GEORGE ANTHEIL

        Bad Boy Made Good
        Ballet Mécanique

George Antheil (1900 - 1959) was born in Trenton, New Jersey, on July 8, 1900, the son of a shoe salesman. A piano prodigy, he went to Europe at the age of 22 to concertize, but soon found that his real love was composing. He settled in Paris, living above the famed Shakespeare & Company bookstore, and was an active participant in a remarkable literary and artistic circle that included Picasso, Joyce, Stravinsky, Satie, Ezra Pound, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and many others. His early compositions showed a fascination with machines, and included such pieces as 'Airplane Sonata', 'Mechanisms', and 'Death of the Machines'. His style was in constant flux, incorporating at various times and in various degrees brutalism, futurism, jazz, and neo-Classicism. His career had many ups and downs. He left Paris in the late '20s and went to Germany, where his 'Transatlantic' was the first opera by an American composer to be produced at a German state opera house.

With the rise of Nazism, however, American music was no longer welcome, and Antheil returned to America. While he was in Europe, he had been supported largely by a wealthy Philadelphia patron, Mrs. Mary Louise Curtis Bok (whose family owned the Saturday Evening Post, and who would later found the Curtis Institute of Music), but that support dwindled when he came back home. While he continued to compose prodigiously for piano, chamber groups, and orchestra, he tried his hand at a number of other careers including magazine writer, advice-to-the-lovelorn columnist, expert on endocrinology, and historian. He even invented, with film actress Hedy Lamarr, a system for scrambling transmissions in radio-controlled torpedoes, which was based in large part on player-piano technology. Their pioneering system, which they patented, describes what is now called spread-spectrum technology, and a direct descendant of it is used widely in today's cellular and cordless phones. But the patent was immediately classified Secret by the Navy, and thus neither the composer nor the actress ever saw a penny from it.

The 1924 version was first heard again in the spring of 1999, when the Ensemble Moderne performed the piece in Germany and England, with the four pianola parts played on two Ampico-equipped, MIDI-retrofitted grand pianos owned by Dr. Jürgen Hocker. On November 18, 1999, in Durgin Hall at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, the world premiere of the 'Ballet Mécanique' in its original instrumentation - with 16 player pianos - took place. The recordings on this disc were made two days after that concert.

Antheil was proud of himself, too, having caused the greatest riot at any musical event since the premiere 13 years earlier of Stravinsky’s 'Sacre du Printemps' - as Aaron Copland put it, "outsacking the 'Sacre'." Antheil wrote, "From this moment on I knew that, for a time at least, I would be the new darling of Paris. I was notorious in Paris, therefore famous … Paris loves you for giving it a good fight."

But his success was to be short-lived. The following year he brought his creation to New York's Carnegie Hall. It was hyped to the hilt, with the story of the Paris premiere repeated and exaggerated, and the promoter not at all subtly hinting that there could be a riot in New York, too. But the audience would have none of it. "Provocateurs" hired to create disturbances at the back of the hall were ignored. Two huge murals, one of a cityscape and one of an African-American couple dancing (to evoke the spirit of Antheil's 'Jazz Symphony', also being premiered) were so incongruous with the hall that they provoked laughter. This time, when the electric fans went on, they were pointed right at the audience, and people had to clutch their programs and hats with both hands to keep them from blowing away. One audience member, reportedly critic Deems Taylor, attached a white handkerchief to the end of his cane, and waved it at the stage in surrender.

To add insult to injury, the siren player never had a chance to rehearse with his instrument, and no one warned him that it needed a long "warm-up" period before it would sound. Thus, when the conductor gave him his cue and he started cranking furiously, nothing came out, but after the piece had ended and the conductor's flailing ceased, the siren, finally warmed up, sang out a solo. The newspapers were almost unanimous in their ridicule of the concert and its composer: more than one used the phrase "trying to make a mountain out of an Antheil."

In 1989, conductor Maurice Peress re-created the entire 1927 Carnegie Hall concert at, appropriately enough, Carnegie Hall, and made a recording which is available on the MusicMasters label. Other performances of the piece, for pianola alone, took place in the 1930s and again in the early 1990s after some of the Pleyel rolls were re-worked by Artcraft, a company in Maine.

— Antheil bio by Paul Lehrman