For those listeners exploring twentieth-century music, particularly American music,
Antheil makes a fascinating subject.
After divorce, she went to America, changed her name and, with the help of musician George
Antheil, invented a system for guiding torpedoes to their targets!
Here were photographs, drawings, letters, and books; projects for murals and architectural decoration; designs for ballets; drawings from the First War; works connected with his film Ballet mecanique, 1924, shown in this exhibition, its modernity rather creaky now but its score by George
Antheil still astonishing.
Ballet came off second best, however, in one of Omnibus's more ambitious television collaborations, where a ballet and a play, both based on Ernest Hemingway's short story "The Capital of the World," were presented in juxtaposition in The ballet was choreographed by Eugene Loring to a score by George
Antheil with TV decor by Henry May (Esteban Frances designed the subsequent Ballet Theatre production that premiered three weeks later); the cast was headed by Lupe Serrano and Roy Fitzell.
Volpone, an opera by George
Antheil, was produced in Los Angeles, Calif.
Here, he focuses on film music in the "golden age" (1933-19), as seen by the composer-critics George
Antheil, Aaron Copland, Hanns Eisler, Leonid Sabeneev, and Virgil Thomson.
The Wish, an opera by George
Antheil, was given its premiere performance in Louisville, Ky.
Hollywood Rim scoring was, however, according to George
Antheil, "a closed corporation" (Modern Music 15.
Antheil comes in only for Ballet Mecanique, as an example of an experimcntalism without substance.
For example, in Of Men and Music, the chapter "On Kicking up a Row" presents Taylor's views on the disastrous American premiere of George
Antheil's Ballet mechanique ([New York: Simon and Schuster, 19.37], 79-84).
By contrast, David Nicholls offers a clear and useful narrative history of experimental and radical music between the wars, linking together Cowell, Busoni, the futurists, Varese, Ornstein, Roslavets,
Antheil, Grainger, Partch, Cage, Harrison, and others into a remarkably coherent web of influences and mutual interests.
The importance of this role is highlighted in the book's subtitle: "a conductor explores." All the major figures he discusses--Antonin Dvorak, James Reese Europe, George Gershwin, Will Marion Cook, George
Antheil, Leonard Bernstein, and Duke Ellington--are ones whose music he worked on, and whose debts to African American musical roots shaped his perspective.