Mahler, Antheil 2025
This Week in Classical Music: July 7, 2025. Mahler and Antheil. There are a number of “semi-round” anniversaries this week, Mahler’s being essentially the most vital: he was born on today 165 years in the past. Our readers could understand how we really feel and take into consideration Gustav Mahler: not solely was he some of the vital composers, he additionally turned a litmus take a look at of types – through the loopy woke days of 2020-2021, he utterly disappeared from the musical scene, being singled out because the “actually unhealthy boy” of Western music. The pattern was reversed a few years in the past, and we’re glad to report that by now, Mahler has resumed his rightful place in classical repertory, each on stage and on the radio (he additionally by no means disappeared for actual music lovers, who continued listening to his superb music on streaming providers and YouTube via these years).
George Antheil was born 125 years in the past, on July 8th of 1900 in Trenton, NJ. Antheil had an attention-grabbing life: born right into a German immigrant household, he was bilingual, began enjoying piano on the age of six, bought concerned with a modernist crowd
when he was 19, and at 21 sailed to Europe, able to make a reputation for himself as a “trendy composer.” He spent a 12 months in Berlin, the place he met Stravinsky, after which moved to Paris. In Paris, Antheil lived in an condo above Sylvia Seashore’s bookstore, “Shakespeare and Co.” Seashore took an curiosity within the younger man and launched him to a number of extraordinary Individuals who lived in Paris within the Twenties, amongst them Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and Virgil Thomson. Antheil additionally turned shut with the Frenchmen Eric Satie and Jean Cocteau. The Paris years had been a productive interval for Antheil. He wrote a number of giant piano items; through the premiere of one in every of them, Mechanisms, a riot broke out, to the composer’s delight (it made him, in his thoughts, equal to Stravinsky, whose premiere of the Ceremony of Spring was additionally met with a riot). Mechanisms was not the one piece that created a disturbance: Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique provoked the identical response. The “ballet” was written as music to accompany the movie by French painter Fernand Léger and American filmmaker Dudley Murphy. The trouble was poorly coordinated, as Antheil’s music ran twice so long as the movie, so the premiere offered the music by itself. It was scored (in its ultimate, much less extravagant kind) for a pianola, a number of pianists, and airplane propellers that made a roaring noise when the pianos and the pianola stopped enjoying.
After one other stint in Germany, Antheil returned to the US in 1933, pushed out by the Nazis. In 1936, he moved to Hollywood and have become a really profitable movie composer, a far cry from his avant-garde days in Paris (the trajectory of Antheil’s life reminds us of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, a toddler prodigy who additionally settled for a lifetime of movie composing after emigrating to the US). In his later days, Antheil wrote some “critical” music, tonal and “neoromantic,” very completely different than what he was composing in his youth. He died of a coronary heart assault in 1959.
Antheil had many pursuits: he wrote novels and labored as a literary critic. A most uncommon factor occurred after he met the Austrian-American actress Hedy Lamarr: the 2 of them invented what is known as “frequency-hopping” for radio-controlled torpedoes. When a single frequency is used, it may be detected after which jammed by the enemy. The Lamarr-Antheil thought was to vary frequencies quickly, based mostly on a code shared by the ship and the torpedo. There have been 88 frequencies for use – the quantity equal to the variety of keys on a piano keyboard. The invention was patented by the actress and composer, however by no means carried out by the US Navy.
We’ll put up samples of his music later this week.