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Growing up in Trenton, New Jersey, George Antheil was surrounded by popular music: gospel, creole, and Latin-American dances. On summer days on the banks of the Delaware River, he would watch black workers singing and dancing. He sang American folk melodies, including songs by Stephen Foster, with his childhood friend Richard Crooks, who would later find fame as a tenor at the Metropolitan Opera. He was above all fascinated by New Orleans jazz, blues, and ragtime. He absorbed the syncopated rhythms of Scott Joplin, fashionable in the Trenton suburbs, and Jelly Roll Morton — especially his jazz foxtrot Jelly Roll Blues. Ragtime influenced Antheil’s compositions in the 1920s and beyond. While he only rarely used syncopated rhythms as a large-scale structural tool, he incorporated them more discretely in his Jazz Sonata (1922 or 1923) and other pieces. These rhythms contrast with the motor-like ostinati of his piano works such as Sonata sauvage (1922-1923) and challenge the irregular, Stravinskian rhythms in works from his European period, between 1922 and 1933. He was further encouraged to include jazz in his compositions after encounters in Paris with Darius Milhaud and, in 1925, George Gershwin, who likely influenced his A Jazz Symphony (1925, revised in 1955). At the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 4 October 1923, Antheil’s avant-garde piano music created a scandal when it opened for the premiere of Milhaud’s La Création du monde, a piece that left a great impression on him, with its jazz and Brazilian influences.
Starting around 1916, Antheil went frequently to Philadelphia to study music and, while there, had his first significant encounters with modern art. He saw Dadaist paintings in art galleries. Back in Trenton, the smoke chimneys of the suburban factories reminded him of paintings by Giorgio de Chirico. In New York, he became close to important actors in the American modernist scene: the painter John Marin, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, the music critic Paul Rosenfeld, and the editor of The Little Review, Margaret Anderson. She, some years later during Antheil’s stay in Paris, would introduce him to the surrealist painters Fernand Léger and Max Ernst and the sculptor Constantin Brâncuși. The latter’s famous sculpture L’Oiseau d’or had inspired Antheil’s Golden Bird “After Brancusi” (1921).
In 1923, Antheil settled in Paris at 12, rue de l’Odéon, above Sylvia Beach’s famous Shakespeare and Company bookstore. He found in the French capital the creative home of which he had always dreamed. He was at the center of the artistic Tout-Paris. His modernist ideas attracted painters (Fernand Léger, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí) and musicians (Erik Satie, Igor Stravinsky, and members of Les Six), as well as English and American artists on holiday in Paris (Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Walter Piston, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot).
Long before his decision to settle in Paris, Antheil had developed an interest in modern music and especially in the French composers Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Les Six, whose influences can be heard in his Profane Waltzers for the piano, composed when he was nineteen years old. He was also deeply moved by Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which he first heard at its American premiere conducted by Leopold Stokowski on 3 March 1922. All his life, Antheil admired Stravinsky and considered him an important model. The fourth movement of Antheil’s Symphony No. 1 (1920-1922), with its startling orchestral gestures and juxtaposed contrasting sections, testifies to his fascination for the Rite. Stravinsky’s influence is also obvious in Antheil’s Symphonie for Five Instruments (1922-1923), composed upon arriving in Paris. The first movement in particular harks back to Stravinsky’s Ragtime (1917-1918) for eleven instruments, and Antheil’s Concerto for Chamber Orchestra (Octet for Winds) (1932) is reminiscent of the Octet for Wind Instruments (1922-1923).
Antheil also associated with the pianist, composer, and pioneer of American avant-garde music Leo Ornstein, who strongly influenced his writing for the piano. Antheil’s Airplane Sonata (1921) echoes Ornstein’s Suicide in an Airplane (1921). Similar to Ornstein, Antheil had the reputation of being a fiendish pianist with diabolical technique that made the piano sound like a percussion instrument. His barbaro style entails violently struck chords — which he said must sound as hard as a stone — and repetitive rhythms inspired by the mechanical noises made by the factories that fascinated him in his boyhood. Composed in the 1920s, these deeply intuitive pieces for “machinelike” piano are presented as a futuristic dream. They include his Sonata sauvage and Sonata No. 3, “Death of Machines” (1923). To compose these unpredictable works, Antheil may have used automatic writing, a technique associated with the surrealists. He shared that his process for composing Airplane Sonata had similarities with a seance: only after he had played the piece in its entirety, without interruption, did he write out the score. Most of his pieces from the 1920s are a collage of contrasting sections, a structure indebted to both Stravinsky and the surrealists. Antheil’s futurist-machinist style, influenced by Dadaism and surrealism, finds a climax in Ballet mécanique, his most ambitious and extravagant piece.
Composed in the winter of 1923 to 1924, Ballet mécanique had initially been conceived to accompany an experimental film by Léger and Dudley Murphy in collaboration with Man Ray. The filmmakers and Antheil worked independently without conferring with each other, and in the end they did not manage to combine the film with the music, the musical score being twice as long as the film. It also seems that, at the time, it was impossible to synchronize a film projector with an ensemble of player pianos. The cinematographic component of the work was thus premiered in Vienna on 24 September 1924 as a 19-minute silent film.1
The original version of Ballet mécanique reveals Antheil’s extreme ambition: he saw the piece as a symbol of the glorious future of the machine era. The original score called for sixteen player pianos that played four different parts, four bass drums, three xylophones, one tam-tam, seven electric bells, one siren, three airplane propellers (one high-pitched, in wood; the other two low-pitched, in wood and metal), and two pianos. Faced with the impossibility to synchronize the player pianos, or even to bring them together with the other instruments, Antheil changed the instrumentation by keeping only one of the player pianos and recommending two additional pianos. After a few run-throughs in Parisian salons, Ballet mécanique was premiered in its revised version, without the film, during a gala at the Théâtre des Champs Élysées on 19 June 1926. Artists and friends attended in support, among them Erik Satie, Milhaud, Man Ray, Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and Francis Picabia. Antheil had skillfully publicized the work as an event of unprecedented modernity. The premiere was a scandalous success, and Antheil was acclaimed as the uncontested leader of musical ultra-modernism.
Antheil rightly considered Ballet mécanique to be his most radical work, as well as his first major composition. Using the pithy verbiage of advertising slogans, he described it as the “new FOURTH DIMENSION of music” and “the first piece of music that has been composed OUT OF and FOR machines, ON EARTH.”2 For him, the piece was “all efficiency. NO LOVE. Written without sympathy. Written cold as an army operates.”3 He meant his music to be aggressive and even violent. The pianists were directed to play ever louder and with a complete absence of expressivity, hitting the keys as if the instrument were a typewriter. The piece fits in with Stravinsky’s primitivism: the alternation of contrasting blocks of sound and the irregular rhythms bring to mind the Rite of Spring. The work’s first version also contained long sections of silence meant to evoke outer space.
Ballet mécaniquewas performed at Carnegie Hall in New York on 10 April 1927. For this concert, the massive instrumentation included ten pianos (one of which was played by Copland), one player piano, six xylophones, electric bells, airplane propellers, four bass drums, a large gong, and most probably whistles, rattles, and motors from sewing machines. Despite Antheil’s expectations, the American premiere created just a one-night scandal. It left him dismayed and disappointed, and he never recovered from this bitter failure.Ballet mécanique had become both the zenith and the nadir of his career as an avant-garde composer.
From then on, he turned away from radical modernism, the artistic path he had so passionately championed. This aesthetic turn had already begun before the American premiere of Ballet mécanique with his neoclassical Piano Concerto, composed in 1926. The public had reacted coolly to this concerto, which has neither the savage crudeness nor the exhilarating energy of Antheil’s futurist pieces. The influence of Stravinsky is more that of Pulcinella than Rite of Spring.
Having spent ten years in Europe, Antheil moved back to the United States in 1933. On the old continent, he had known both success and the disillusionment that unavoidably meets a flagbearer of radical modernism. Back in America, he was faced with a new set of problems around his musical identity. His compatriots perceived him as an “American in Paris” and no longer as a fellow composer who had been born and educated in America, like them. Despite his fondness for France and especially for Paris, it remained a place of his exile, though he had found a sizeable community of American artists there. He indeed kept a deep and lifelong attachment to his American roots, which inspired him throughout his stylistically changing musical career.
During his voluntary exile, Antheil had developed a nostalgic vision of the music made in America. After his return, he traveled through his native country so as to reunite with his roots. And yet, in Florida, he discovered that the Suwannee River was but a muddy stream — not the magnificent river depicted by Stephen Foster, who had never set foot in Florida! Antheil’s search for “Americanness” was perhaps based more on an imaginary ideal than on pure facts. His Symphony No. 3, “American,” (1936-1939, revised in 1946) was composed in part during this trip. It contains references to American popular music: the brass sometimes evoke a marching band, and the diatonic melodies and syncopated rhythms allude to folk songs. Personal interpretations of American music also appear in his lyrical works. His vocal style and articulation of English, with light and simple orchestrations, recall staged musicals. The tragic ending of his opera The Brothers (1954), inspired by the story of Cain and Abel, has intense romantic expressivity, but closer to Leonard Bernstein’s lyricism in West Side Story than to German post-romanticism.
Apart from his avant-garde ambitions and his ultimately somewhat artificial search for an American identity, Antheil was not interested in finding a style to which he would adhere. His catalog is stylistically eclectic. Neoclassicism and French music, which appeared in works from his Paris years, continued to inform his music episodically. The extroverted, joyful, bright music of his ballet Dreams (1934-1935) combines the rebellious stance of Les Six with the irony of Stravinsky, the humor of Jacques Offenbach, and the simplicity of American popular music. Over the last two decades of his career, a post-romantic style became progressively present. The lyrical style of the Adagio molto second movement of his Symphony No. 5, “Joyous,” (1947-1948) harkens back to Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (Antheil was passionate about Russian music) and Gustav Mahler.
Antheil made no attempt to hide his influences. To the contrary, he featured them in his composition process by quoting from them. His String Quartet No. 2 (1927, revised in 1943) demonstrates his admiration for masters of the past such as J.S. Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Johannes Brahms. If Stravinsky’s influence was prominent in the 1920s, it was eclipsed by Sergei Prokofiev and even more so Dmitri Shostakovich, to whom Antheil made ample reference, notably in his fourth (1948) and fifth (1950) piano sonatas.
Spanish and Latin-American music also inspired him. Examples of a new — and exoticizing — fondness for Hispanic music appear in his ballet Capital of the World (1952), based on a short story by Hemingway, and his soundtrack to The Pride and the Passion (1957), a film by Stanley Kramer, which takes themes from nineteenth-century Spanish music. Latin-American music seems to have influenced Antheil in a deep and authentic way. He approached it with care in his Symphony No. 2, a work he structured around a quotation from Milhaud’s Bœuf sur le toit, in which Milhaud had borrowed from a short Brazilian tango.
Starting in 1935, Antheil worked intensely for film, mainly for Paramount Pictures. Though this activity was lucrative and enabled him to live comfortably and become known in Hollywood, he never considered film music a convincing way to express himself. He nonetheless made great effort to produce quality scores while complying with the demands of producers who cared little for the music’s artistic quality. He eventually gave up on trying to “save” mediocre films with music that, according to him, deserved much better. But before his exit, he collaborated with big names in cinema and contributed to major films. Among the circa thirty films for which he composed are The Scoundrel (1935) by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur; The Plainsman (1936) by Cecil B. DeMille, with Gary Cooper; Angels over Broadway (1940) and Specter of the Rose (1946) by Ben Hecht; In a Lonely Place (1950) by Nicholas Ray, with Humphrey Bogart; and Dementia (1955) by John Parker.
1. It was only in 1935, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, that the film was projected along with an arrangement of Antheil’s piece, which used only one player piano. ↩
2. George Antheil, “My Ballet mécanique: What It Means,” Der Querschnitt 5 (1925): 789. ↩
3. Letter by George Antheil to Stanley Hart, dated 1 September 1925, Library of Congress, George Antheil Collection. ↩
Do you notice a mistake?