer Ron Nelson. Awadagin Pratt will be the soloist in Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4.

The Times of Trenton did the right thing and actually sent a photographer to one of the orchestra’s rehearsals.

Please consider attending the concert, if you can. The area can never have too many orchestras, if people will only go, and the greater the support, the better the NJCP is bound to get. It’s your call whether or not you think the city of Trenton should have its own orchestra.

Personally, I’m looking forward to George Antheil’s “Capital of the World,” which the NJCP will perform on May 9. Antheil, the self-proclaimed “Bad Boy of Music,” was born in Trenton in 1900. He turned Paris on its ear with his “Ballet Mécanique,” which incited one of the great musical riots in 1926. Spalding made an acclaimed recording of the work with his other group, the Philadelphia Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra, at the War Memorial, which was issued on the Naxos label. He’s also recorded Antheil for New World Records.

The Greater Trenton Symphony, founded in 1921, was New Jersey’s oldest professional symphonic ensemble. The orchestra performed its last concert – the first since 2010 – on New Year’s Eve, 2012. You can read more about what happened next in my article in today’s Trenton Times.

http://www.nj.com/times-entertainment/index.ssf/2014/10/classical_music_nj_capital_phi.html

PHOTO: Awadagin Pratt, who will be the soloist tomorrow night in Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4, wowed the judges of the Naumburg International Piano Competition with his performance of the piece in 1992

October 24, 2014
Wacky Composers: Grainger & Antheil’s Eccentric Genius

July 8 is classical music’s birth date of wacky. Were there two more eccentric characters than Percy Grainger and George Antheil? Undoubtedly, there were some who would give them a run for the money, but few could win the race.

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.

At the time, he 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 ostentatiously would 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.

Grainger, born in Australia in 1882, was an outstanding pianist and an innovative composer. He was also obsessed with physical fitness and the idea of racial superiority. Rather than drive or take the train, he preferred to jog across country from engagement to engagement. He would throw a ball over one side of a house, and then race around the other side to catch it.

Enamored of 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.

He was unusually close to his mother and developed 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.)

Late in life, he experimented with electronics and “machine music,” in a sense paralleling an obsession of Antheil, who besides the “Ballet Mécanique,” wrote works like the “Airplane Sonata” and “Death of Machines.”

Sadly, only the smallest portion of Grainger’s output (“Country Gardens,” “Molly on the Shore,” “Shepherd’s Hey”) is known by the general public, and generally celebrated for the wrong reasons. Grainger’s treatment of harmony and rhythm could be highly original. He was a brilliant musician, and wholly unconventional in more ways than one.

Happy birthday, you wacky, wacky boys.

Here’s Antheil’s “Ballet Mécanique” – presumably in its revision, because of the use of live pianists – with the annoying Fernand Léger film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kX9SZ21OmYU

And Grainger’s setting of a text from the Faroe Islands, “Father and Daughter”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPAVUlmL0sk

PHOTOS: Grainger (left) and Antheil, both very bad

July 8, 2014

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