In the twentieth century, the first American musician who attained international repute was George Antheil. He took musical lessons with composers Ernest Bloch and Constantin von Sternberg in U.S.A. in his teens, and then in Europe as a touring piano-player at concerts, he got the initial notice and almost immediately attained more popularity for his remarkable agility and spirit. His particular jumpy, percussive and glitzy piano performances had suggestive names such as Mechanism, Death of Machines, Airplane Sonata, Sonata Sauvage and Jazz Sonata, and he performed all these in his own distinct ‘mettlesome’ flair, which benefited him immensely; and also those by Arnold Schoenberg, a similarly tough modernist.
Antheil connected with lots of the highly significant artistic personalities like Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, Igor Stravinsky, Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats after he, as a part of the initial cluster of American emigrants, got together in Paris in the 1920’s. A clanging sonic composition entailing a wide-ranging array of striking musical devices such as airplane propellers, eight grand pianos, electric bells, a siren and an alarm clock, Ballet mécanique, the most prominent composition of Antheil was created in Europe. During the... show more

In the twentieth century, the first American musician who attained international repute was George Antheil. He took musical lessons with composers Ernest Bloch and Constantin von Sternberg in U.S.A. in his teens, and then in Europe as a touring piano-player at concerts, he got the initial notice and almost immediately attained more popularity for his remarkable agility and spirit. His particular jumpy, percussive and glitzy piano performances had suggestive names such as Mechanism, Death of Machines, Airplane Sonata, Sonata Sauvage and Jazz Sonata, and he performed all these in his own distinct ‘mettlesome’ flair, which benefited him immensely; and also those by Arnold Schoenberg, a similarly tough modernist.
Antheil connected with lots of the highly significant artistic personalities like Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, Igor Stravinsky, Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats after he, as a part of the initial cluster of American emigrants, got together in Paris in the 1920’s. A clanging sonic composition entailing a wide-ranging array of striking musical devices such as airplane propellers, eight grand pianos, electric bells, a siren and an alarm clock, Ballet mécanique, the most prominent composition of Antheil was created in Europe. During the first presentation in Paris in 1926, it made an impression but it was also responsible for creating the permanent repute of Antheil’s as the "Bad Boy of Music" (a title he would never cherish), after it was performed at the Carnegie Hall in 1927.
Laden with jazzy beats and well-liked song parodies, a period piece, Antheil created the score and libretto to Transatlantic as he was stimulated by the rise of Germany’s contemporary opus. Inspired by the famous Helen of Troy, Helen Retires was the initial opera that he presented in America. However, it didn’t achieve any critical acclaim. What echoed the additional progression of his technique between the middle of 1930’s and his passing away in 1959, were the two interconnected currents in the productions of Antheil. His growing association with film productions coupled with his “rediscovery” of the symphonic practice personified in the compositions of Mahler and Beethoven intimated innovative stylistic concerns and took his compositions to completely new listeners; even as the cadenced vivacity and the choral flavor of his initial compositions kept on procuring a chief position. His compositions, including the Romantic breadth, of the particular time are suffused with a freshly melodious style, as Antheil was influenced by the invasive “American” sound which in the 1930’s and 1940’s swayed the music of the people of his own country. Identical to the composers like Harris, Thomson and Copland, he started to feature indigenous ingredients and acoustic "wide-open landscapes" into his compositions and music for movies like The Plainsman (1936) and The Fighting Kentuckian (1949). After twenty years, Antheil’s focus on opera was rekindled with a series of operas in the initial years of 1950s, the most popular being Volpone, as he kept on composing a sequence of scores for movies and instrumental, symphonic and keyboard pieces. From the 1970’s, Antheil distinctive genius through a growing string of recordings was experienced again by the listeners, and that happened after a stretched phase of his apathy to composition. In spite of his participation in an astounding array of added undertakings, Antheil succeeded in carrying on a prolific calling in music. On other occasions, he boosted the composition of "legitimate" music with added productive film-scoring pieces; co-conceived a radio-directed torpedo with Hedy Lamarr, the actress from Hollywood, and which portended by 50 years the advancement of digital cellular telephony; penned down features for Esquire on subjects such as war predictions and endocriminology (the study of the human glands and their relation to criminal behavior); fashioned a syndicated column for romantic counseling; and in 1947 wrote an immensely enjoyable Bad Boy of Music, his brazenly boastful autobiography.
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