July 8 - George Antheil (The Musical Birthday Series, 4th Annual Cycle)

Previous posts for July 8th are found here: Steve Lawrence; Percy Grainger (2019), Raffi (2020), and Billy Eckstine (2021)

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George Antheil (8 July 1900 – 12 February 1959) was an American composer, pianist, author, and inventor.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Quiet!!!

 

Antheil’s most celebrated work, Le Ballet Mécanique, scored for player pianos, automobile horns, electric bells, and airplane propellers, produced a hostile outcry in Paris (1926) and New York (1927). -- britannica.com

His noisy Ballet Mécanique,

Is not for the timid or weak,

It attained notoriety

With its brash impropriety

And was thought to be terribly chic.

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Spotlight

Antheil became the self-styled enfant terrible of modern music.  Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians (8th ed.)

 

As part of his "bad boy" behavior, Antheil provocatively pulled a revolver from his jacket and laid it on the piano.- Wikipedia

The “Bad Boy of Music” arose

As a kind of elaborate pose,

With dogged devotion

And blunt self-promotion

And the attitude “anything goes!”