George Antheil was born to a family of German immigrants on 8 July 1900 in Trenton, New Jersey, where his father owned a shoestore. He began learning piano at the age of six, showing exceptional musical talent. In 1916, he began traveling to Philadelphia to study with Constantin von Sternberg, a former student of Franz Liszt. In 1917, he enlisted in the American Air Force, serving for two years before returning to his studies in New York City in 1919, this time with Ernest Bloch, who oversaw the composition of Antheil’s Symphony n° 1 “Zingaresca” (1920-1922, revised in 1923). Immersed in the modernist world of the New York avant-garde, his focus during this period was on pieces for piano and percussion, highly influenced by futurism. Thanks to the patronage of Mary Louise Curtis Bok, he was able to enroll in the Philadelphia Settlement Music School.

In 1922, the agent Martin H. Hanson invited Antheil to replace Leo Ornstein on a musical tour of Europe, launching his career as an avant-garde pianist. He performed in London, then played in Budapest, Vienna, and Donaueschingen. His home base during this time in Europe was in Berlin, where he premiered his Sonate n° 2 - Airplane (1921) and met Stravinsky. The following year, he moved to Paris, where he mingled with artists and intellectuals, making friends with James Joyce as well as with fellow American expats such as Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Aaron Copland, and Virgil Thomson. While in Paris he composed Sonate n° 2 for violin, piano, and drums (1923) following a trip to Tunis, his Stravinsky-inspired Symphonie for five instruments (1922, second version in 1923), and his Concerto pour piano (1926). On 19 June 1926, the premiere of his Ballet mécanique (1923-1924, revised in 1952-1953) for pianos, percussion, and various mechanical instruments, was performed at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. It caused a sensational scandal. Ballet mécanique premiered in the United States on 10 April 1927 at Carnegie Hall in New York City. The first half of the program was a performance of A Jazz Symphony (1925, revised in 1955), which garnered favorable reactions from the audience, but Ballet mécanique elicited such shock that Antheil decided to give up ultra-modernist music. Antheil returned to Berlin in the winter of 1928, where he met Kurt Weill and was hired as assistant musical director of the Deutsches Theater. His first opera, Transatlantic (1927-1928) premiered in Frankfurt on 25 May 1930. In the spring of 1931 Antheil returned to France, where two Guggenheim scholarships (in 1932 and 1933) made it possible for him to compose his second opera, Helen Retires, which premiered in New York City on 28 February 1934. He also composed several chamber music pieces during this period, including Concerto for wind quintet (1932).

In autumn 1933, with Nazism on the rise, Antheil returned to New York and became deeply involved in the music community, organizing and performing concerts with Aaron Copland and Wallingford Riegger, and taking part in committees and organizations associated with modern and avant-garde music. The following year, he composed the score for Dreams (1934-1935), a ballet choreographed by George Balanchine, and commenced work on Symphony n° 3 “American” (1936-1939, revised in 1946).

In 1936, Antheil moved to Hollywood to compose film scores. He wrote some thirty of them, in collaboration with noted screenwriters and directors such as Cecil B. DeMille, Nicholas Ray, and Ben Hecht. From 1936 to 1940, he was a music reporter and critic for the magazine Modern Music. Later on in the Second World War, he worked as a war correspondent for the Los Angeles Daily News. His brother, Henry, a diplomatic courier, was killed in 1940 when his plane was shot down over the Baltic Sea, a loss that deeply affected Antheil. Symphony n° 4 “1942” (1942) and Symphony n° 5 “Tragic” (1945-1946) are both marked by Antheil’s grief and anguish over this loss and over the war as a whole. It was during this difficult period in his life that he began working with Hedy Lamarr, where they used the player piano technology Antheil had developed for Ballet méchanique to randomly change the radio frequencies used to guide torpedoes, making them undetectable to the enemy. Alongside his work as a film scorer, Antheil continued composing concert music and operas, including Volpone (1949-1952) and The Brothers (1954). A trip to Spain in the late 1950s provided much inspiration in his later work, such as Capital of the World (1952), a ballet composed for the CBS Television Network and the score of Stanley Kramer’s film The Pride and the Passion (1957). George Antheil died of a heart attack on 12 February 1959 in New York City.