Musicians - George Antheil

Home > Listing Index > Musicians > George Antheil

	Musicians - George Antheil

George Antheil (June 8, 1900 – February 12, 1959) was an American composer and pianist of Polish Jewish descent, born in Trenton, New Jersey. He first established a career as a concert pianist, mostly in Europe, but shortly thereafter also attracted notice for his avant-garde compositions, which were strongly influenced by Stravinsky. His most famous work is Ballet mécanique (1926), intended as a concert piece and not as music for dancers, despite the title: it's the machines that are doing the dancing in this piece, which includes parts for electric buzzers and airplane propellers. The ballet was greeted with riot on its first performance, which critics claim was induced and managed by film director Marcel Lherbier for his film L'Inhumaine. During the 1920's he frequently toured playing together with Olga Rudge the violinist and mistress of his friend Ezra Pound.

In the 1930s Antheil's music grew more traditional, but at the same time he found difficulty making a living, and at various times he wrote film scores, conducted a lonely-hearts column, and wrote for Esquire Magazine. Among other pieces, he wrote a series of articles for Esquire on glandular-analysis (endocrinology was his hobby). Antheil was a good friend of writer Jack Woodford.

His autobiography, Bad Boy of Music (1945), was a popular success, and it remains a vivid and entertaining account of his experiences. In the last two decades of his life he was in demand as a composer of operas and film scores. Long after his death, his work in yet another field was belatedly recognized: he and Hedy Lamarr are credited with inventing the frequency-hopping spread spectrum technique for signal transmission in 1942. He died in 1959, in New York City leaving his wife, Boski, and two surviving children, Peter, and Chris.

Written Works

Everyman His Own Detective: A study of glandular criminology (1937)
The Shape of the War to Come (1940)
Death In the Dark
Bad Boy of Music (1945)

Film Scores

The Spectre Of The Rose
Buccaneer, The (1938)
Pride and the Passion, The (1957)
20 Million Miles to Earth (1957) (uncredited)
Young Don't Cry, The (1957)
Werewolf, The (1956) (uncredited)
Juggler, The (1953)

Operas

The Brothers (1954)
Helen Retires (1930-31)
Venus in Africa (1954)
Volpone -- A Satire in Music(1949-52)
The Wish (1954)
Transatlantic

Important works

Ballet Mecanique (1924; first version)
Airplane Sonata (1923)
Sonate Sauvage (1923)
Woman Sonata (1923)
La Femme 100 Tetes (1930s)
Collected Violin Sonatas (1923, 1940s)
6 symphonies (actually 7; there are two versions called 5)
Operas
Varied Choral and Orchestral Works
String Quartets

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for George Antheil ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article George Antheil; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay