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George Antheil
July 8, 1900 - February 12, 1959
born in Trenton, NJ, composed during the Modern period
Biography
George Antheil was the first American composer of the twentieth century to gain international attention. Following musical studies in his teens in the U.S. with composers Constantin von Sternberg and Ernest Bloch, Antheil made his first splash as a touring concert pianist in Europe and soon attracted attention for his extraordinary athleticism and mettle. The latter quality served him particularly well as he presented programs that included his own jazzy, jittery, percussive piano works (with evocative titles like Airplane Sonata, Jazz Sonata, Sonata Sauvage, Mechanisms, and Death of Machines), as well as those by equally thorny modernist Arnold Schoenberg.

As one of the first wave of American expatriates who flocked to Paris in the 1920s, Antheil associated with many of the most important cultural figures of the day, including William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, and Igor Stravinsky. While in Europe, Antheil composed his most famous work, Ballet mécanique, a clangorous sonic essay requiring an extensive battery of percussion instruments including a siren, electric bells, airplane propellers, an alarm clock and eight grand pianos. It created a sensation at its initial performance in Paris (1926), but the work fell flat at its Carnegie Hall premiere in 1927, cementing Antheil's lasting reputation as the "Bad Boy of Music," a designation he would live to regret.