George Antheil

George Johann Carl Antheil ( ; July 8, 1900 – February 12, 1959) was an American avant-garde composer, pianist, author, and inventor whose modernist musical compositions explored the sounds – musical, industrial, and mechanical – of the early 20th century. Spending much of the 1920s in Europe, Antheil returned to the United States in the 1930s, and thereafter composed music for films, and eventually, television. As a result of this work, his style became more tonal. A man of diverse interests and talents, Antheil was constantly reinventing himself. He wrote magazine articles, an autobiography, a mystery novel, and newspaper and music columns.

In 1941, Antheil and the actress Hedy Lamarr developed a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used a code (stored on a punched paper tape) to synchronize frequency changes, referred to as frequency hopping, between the transmitter and receiver. It is one of the spread spectrum techniques that became widely used in modern telecommunications. This work led to their induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.

Early life

Antheil was born George Johann Carl Antheil, and grew up in a family of German immigrants in Trenton, New Jersey. His father owned a shoe store. Antheil got his education in the Trenton public schools. He was raised bilingually, writing music, prose, and poetry from an early age, and never formally graduated from high school or college, According to Antheil's autobiography, The Bad Boy of Music (1945), he was "so crazy about music", that his mother sent him to the countryside where no pianos were available. Undeterred, George simply arranged for a local music store to deliver a piano. His somewhat unreliable memoir mythologized his origins as a futurist, and emphasized his upbringing near a noisy machine shop and an ominous prison. George's younger brother was Henry W. Antheil Jr.; he became a diplomatic courier and died on June 14, 1940, when his plane was shot down over the Baltic Sea.thumb|Journal entry by a young Antheil, showing a [[violin and hand saw, captioned, "Drawing of a violin and the thing to play it with"]]

Antheil started studying the piano at the age of six. In 1916, he traveled regularly to Philadelphia to study under Constantine von Sternberg, a former pupil of Franz Liszt. In 1919, he began to work with the more progressive Ernest Bloch in New York. Initially, Bloch had been skeptical and had rejected him, describing Antheil's compositions as "empty" and "pretentious"; however, the teacher was won over by Antheil's enthusiasm and energy, and helped him financially as he attempted to complete an aborted first symphony. Antheil's trips to New York also permitted him to meet important figures of the modernist movement, including the musician Leo Ornstein, journalist and music critic Paul Rosenfeld, painter John Marin, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, and Margaret Anderson, editor of The Little Review.

Around this time, von Sternberg introduced Antheil to his patron of the next two decades: Mary Louise Curtis Bok, later the founder of the Curtis Institute of Music.

Antheil continued his piano studies, He also worked on his first symphony, managing to attract Leopold Stokowski to premiere it. Before the performance could take place, Antheil left for Europe to pursue his career. This may have diminished his chances for success in his native country.

Berlin and Paris

thumb|upright|Antheil photographed with his signature [[Bangs (hair)|bangs, ]]

On May 30, 1922, at the age of 21, Antheil sailed for Europe to make his name as "a new ultra-modern pianist composer" and a "futurist terrible". He had engaged Leo Ornstein's manager, and opened his European career with a concert at Wigmore Hall. The concert featured works by Claude Debussy and Stravinsky, as well as his own compositions.

thumb|left|upright|12 Rue de l'Odéon, Antheil's home in Paris, as seen in 2004Despite the inauspicious beginning, Antheil found Paris, at the time, a center of musical and artistic innovation, to be a "green tender morning" compared to the "black night" of Berlin. Like George Gershwin, Antheil was among the few young American composers in Paris to not study with Nadia Boulanger.

The couple lived in a one bedroom apartment above Sylvia Beach's bookshop Shakespeare and Company. Beach described him "as fellow with bangs, a squished nose and a big mouth with a grin in it. A regular American high school boy." She was very supportive, and introduced Antheil to her circle of friends and customers including Erik Satie, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Virgil Thomson, and Ernest Hemingway. Joyce and Pound were soon talking of an opera collaboration. Pound, in particular, was to become an extravagant supporter and promoter of Antheil and his work, comparing him variously to Stravinsky and James Cagney, and describing him as breaking down music to its "musical atom". Pound introduced Antheil to Jean Cocteau, who in turn helped launch Antheil into the musical salons of Paris; Pound also commissioned Antheil to write three violin sonatas for his mistress, Olga Rudge. In 1924, Pound published Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony, as part of his campaign to boost Antheil's reputation. The book may have done Antheil more harm than good, and the composer was to distance himself from it in his memoir.

Antheil was asked to make his Paris debut at the opening of the Ballets suédois, an important Paris social event. He programmed several recent compositions, including the "Airplane Sonata", the "Sonata Sauvage", and "Mechanism". Halfway through his performance, a riot broke out, much to Antheil's delight. According to Antheil, "People were fighting in the aisles, yelling, clapping, hooting! Pandemonium! ... the police entered, and any number of surrealists, society personages, and people of all descriptions were arrested ... Paris hadn't had such a good time since the premiere of Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps." The riot was filmed and may in fact have been engineered, as the Marcel L'Herbier movie L'Inhumaine needed a riot scene set in a concert hall. In the audience were Erik Satie, Darius Milhaud, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and Francis Picabia. Antheil was delighted when Satie and Milhaud praised his music.

Ballet Mécanique and later work in Europe

Antheil's best-known composition is Ballet Mécanique. The "ballet" was originally conceived to be accompanied by the film of the same name by experimental filmmakers Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy (with cinematography by Man Ray), although the nature of the collaboration is mysterious. The first productions of Antheil's work in 1925 and 1926 did not include the film, which turned out to last around 19 minutes, only half as long as Antheil's score. The piece consisted of periods of music and interludes of silence set against the roar of the airplane propellers. Antheil described as "by far my most radical work ... It is the rhythm of machinery, presented as beautifully as an artist knows how." The Léger-Murphy film and Antheil's score were finally performed together at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1935. The Paris première in June 1926 was sponsored by an American patroness who at the end of the concert was (according to Antheil) "tossed in a blanket by three baronesses and a duke."

thumb|left|upright|Antheil arriving in New York in 1927

On April 10, 1927, Antheil rented New York's Carnegie Hall to present an entire concert devoted to his works, including the American debut of Ballet Mécanique in a scaled-down version. He commissioned elaborate backdrops of skyscrapers and machines, and engaged an African American orchestra to premiere his A Jazz Symphony. The concert started well, but according to the concert's promoter and producer, when the wind machine was turned on, "all hell, in a minor way, broke loose." During the gale, audience members clutched their programs and their hats, one "tied a handkerchief to his cane and waved it wildly in the air in a sign of surrender." Much to the amusement of the audience, the untested siren failed to sound on cue, despite frantic cranking and reached its climax only after the end of the performance, as the audience was clapping and leaving the hall. American critics were hostile, calling the concert "a bitter disappointment" and dismissing the Ballet Mécanique as "boring, artless, and naive" and Antheil's hoped-for riots failed to materialize. The failure of the Ballet Mécanique affected him deeply, and he never fully recovered his reputation during his lifetime, though his interest in the mechanical was emulated by other prominent composers such as Arthur Honegger, Sergei Prokofiev, and Erik Satie. In 1954, Antheil created a modified version of the work for percussion, four pianos, and a recording of an airplane motor. This work, which involved American politics, gangsters, a bathtub scene and a Childs Restaurant was a success at the Frankfurt Opera.

Hollywood

In 1936, Antheil travelled to Hollywood, where he became a sought-after film composer, writing more than 30 scores for such directors as Cecil B. DeMille and Nicholas Ray, The Antheils' only child, a son named Peter, was born in 1937. Antheil found the industry hostile to modern music, complaining that it was a "closed proposition", and describing most background scores as "unmitigated tripe". He became increasingly dependent on more independent producers such as Ben Hecht to give him work, such as Angels Over Broadway (1940) and Specter of the Rose (1946). Antheil was confident in the ability of his music to save a weak film. "If I say so myself, I've saved a couple of sure flops". and six symphonies; his later works were in a more romantic style and influenced by Prokofiev and Shostakovich, as well as American music including jazz. Works such as Serenade No. 1, Piano Sonata No. 4, Songs of Experience and Eight Fragments from Shelley, written in 1948 showed a self-described desire "to disassociate myself from the passé modern schools of the last half-century, and to create a music for myself and those around me which has no fear of developed melody, real development itself, tonality, or other understandable forms."

Before World War II, he participated in the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, putting on exhibits of artworks banned in Nazi Germany such as those by Käthe Kollwitz. Another book of "glandular criminology" was titled Every Man His Own Detective.

Antheil's interest in this area brought him into contact with the actress Hedy Lamarr, who sought his advice about how she might enhance her upper torso. He suggested glandular extracts, but their conversation then moved to torpedoes.

Antheil and Lamarr developed the idea of using frequency hopping: in this case using a player piano roll to randomly change the signal sent between the control center and torpedo at short bursts within a range of 88 frequencies on the spectrum (88 black and white keys are on a piano keyboard). The specific code for the sequence of frequencies would be held identically by the controlling ship and in the torpedo. This basically encrypted the signal, as it was impossible for the enemy to scan and jam all 88 frequencies because this would have required too much power. Antheil would control the frequency-hopping sequence using a player-piano mechanism, which he had earlier used to score his Ballet Mécanique.

On August 11, 1942, was granted to Antheil and "Hedy Kiesler Markey", Lamarr's married name at the time. This early version of frequency hopping, though novel, soon met with opposition from the U.S. Navy and was not adopted.

The idea was not implemented in the US until 1962, when it was used by U.S. military ships during a blockade of Cuba after the patent had expired. The patent was little known until 1997, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave Lamarr a belated award for her contributions. In 1998, an Ottawa wireless technology developer, Wi-LAN, acquired a 49% claim to the long expired patent from Lamarr for an undisclosed amount of stock. Lamarr and Antheil's frequency-hopping scheme shares some concepts with modern spread-spectrum communication technology, such as Bluetooth, COFDM used in Wi-Fi network connections, and CDMA used in some cordless and wireless telephones. Blackwell, Martin, and Vernam's 1920 Secrecy Communication System () was a predecessor to Kiesler and Antheil's patent, which employed the techniques in the autonomous control of torpedoes.

Later life

Antheil died of a heart attack in the New York City borough of Manhattan. His legacy included three accomplished students, Henry Brant, Benjamin Lees, and Ruth White. He is buried in Riverview Cemetery, in Trenton, New Jersey.

In literature

"Antheil's my man." Mrs. McKisco turned challengingly to Rosemary, "Antheil and Joyce. I don't suppose you ever hear much about those sort of people in Hollywood, but my husband wrote the first criticism of Ulysses that ever appeared in America." (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night)

Bibliography

Death In the Dark, a crime novel edited and published by T. S. Eliot (1930)
Every Man His Own Detective: A Study of Glandular Criminology, New York City: Stackpole Sons (1937)
"The Shape of the War to Come", a pamphlet (1940)
Bad Boy of Music, Garden City, New York: Doubleday (1945; various reprints and languages)

References

Citations

Sources

Martín Sánchez, David (2024), "George Antheil y la música de cine: características de la banda sonora de Orgullo y Pasión (1957)". Popular Music Research Today: Revista Online De Divulgación Musicológica, 6, 79–96. https://doi.org/10.14201/pmrt.31268

External links

Composer's entry on IRCAM's database
A concise chronological list of George Antheil's compositions. Compiled by Tommi A. Ojanperä. Last revised on January 2, 2000. Accessed on March 4, 2024, on the Internet Archive.