George Antheil

George Johann Carl Antheil (pronounced AN-tyle, July 8, 1900 – February 12, 1959) was an American composer, pianist, author, and inventor known for his avant-garde work. His modernist pieces drew on the musical, industrial, and mechanical sounds of the early 1900s. After spending most of the 1920s in Europe, he came back to the United States in the 1930s and began writing music for films and later television, which pushed his style toward a more tonal sound. Antheil had many interests and talents, constantly shifting his focus. He produced magazine articles, an autobiography, a mystery novel, and columns for newspapers and music publications. In 1941, together with actress Hedy Lamarr, he created a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes. The system used a code stored on punched paper tape to synchronize frequency changes—a technique called frequency hopping—between the transmitter and receiver. This innovation is a form of spread spectrum technology now common in modern telecommunications, and it earned both Antheil and Lamarr a place in the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.

Antheil was born in Trenton, New Jersey, to a family of German immigrants. His father ran a shoe store. He attended Trenton public schools and was raised speaking both English and German, writing music, prose, and poetry from a young age. He never officially finished high school or college, dropping out of Trenton Central High School in 1918. According to his autobiography, *The Bad Boy of Music* (1945), he was so obsessed with music that his mother sent him to the countryside where no pianos were available, but he simply arranged for a local music store to deliver one. His memoir, considered somewhat unreliable, mythologized his early life as a futurist and emphasized his childhood near a noisy machine shop and a grim prison. His younger brother, Henry W. Antheil Jr., worked as a diplomatic courier and died on June 14, 1940, when his plane was shot down over the Baltic Sea.

Antheil began piano lessons at age six. In 1916, he traveled regularly to Philadelphia to study with Constantine von Sternberg, a former student of Franz Liszt. Sternberg gave him formal composition training in the European tradition, but the trips also introduced him to conceptual art like Dadaism. In 1919, he started working with the more progressive Ernest Bloch in New York. Bloch initially rejected him, calling his compositions "empty" and "pretentious," but was eventually won over by Antheil's enthusiasm and energy, even helping him financially as he worked on an unfinished first symphony. These New York trips also let him meet key modernist figures, including musician Leo Ornstein, critic Paul Rosenfeld, painter John Marin, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, and Margaret Anderson, editor of *The Little Review*.

At age 19, Antheil was invited to spend a weekend with Anderson and friends; he ended up staying six months. The group, which included Georgette Leblanc (former companion of Maurice Maeterlinck), became influential in his career. Anderson described Antheil as short with an oddly shaped nose, playing "a compelling mechanical music" and using "the piano exclusively as an instrument of percussion, making it sound like a xylophone or a cymballo." During this period, he worked on songs, a piano concerto, and a piece later called "The Mechanisms."

Around this time, von Sternberg introduced Antheil to Mary Louise Curtis Bok, who would become his patron for the next two decades. Bok, later the founder of the Curtis Institute of Music, was assured by von Sternberg of Antheil's genius and good character. She gave him a monthly stipend of $150 and arranged for him to study at the Philadelphia Settlement Music School. Although she eventually disapproved of his behavior and work, she continued to respond favorably to his letters for 20 years. Because her financial support gave him independence, many observers felt he should have credited her more in his autobiography for the length and extent of her help.

Antheil kept studying piano and modernist compositions, including works by Igor Stravinsky and the French group Les Six. In 1921, he wrote the first of his technology-based pieces, the solo piano Second Sonata, "The Airplane." Other works in this series included the *Sonata Sauvage* (1922–23), the Third Sonata, "Death of Machines" (1923), and "Mechanisms" (c. 1923), all composed in Europe. He also worked on his first symphony and managed to interest Leopold Stokowski in premiering it, but left for Europe before the performance could happen, which may have hurt his chances for success in the United States.

On May 30, 1922, at age 21, Antheil sailed for Europe, aiming to establish himself as "a new ultra-modern pianist composer" and a "futurist terrible." He hired Leo Ornstein's manager and opened his European career with a concert at Wigmore Hall, featuring works by Claude Debussy and Stravinsky alongside his own. He spent a year in Berlin, planning to work with Artur Schnabel, and gave concerts in Budapest, Vienna, and at the Donaueschingen Festival. He achieved the notoriety he wanted but often had to pay concert expenses himself. His finances suffered when Mrs. Bok cut his stipend in half, though she still sometimes funded specific concert costs. He met Boski Markus, a Hungarian woman and niece of playwright Arthur Schnitzler, who became his companion; they married in 1925.