Product Description
George Antheil was an American composer (1900-1959) whose most famous works include the "Airplane" Sonata for piano and the Ballet Mecanique. His distinctly modern compositions were landmark in the avant garde movement in Paris in the 1920's, and his influences included Stravinsky and Schoenberg. ... Read more

Product Description
George Antheil was an American composer (1900-1959) whose most famous works include the "Airplane" Sonata for piano and the Ballet Mecanique. His distinctly modern compositions were landmark in the avant garde movement in Paris in the 1920's, and his influences included Stravinsky and Schoenberg. ... Read more

Product Description
George Antheil was an American composer (1900-1959) whose most famous works include the "Airplane" Sonata for piano and the Ballet Mecanique. His distinctly modern compositions were landmark in the avant garde movement in Paris in the 1920Õs, and his influences included Stravinsky and Schoenberg. ... Read more

Product Description
Chapters: Ernie Kovacs, Antonin Scalia, Dennis Rodman, Samuel Alito, George Antheil, John Brooks, Bob Ryan, David Dinkins, Nicholas Katzenbach, D. Jeffrey Wright, Damian Steele, Mark Safranko, N. Gregory Mankiw, Robert C. Smith, George Poe, Joseph Reed, Troy Vincent, Zebulon Pike, Wayne Deangelo, Carman, Patrick Kerney, Embeth Davidtz, Thomas B. Kay, Jerry Robinson, Maury Muehleisen, Peter Courtney, Tal Brody, Martin Connor, Patrick M. Walsh Jr., Gershom Mott, Frank William Crilley, Leah Jamieson, H. Richard Hornberger, Bobby Smith, Jean Acker, Charles Tart, Judith Light, Dan Donigan, Robert Greenleaf Leavitt, Dahntay Jones, Jim Coane, Richard Kind, Angie Pontani, Thomas N. Schroth, Newton A.k. Bugbee, Samuel D. Ingham, Craig Mack, Fred Zabitosky, Patricia Russo, S. Howard Woodson, Lambert Cadwalader, Bobby Sanguinetti, William J. Johnston, Duane Robinson, James J. Dillon, Sido L. Ridolfi, Jim Hoey, Drew Gress, Joseph P. Merlino, Lucius Horatio Stockton, Billy Gazonas, Richard Hazard, Madaline A. Williams, John Stryker Meyer, Diana Vincent, Bowes Reed, Frank D. Schroth, Gary Stills, Harry Deane, George Washington Doane, Joshua M. Zeitz, Elvin Bethea, Orfeo Angelucci, Tim Kelly, Frank Thompson, Samuel Gibbs French, Frank O. Briggs, Ty Treadway, Karl Weidel, Jonathan Levine, Samuel R. Gummere, Marie Hilson Katzenbach, Elijah C. Hutchinson, Edward Bloor, Donald Cogsville, Charles R. Howell, Bob Milacki, Robert Furman, Harry Basch, Jordan Younger, Philemon Dickinson, Elizabeth Banks, Brenda Hutchinson, James Buchanan, Allan B. Walsh, Samuel W. Stockton, Henry W. Antheil, Jr., Frank S. Katzenbach, Peter Pietras, Richard Howell, Zalman King, Amy Locane, Oliver H. Smith, James Bishop, de Witt C. Flanagan, Robert J. Burkhardt, James Walter Wall, Ajai Sanders, Mike Tiernan, Ira W. Wood, Chris Prynoski, Edward Boker Sterling, Charles Conrad Abbott, John T. Bird, Edward L. Katzenbach, Frederick W. Donnelly, Leo Rossi, Al Herpin, Terran...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=166514 ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

THE essential book on George Antheil - but hard to find at a reasonable price
THE essential book on George Antheil - the only serious research on the life and music of the composer and, hence, probably the definitive one, making it all the more frustrating that this book (originally published in 1983 by Ann Arbor's UMI Research Press) should be long out of print and difficult to find.

The statement may seem paradoxical, given that Antheil wrote (in 1945) a famous autobiography, "Bad Boy of Music", now easily available (Bad Boy of Music). So you'd think everything was already there. But reading Whitesitt after BBM, as I did, is like seeing the Hollywood movie first, then reading the history books: first, the fiction, then the facts. Antheil was a notorious story teller, and it is difficult in BBM to untangle the make-believe and the truth, especially since, with Antheil, even the truth sounds like fiction. One benefit of Whitesitt is to establish that even some the most outlandish episodes really happened, as with Antheil's writings in criminal endocrinology, military strategy, lonely-hearts column and other improbable "bread-and-butter" activities.

Also, as is clear from Whitesitt, it is not so much what Antheil tells you (truth or fabrication) as what he hides from you. Like the fact that he never made a living from his his concert and compositional activities in Germany and France in the 1920s, and constantly begged for money from his saint and lenient patron Marie-Louise Curtis Bok (later the founder of the Curtis Insitute of Music), who, with admirable patience and benevolence, obliged, to the height of several thousands of dollars over the years, between 1922 and the late thirties. Antheil shamelessly milked the cow. Whitesitt was able to draw from the contemporary correspondance between Antheil and Bok, evidently much more accurate and forthright (esp. in money matters) than the book written some 20 years after the facts.

Also, Whitesitt sets the facts and dates straight. BBM is filled with imprecisions or contradictions of dates, especially for the Paris period. As hard as I tried, I was unable to establish from that source the date of the premieres of Ballet Mécanique or Symphonie en Fa. All that is clear in Whitesitt.

Other than its numerous quotes of Antheil's correspondance with Bok and contemporary press reviews, the book is a treasure-trove of valuable information. Its editorial body is in fact rather short - less than 200 pages. It surveys the life and career of Antheil, his writings on music, and his music - the longest section, with thorough and perceptive analyses. But an additional value comes from the appendixes, providing a complete catalog of works (indispensable, as Antheil was horrendously sloppy about titling, consistency of naming, publication - many questions that his autobiography had raised were solved here), a discography including the list of unpublished recordings and tapes detained by the Antheil estate, a thorough bibliography, comprising the complete writings OF Antheil (including the record jacket notes, manuscripts and typescripts detained by the Antheil estate, correspondance, and even a list of books "contracted but not published") and those ON Antheil, and a detailed index. All this is goldmine for the music lover seriously interested in Antheil.

The notes are placed at the end, making it impractical to check on the references, and some of them seem inaccurate, like note 145 page 31, which attributes to an article from Copland a quote that obviously comes from the autobiography, or note 200 page 281 which is not referenced in the text. I find Whitesitt frustratingly short on Antheil's life after 1945 - a period not covered by the autobiography. One may not agree with Whitesitt's opinions on the music, like her dismissal of the First Piano Concerto - she didn't have recordings back then. The discography is now badly dated - it was collated in 1983, before the advent of the CD, and many new Antheil recordings have been published since (see my numerous reviews). These are minor quibbles on do not diminish the books irreplaceable merits.

In the end, the career of George Antheil is the strangest case of "what went awry". Here is a young firebrand, sweeping off Paris, writing music that may be indebted to Stravinsky (the Stravinsky of Les Noces) but (like Varèse's Amériques compared to Le Sacre) goes Stravinsky some steps further, by radicalising the Russian's processes of rhythmic writing and block juxtaposition.

Then came the infamous Carnegie Hall concert in 1927, when an over-publicized and badly rehearsed performance of "Ballet Mécanique" was booed down as a circus act and durably molested Antheil's reputation in the US. But there was more. Even as he reached his apex in Paris, Antheil reneged. He rejected his former self, dubbing his radical works "great empty chic". He became obsessed with a flimsy notion of "the form" (contending to Copland that it is not personality that counts, but "the form"), went back to the study of Beethoven and the great symphonists to try and grasp that elusive notion, and composed traditional and often bombastic pieces - not realizing that it is in his earlier, radical period that he had invented a genuinely original form.

Other than his inability to focus - what is a composer wasting his time and energy on endocriminology or patenting a radio control system for torpedoes? - another big problem of Antheil, one he could never get rid of, was imitation. It was OK when he imitated Les Noces, because he radicalized it. But his later works are only derivative (of Prokofiev and Shostakovich mainly), WITHOUT the originality of form, when they are not filled with direct quotations (Mahler and Sibelius in Symphonies 3 & 4), pointing only to undigested influences.

All his life Antheil seems to have been in pursuit of a chimera: recognition, fame. When he attained it in Paris, it didn't fulfil his craving. Now he needed the recognition of America - and possibly of Beethoven, Mahler and what not. He never really got it, because he didn't have (any more) so much to offer that deserved it.
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