35 Facts About George Antheil

George Antheil wrote magazine articles, an autobiography, a mystery novel, and newspaper and music columns.

George Antheil was raised bilingually, writing music, prose, and poetry from an early age, and never formally graduated from high school or college, flunking out of Trenton Central High School in 1918.

Undeterred, George Antheil simply arranged for a local music store to deliver a piano.

George Antheil started studying the piano at the age of six.

At age 19, Antheil was invited to spend the weekend with Anderson and a group of friends; he stayed six months, and the close-knit group, who included Georgette Leblanc, former companion of Maurice Maeterlinck, were to become influential in Antheil's career.

Intensely engaged in his music, during this period, George Antheil worked on songs, a piano concerto, and a work that came to be known as "The Mechanisms".

George Antheil continued his piano studies, and the study of modernist compositions, such as those by Igor Stravinsky and members of the Les Six group of French composers.

George Antheil worked on his first symphony, managing to attract Leopold Stokowski to premiere it.

On May 30,1922, at the age of 21, George Antheil sailed for Europe to make his name as "a new ultra-modern pianist composer" and a "futurist terrible".

George Antheil had engaged Leo Ornstein's manager, and opened his European career with a concert at Wigmore Hall.

George Antheil spent a year in Berlin, planning to work with Artur Schnabel, and gave concerts in Budapest, Vienna, and at the Donaueschingen Festival.

George Antheil met Boski Markus, a Hungarian and niece of the Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler, who became his companion and whom he married in 1925.

George Antheil went as far as arranging a concert to launch Antheil's career in the French capital, but the younger man failed to show up, preferring to travel to Poland with Markus.

Stravinsky snubbed the younger man, having discovered that George Antheil had boasted that "Stravinsky admired his work".

The breach devastated George Antheil, and was not ultimately repaired until 1941, when Stravinsky sent the family tickets to a concert he was giving in Hollywood.

George Antheil was asked to make his Paris debut at the opening of the Ballets suedois, an important Paris social event.

George Antheil was delighted when Satie and Milhaud praised his music.

George Antheil assiduously promoted the work, and even engineered his supposed "disappearance" while on a visit to Africa, so as to get media attention for a preview concert.

In 1954, George Antheil created a modified version of the work for percussion, four pianos, and a recording of an airplane motor.

George Antheil re-entered American life with enthusiasm, organizing concerts, working on committees with Aaron Copland and Wallingford Riegger, and writing piano, ballet, and film scores, as well as an opera Helen Retires about Helen of Troy; the latter proved a flop.

George Antheil's music had moved away from more extreme aspects of modernism, and more tonal, neoromantic aspects were by now discernible in his work.

In 1936, Antheil travelled to Hollywood, where he became a sought-after film composer, writing more than 30 scores for such directors as Cecil B DeMille and Nicholas Ray, including The Scoundrel and The Plainsman.

George Antheil found the industry hostile to modern music, complaining that it was a "closed proposition", and describing most background scores as "unmitigated tripe".

George Antheil became increasingly dependent on more independent producers such as Ben Hecht to give him work, such as Angels Over Broadway and Specter of the Rose.

George Antheil wrote the score for the independent film Dementia and In a Lonely Place starring Humphrey Bogart.

George Antheil was confident in the ability of his music to save a weak film.

George Antheil accepted a commission from the CBS Television network to compose a theme for their newsreel and documentary film series The Twentieth Century, narrated by Walter Cronkite.

George Antheil was the film music reporter and critic for the magazine Modern Music from 1936 to 1940, writing columns considered lively and thoughtful, noting the comings and goings of musicians and composers during an era when the industry was flirting with more "modern" scores for films.

George Antheil published a book of war predictions, entitled The Shape of the War to Come.

George Antheil wrote a nationally syndicated newspaper relationship advice column, as well as regular columns in magazines such as Esquire and Coronet.

George Antheil considered himself an expert on female endocrinology, and wrote a series of articles about how to determine the availability of women based on glandular effects on their appearance, with titles such as "The Glandbook for the Questing Male".

George Antheil suggested glandular extracts, but their conversation then moved to torpedoes.

George Antheil died of a heart attack in the New York City borough of Manhattan.

George Antheil's legacy included three accomplished students, Henry Brant, Benjamin Lees, and Ruth White.

George Antheil is buried in Riverview Cemetery, in Trenton, New Jersey.