The New York Times
"A Musical Maverick Rooted in Trenton"

March 16, 2003, Sunday
NEW JERSEY WEEKLY DESK

By BRIAN WISE (NYT)
ONE of the great curiosities of 20th-century music is ''Ballet mécanique,'' a 25-minute percussion-and-piano extravaganza featuring 16 player pianos, electric bells, airplane propellers, an alarm clock and a siren, by Trenton-born composer George Antheil (1900-59). Composed from 1923 to 1925, the work is a clangorous ode to the dawn of the mechanized age, with its pounding rhythms and industrial-level dynamics.
The piece created such a stir at its premiere in Paris in 1926 that it established Antheil as a maverick and has overshadowed the accomplishments of his eclectic career, which included a dozen serious keyboard works, a few Romantic symphonies, ballet music, chamber works, jazz songs, film scores and at least one opera. Over the past decade, Antheil's life and work have been the subject of a growing body of scholarship. This Friday through Sunday, at the Conduit arts complex in Trenton, and at various sites around the city, the Composers Guild of New Jersey will sponsor a festival and symposium dedicated to Antheil and his present-day influence.
The festival brings together a wide array of performers and scholars for concerts, discussions, lectures, film screenings and even a techno dance party at Trenton's Conduit Nightclub, featuring remixes of ''Ballet mécanique.'' Performers will include Guy Livingston, a pianist who is director of the festival, and the College of New Jersey Percussion Ensemble. Also present will be a number of historians, authors, representatives of Antheil's estate and his nephew, Arthur Antheil McTighe.
Antheil, who took up the piano as a child, left Trenton for Berlin at age 22. There, he quickly made a splash as a pianist with performances of modern pieces in a signature aggressive style that often provoked physical reactions from the audience. His concerts frequently included his own syncopated and dissonant works.
Antheil moved on to Paris in 1923, where he mingled with James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali and Igor Stravinsky, among other famous artists of the time. At one point, he lived in an apartment above Shakespeare & Company, the bookstore owned by Sylvia Beach, who the original publisher of Joyce's ''Ulysses.''
Suddenly, though, he abandoned this life, returning to the United States, and adopted a neo-classical style in his work. By the late 1930's, he settled in Hollywood where he became a prolific movie composer, a career move that destroyed his credibility among supporters of serious music.
''He never quite managed to make it,'' said Mr. Livingston, 34, who helped catalog Antheil's manuscripts for the New York Public Library and has recorded Antheil's piano sonatas and performed several recitals of his music, including a program last year program at Princeton University's Taplin Auditorium. ''The 'Ballet mécanique' was the high point of his career. He's been viewed as a footnote in 20th-century music.''
Mr. Livingston said Antheil's seemingly random stylistic leaps did little to help his reputation. This view is shared by Frank J. Oteri, a New York-based composer and editor of www.newmusicbox.org, a Web site devoted to contemporary American music, who will moderate a discussion on ''Futurism vs. Neo-Romanticism in Antheil's Music'' at the festival.
''Antheil was a polystylist who in later years wrote very accessible music that probably hurt his reputation as a maverick,'' he said. Mr. Oteri added that at the same time, Antheil's ''reputation as a maverick hurt his more accessible music from ever finding a wider audience.''
Organizers say the festival is designed not only to celebrate Antheil's work, but also to stimulate discussion about New Jersey artists today. They point out that Antheil never abandoned his home state, moving back there toward the end of his life.
Antheil himself described his Trenton upbringing in his entertaining and self-mythologizing autobiography, ''Bad Boy of Music,'' (1945), noting that he was born ''across the street from a very noisy machine shop, thus in all probability giving ammunition into the hands of those who claim there is such a thing as prenatal influence.''
The composer's loyalty to Trenton is reflected in several piano pieces based on the mechanical sounds of the city's factories, including ''The Death of Machines'' and the angular ''Sonata Sauvage.'' Scholars say some of his music was inspired by the rural surroundings of Washington Crossing and Titusville. ''McConkey's Ferry (Washington at Trenton)'' is a 10-minute work inspired by George Washington's crossing of the Delaware River during the Revolutionary War, and ''You Can Tell You're in New Jersey'' is a work for chorus and piano peppered with references to the region. Antheil died in Trenton, and is buried in the city's Riverside Cemetary.

Aside from composing prolifically, Antheil was a contributor to Esquire magazine, and also wrote books, including one on endocrinology. In 1942, he co-invented and -patented, with Hedy Lamarr, a device for radio control of missiles that could be used against the Germans. A refined version of this device was used by the American military in the 1960's.
Antheil had a flair for sensationalism. For example, in his autobiography, he claimed to be an expert sharpshooter, writing that during a 1923 recital in Paris, when the audience was incited by the composer Erik Satie to whistle and heckle, he kept his cool, in part, because he packed a pistol onstage in a silken holster. But as his diverse interests suggest, Antheil was more than a ''bad boy.'' He possessed an original, searching intellect, an aspect of his personality that the festival will underscore this fact with the discussion ''Ballet fr?netique: The Multiple Lives of George Antheil.''
The festival is a somewhat curtailed version of what was to be a larger celebration sponsored by the city's museums, educational institutions and arts presenters. Financing difficulties stemming from the weak economy and cuts in state arts subsidies forced some of these entities to withdraw. Yamaha Artist Services stepped in at the last minute to provide more financial support.
Frank Brickle, president of the guild, said he hoped a similar event could be presented every two years, drawing attention to other major New Jersey composers and artists.
''Very few people are aware of the position that New Jersey composers have had on the American music scene,'' he noted. ''We want to look back and show New Jersey what they're sitting on, and provide context for present-day composers to function.''

The George Antheil Festival 2003 will be presented from Friday through Sunday at the Conduit arts complex in Trenton and at various sites around the city.

Friday, March 21, 2003
ENFANT TERRIBLE FROM TRENTON

Antheil festival in composer's hometown aims to restore reputation of pistol-packing visionary who shocked 1920s Paris
BY WILLA J. CONRAD
Star-Ledger Staff

Put the words "bad boy" and "classical music" together and, nine times out of 10, historians come up with the name of composer and pianist George Antheil (1900-1959).

Yet there was more -- much more -- to this American composer than the riot-inducing works he contributed to the artistic ferment of 1920s Paris, and the Composers Guild of New Jersey is presenting a two-day festival this weekend to prove it.

For instance, Antheil's early pals were Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. But most New Jerseyans probably don't know that the man was Trenton-born and -bred, the son of a shoe salesman who hopscotched right out of industrial New Jersey and directly into the frying pan of Paris in the heyday of French influence over American composition. At one point, he was considered more innovative than Stravinsky, and by the early '20s the Parisian literary movement adopted him as its most vivid spokesman for "modernist" ideas.

This weekend's festival events, which include several concerts, a cabaret, documentary films, panel discussions, a techno-mix dance event and the largest scholastic gathering of Antheil (pronounced ANN-tile) specialists to gather in one place to date, will take place in Trenton, where Antheil's nephew and other relatives still reside. Most of the events are free; all are open to the public.

Perhaps the name "Ballet mécanique" evokes a distant memory of some chapter read in a nearly forgotten music history course. This was the 1924 work that best summed up Antheil's conviction, about 20 years before home stereo systems would become commonplace, that music and machines would inevitably meet.

"He wrote a gorgeous essay, a manifesto, in 1927, that describes concerts of the future as being a composer sitting at a large piano surrounded by mechanical pianos and loudspeakers and electronic sound machines. He basically invented the synthesizer in his head before it existed," says Guy Livingston, a pianist and Antheil advocate who is festival director.

Antheil's "Ballet pour instruments mécaniques et percussion" was scored for 16 synchronized player pianos, airplane propellers and sirens, a concoction that in the age of samplers and synthesizers might evoke a yawn. It was dense, propulsive and repetitive music. The Paris premiere -- in a drastically reduced version -- was in 1926. No less a personage than Ezra Pound rose to shout at the cacophonous audience, "Shut up, you are all stupid idiots." The event was deemed a success.

It took the electronic revolution 70 years to catch up. In 1999, a Massachusetts professor, Paul Lehrman, put together the first performance of "Ballet mécanique" performed as Antheil scored it -- thanks to the invention of the computer-controlled Yamaha Disklavier. Yamaha is a co-sponsor of this weekend's festival. Lehrman's documentary about that performance will be screened this weekend, and panelists will discuss the work's impact.

"It was too much, the sheer loudness and almost violence of his performances," says Livingston, who discovered Antheil in an archive of the composer's forgotten piano music at the New York Public Library. Antheil's "Airplane Sonata" and other works have been a staple of Livingston's repertoire since, and Livingston will play several Antheil works this weekend.

"Now we look back and say this guy was a real visionary, one of the first composers to look at sounds beyond conventional concert instruments as music," Livingston says. "But he got audiences so mad or excited, it reached a point that he kept a pistol holster sewn inside his tuxedo."

That silken holster was part of the Antheil style: brash, confrontational, and in love with publicity. His showmanship ultimately sunk him in the arena of world opinion; eventually the French grew tired of his theatrics, and the 1927 New York premiere of "Mécanique" at Carnegie Hall, which had been hyped like a Barnum & Bailey center ring act, was an utter disaster.

Antheil ended up back home, writing lyrical film scores for Hollywood to support his wife and young family. His compositional style since the '20s had been evolving into what Antheil himself dubbed "neo-Romanticism"; by the early '40s, he re-established himself as an American symphonist whose works were played by major orchestras.

Part of the purpose of the festival, says guild secretary Frank Brickle, is to debunk the idea that Antheil's candle burned out after the Carnegie Hall flop.
" There's a certain amount of received wisdom about what happened to him, that at a certain point he turned conservative and wrote drivel," says Brickle. "I think you could make the argument that he hit the sweet spot of what everyone was trying to do in the '40s and '50s: write the musical equivalent of the great American novel. His Fourth Piano Sonata and Fifth Symphony are astonishing pieces. I think his music was as good as or better than anything from that period."

Antheil was a mercurial figure, an entrepreneur whose ideas were not limited to music. Besides composition, he wrote a murder mystery novel, contributed articles to Esquire magazine, studied glandular criminology (the now debunked study of whether facial characteristics incline one toward criminal activity), and with his friend, the actress Hedy Lamarr, patented a device that emitted constantly shifting radio frequency patterns for directing torpedoes.

In 1959, Antheil was writing music for Walter Cronkite's TV series, "The 20th Century," when he died of a heart attack. He left behind six operas, more than 100 film scores, five symphonies, and more than 50 other works for voice, piano or chamber ensemble.

Yet all most people remember Antheil for was "Ballet mécanique." Restoring a more balanced view is this festival's purpose, says Brickle. "Trying to bring attention to Antheil is one way of restoring a whole huge swath of musical history," he says.