George Antheil - Early Life

Early Life

Antheil was born Georg Carl Johann Antheil and grew up in a family of German immigrants in Trenton, New Jersey. His father owned a local shoe store in Trenton. Antheil was raised bilingually, writing music, prose, and poetry from an early age, and never formally graduated from high school or college. According to Antheil's autobiography The Bad Boy of Music (1945), he was "so crazy about music", that his mother sent him to the countryside where no pianos were available. Undeterred, George simply arranged for a local music store to deliver a piano. His somewhat unreliable memoir mythologized his origins as a futurist, and emphasized his upbringing near a noisy machine shop and an ominous prison. George's younger brother was Henry W. Antheil, Jr., a diplomatic courier who was killed when his plane was shot down over the Baltic Sea on June 14, 1940.

Antheil started studying the piano at the age of six, and in 1916 he traveled regularly to Philadelphia to study under Constantine von Sternberg, a former pupil of Franz Liszt. From Sternberg he received formal composition training in the European tradition, but his trips to the city also exposed him to conceptual art, including Dadaism. In 1919, he began to work with the more progressive Ernest Bloch in New York. Initially Bloch had been skeptical and had rejected him describing Antheil's compositions as "empty" and "pretentious"; however, the teacher was won over by Antheil's enthusiasm and energy, and helped him financially as he attempted to complete an aborted first symphony. Antheil's trips to New York also permitted him to meet important figures of the modernist movement including the musicians Leo Ornstein and Paul Rosenfeld, the painter John Marin, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, and Margaret Anderson, editor of the The Little Review.

At age 19, Antheil was invited to spend the weekend with Anderson and a group of friends; he stayed six months, and the close-knit group, who included Georgette Leblanc, former companion of Maurice Maeterlinck, were to become influential in Antheil's career. Anderson described Antheil as short with an oddly shaped nose, who played "a compelling mechanical music", and used "the piano exclusively as an instrument of percussion, making it sound like a xylophone or a cymballo." A workaholic, during this period he worked on songs, a piano concerto and a work that came to be known as "the Mechanisms".

Around this time, von Sternberg introduced Antheil to his patron of the next two decades: Mary Louise Curtis Bok, later the founder of the Curtis Institute of Music. Assured by von Sternberg of Antheil's genius and good character, Bok gave him a monthly stipend of $150, and arranged for him to study at the Philadelphia Settlement Music School. Though she came to disapprove of his behavior and his work, for the next twenty years she continued to respond favorably to his letters. Though her financial support enabled Antheil to maintain a degree of independence in his work, many feel he should have done more in his autobiography to recognize the length and extent of her contribution to his career.

Antheil continued his piano studies, and the study of modernist compositions such as those by Igor Stravinsky and members of the Les Six group of French composers. In 1921, he wrote his first in a series of technology-based works, the solo piano Second Sonata, "The Airplane". Other works in the group included the Sonata Sauvage (1922–3) and subsequently Third Sonata, "Death of Machines" (1923), "Mechanisms" (ca 1923), both composed in Europe. He also worked on his first symphony, managing to attract Leopold Stokowski to premiere it. However, before the performance could take place, he left for Europe to pursue his career, in retrospect perhaps dimming his chances for success in his native country.