The avant-garde composer George Antheil may not be New Jersey’s most famous musical figure, but he is certainly one of its most colorful and accomplished.
Born in Trenton in 1900, Antheil studied composition and music theory in Philadelphia and New York. He settled in Paris in 1923 at the encouragement of the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, whose innovative, often violent, rhythms would influence Antheil’s work, notably his fierce, famous (and infamous) Ballet Mécanique. The 1926 Paris premiere of the piece—a storm of player pianos, bells, fire alarms and sirens—won cheers as well as boos and culminated in a riot, scarring Antheil’s reputation. Still, this was Paris in the ’20s, and he was mixing it up with the likes of Hemingway, Joyce and Pound.
Antheil returned to the U.S. as Nazism arose, but failed to engage American audiences. He wrote detective stories, contributed to medical journals and, with Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr, patented a device that prevented the jamming of radio signals used to guide airborne torpedoes. In 1945, Antheil published his autobiography, The Bad Boy of Music.
On October 10, to open its season, the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra will perform Antheil’s McKonkey’s Ferry, an approachable concert overture depicting George Washington crossing the Delaware. The piece has a “fairly strong military element,” says NJSO music director Jacques Lacombe, “but it also has some beautiful lyrical moments.” Watch the State of the Arts NJ feature about the Antheil and the concert below!
Lacombe says that Antheil, who died in 1959, was a unique talent who “showed an incredible level of creativity combined with a great mastery of the orchestra.” The season opener, to be held at NJPAC in Newark, will include the Nocturnes of Claude Debussy, the father of musical impressionism, and Carl Orff’s 1930s Carmina Burana, in which Orff infused Gregorian chants with modern rhythms. The program will be repeated October 11 at the State Theatre in New Brunswick and October 12 at Mayo PAC in Morristown. For more info, see the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra website.