## George Antheil and the Noise He Made
George Carl Johann Antheil was born on July 8, 1900, in Trenton, New Jersey, to German immigrant parents. His father owned a shoe store. He had two brothers. The family was Lutheran. None of this would have led anywhere remarkable if Antheil had not been, from an early age, conspicuously and combatively talented.
He studied piano, first under Constantine von Sternberg and later under Ernest Bloch, the Swiss-American composer, beginning in 1916. He was good enough that a wealthy patron named Mary Louise Curtis Bok agreed to sponsor his studies in Europe. He arrived in Berlin in 1921 and was, within a year, appointed the first American conductor at the Berlin Opera. His First Symphony was premiered by the Berlin Philharmonic in 1922. He was twenty-two years old and he knew it.
He moved to Paris in 1923 and began what became his signature work: Ballet Mécanique. The composition originally accompanied a film by Dudley Murphy and Fernand Léger, but the film and the music evolved separately, and by 1926 Antheil was conducting its premiere as concert music in Paris, with Vladimir Goldschmann on the podium. The score called for sixteen player pianos, an airplane propeller, an electric bell, a siren, and various percussion instruments. At the Paris premiere, the propellers reportedly blew several toupees off audience members’ heads. The Carnegie Hall performance that followed, in 1927, received mixed notices that ranged from fascination to outrage. The American press alternated between calling Antheil a genius and a charlatan, and Antheil, who was twenty-seven and acutely aware of his own publicity value, did not discourage either characterization.