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George Antheil
Bad Boy of Music
Marthanne Verbit, piano
Settling the Score
by Joseph Fennimore
Thirty-five years after his death in 1959 at age 59, George Antheil's name is familiar to knowledgeable musicians while his music remains unknown except for Ballet Mécanique (1924). Students of musical matters may still stumble upon a copy of Antheil's autobiography Bad Boy of Music (1945), in which they learn Antheil kept a loaded revolver on the piano while playing recitals; he was an intimate of Ezra Pound and James Joyce; the vastness of Antheil's talent threatened the equanimity of Igor Stravinsky; Antheil was the first American to write an opera premiered at a major European house; he wrote movie music, a lonely-hearts column for a Los Angeles daily, and a hook or two on glandular criminology; and he patented a design for a torpedo with Hedy Lamarr.
If the general concertgoing public has heard of Antheil at all, it is because the New York City premiere of Ballet Mécanique (scored for eight pianos, percussion, and various mechanical devices) remains the most notorious classical music brouhaha this country has mustered. A decade afterward, the venerable Deems Taylor wrote:
The piece began before a silent and attentive audience. After five minutes of it, a few began to fidget; after six minutes a few more began to cough; after seven a few more began to giggle. At the eighth minute precisely, a man in the third row raised his cane, to which he had tied his handkerchief. At the sight of that white flag the entire house simultaneously gave up trying not to laugh. I don't know how Ballet Mécanique ends. I am not even prepared to discuss its possible musical value; but I do know that as a comedy hit it was one of the biggest successes that ever played Carnegie Hall.
Comedy was not what Antheil had in mind. He aimed to one-up Stravinsky, using the percussive rhythmic devices of the Rite of Spring to evoke not the primitive, hut-and more astutely-the mindless energy of machines. Concertgoers certainly had not grown familiar with the Stravinsky work through recordings. How many performances of the Rite could New York boast by 1927?
In Paris, with Ezra Pound for a teacher, Antheil learned to manipulate the press. Controversy sold newspapers and even concert tickets if the prospect of a flap were in the offing. To be outrageous, to shock, to offend were to be avant garde. Scandal was the passport to fame. Three Paris performances of Ballet Mécanique had won Antheil notoriety as an enfant terrible.
Antheil never showed himself political in any sense of the word. He was wild for fame and didn't care how he got it. His P. T. Barnum style of promo amused Parisians and might even have flown in Dubuque, but it incensed the New York music establishment. Turning down the League of Composers' offer of a New York City premiere of Ballet Mécanique further damaged his standing. Antheil was just too full of himself and needed cutting down. He became the butt of a joke, a laughing stock.
But yesterday's joke, if it's big enough, has a way of becoming tomorrow's legend. The Ballet Mécanique fiasco has evolved into a kind of success, keeping Antheil's name alive while greater successes of the day have been long forgotten.
George Antheil was a prodigious pianist. His early piano music could only have been conceived by a virtuoso. However, if the condition of his unpublished manuscripts correlates to his performance style, he was also a player hasty, sloppy, and crude.
The manuscripts in his hand are frequently illegible. Whether a pitch is a line or a space is often unclear. Chord clusters with rafts of accidentals may flat and sharp the same note; apparent repeated chords are senselessly inconsistent in spelling. 8vas—signs for octave placement—are begun but seldom terminated. Clefs are missing. Time signatures appear when not needed and vice versa. Metronome marks are spotty, tempo indications capricious or impossible to negotiate. Repeat signs are written by dots and a double bar and with the words "play three times" over the measures concerned. Except for pitch vagaries, the same faults remain when the urtext is in the hand of a copyist. In a style neither harmonic nor serial that is sporadically asymmetrical and intentionally irregular, figuring out exactly what's intended becomes nearly impossible.
After plundering the musical materials of these early piano works in Ballet Mécanique, Antheil never returned to make tidy the original piano scores. Had they been published, he might have done so. Their daunting condition is the main reason they remain unknown.
Twenty years after the New York City Ballet Mécanique failure, Antheil wrote his Sonata No. 4 for piano. Neatly copied, even articulations carefully indicated, errors are few. Frederick Marvin gave the premiere. Antheil could no longer play well enough.
Most of Antheil's piano music mirrors the modish fashions and ideas of the times in which they were written. None of the piano music is as consistently personal, even private, as the Valentine Waltzes. Largely improvisatory, the driving energy is gone. No philosophy underpins the style. He looks back, not forward. Once again, the manuscript's a mess. Unpublished. He didn't care if anyone else ever saw it or played it. He recorded the Valentine Waltzes, which were a gift to Noma Copley, a dear friend. Effortful imperfect playing, but a performance ripe with musical authority and a great natural talent, ravaged and spent.
America is said to crush her finest talents with either neglect or an exploitative success. Somehow, with George Antheil, it seems she did both.
Joseph Fennimore is a composer, pianist, and writer on music.
The Piano Music
by Linda Whitesitt
Airplane Sonata is the product of a series of spectacular dreams in which Antheil felt that he had "for once caught the true significance and atmosphere of these giant engines and things that move about us."* Written in his hometown of Trenton before he left on his first European concert tour, it is the progenitor of his "time mechanisms”: "the future of the world lies in the vibration of its people. The environment of the machine has already become a spiritual thing.... For the great mass of us the war has killed illusion and sentimentality... Hence the birth of the Music-Mechanists." For Antheil the future would embrace two kinds of music: the Banal or Sentimental from distortions of popular tunes and the Mechanistic from his concept of music as sound unwinding in time.
The lack of dynamic and articulation indications in the Airplane Sonata makes the score look tough-as-steel, and the first movement's designation "To be played as fast as possible" reinforces the frenetic quality of Antheil's unyielding pounding ostinato fragments. "One must begin with hard musical objects, perhaps simple banalities, so fast and unalterable that they are horn hard as stone, indestructible fragments for all ages. The "nuanced" postscript of the first movement with its quiet repetitions serves to introduce the second movement's understated parallelisms, an evocation of the "banal" side of Antheil's machine aesthetic. This postscript returns at the conclusion of the sonata, one of the composer's favorite methods of unification. Throughout the sonata, Antheil manipulates blocks of multimetric, polychordal fragments like a cubist painter might arrange geometrical abstractions on a canvas.
Sonata Sauvage (part of a group of piano pieces written in Berlin in 1923) is an exuberant and programmatic evocation of Antheil's conception of three elements of primitive culture. Instructions in the first movement indicate the desired effect of the rhythmically powerful and harmonically clustered ostinato patterns: "Joyeuse marcato à la nègre," "very fff and barbaric." Repeated notes and reiterated chromatic motives suggest slithering snake-like contortions in the second movement. In the final movement, Antheil knows exactly the right indication to produce his dry, cold, mechanistic ideal: "After the introduction the whole is to be performed prestissimo in a wooden sfz xylophonic manner, in an almost unaccented manner. Antheil performed this sonata along with Airplane Sonata as part of his public debut in Paris on 4 October 1923 at the Champs Elysées Theatre. The Parisian press responded to the concert with a caricature showing the composer "operating" a steam-driven piano.
Perhaps to celebrate his long anticipated "notoriety," Antheil wrote Little Shimmy on the day before the concert and dedicated it to his wife, Böski Marcus. In its sparse texture and harmonic formula, it parodies the blues, much like the second violin sonata written during this same period.
Antheil's search for a fundamentally American style in the late twenties began with his opera Transatlantic. Premiered in Frankfurt on 25 May 1930, it tells the story of a financially corrupt American political election. The Tango on this recording is a transcription of the rhythmic leitmotif that pervades the opera.
Antheil returned to the time-space implications of the Airplane Sonata dreams with La Femme 100 Têtes ("The Woman with a Hundred Heads" or "The Woman without a Head" or the enigmatic combination of both: "The Hundred Headless Woman"), a collection of forty-five piano preludes including a final "Percussion Dance" composed to capture the essence of a surrealist collage-novel of etchings by Max Ernst. Marthanne Verbit selected twenty of the preludes to form a compendium of his compositional styles. With instructions and titles like "cruel, quick," "nostalgic," "slightly brutal," "Minuet?” (#25) and "Onward Christian Soldiers" (#26), they include the percussive rhythmic polyphony of Sonata Sauvage, the simple triads and atonal sonorities of his later neoclassic works and direct quotations from Ballet Mécanique.
Sonata No.4 for piano, dedicated to his friend Virgil Thomson, is a synthesis of Antheil's 1920s aesthetic of the machine with his 1940s aesthetic of romanticism. The outer movements, the first in sonata form and the third in a dazzling virtuosic toccata, present "the iron ring of modern civilization" and frame the neoromantic lyricism of the middle movement. Throughout, the sonata is tinged with Antheil's satiric wit.
In the set of eleven Valentine Waltzes, the composer attempts to "take an almost hackneyed form, the waltz, and to try to do again, what so many composers have done before me, to bring it to life for our own time." The waltzes juxtapose distorted stylistic quotations with arpeggiated waltz tunes creating a tongue-in-cheek sentimentality. Much of Antheil's piano music exudes the quality of spontaneity found in these waltzes, and one suspects that the composer's facility at the piano was at the root of his reliance on what he identified as his "native gift of invention."
*All excerpts quoted from George Antheil's unpublished letters and typescripts.
Linda Whitesitt is the author of The Life and Music of George Antheil
(Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1983).
Marthanne Verbit is the first pianist to have undertaken the Olympian task of deciphering and recording these early pieces of Antheil. She uniquely has the requisite tenacity, skill, and resources for the task. Dedication is the word.
Her researches have been thorough, her relationship with Antheil becoming deeply personal even though they never met. Everything about him that could he known, she has learnt. When she refers to Antheil as "George," one has the feeling he asked her to call him that.
She has much in common with Antheil: colossal energy, fierce independence, an awesome ambition coupled with a desire to fly in the face of authority, a deep desire for "success" but only if setting the terms, and a wild sense of humor with relish for the ridiculous.
Her career testifies to a free-wheeling determination to go where none or few have trod. Unlike most musicians, she is an explorer. Unlike most players of off-beat repertory, she is not dying for the first opportunity to trot out her Beethoven Sonatas. Unlike most virtuosos, she has not beaten spontaneity out of her head, heart, and fingers. Ergo, her piano playing is replete with flair, whimsy, caprice, and the willingness to take chances. She always encompassed the delicate. Antheil has widened her gamut to include the brutal.
He's lucky to have her in his service.
—Joseph Fenimore
Sources
Manuscripts and scores:
New York Public Library
Publisher: G. Schirmer, Inc.
Credits
Recorded and mastered by Tom Lazarus, Classic Sound, New York City
Recorded in March and June 1994 at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York City
Consultant: Charles Amirkhanian, music executor, Estate of George Antheil
Piano courtesy of Baldwin
Concert tuning by Alexander Ostrovsky
Art direction/design: Lisa Diercks
Cover photograph: Sylvia Beech Papers, Manuscript Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries
Marthanne Verbit can be beard on two other Albany Records releases: Past Futurists (Troy 070) and Valentines (Troy 071).
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© 1994 MARTHANNE VERBIT
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