"Bad Boy of Music" in Paris
carol z. rothkopf

The most acclaimed and revolutionary American musician
in Paris in the 1920s was George Johann Carl Antheil. Ezra
Pound touted Antheil's work, which was scored for such
"instruments" as player pianos, car horns, and airplane propellers,
as creating "a musical world. . .of steel bars, not of old stone and
ivy'' James Joyce encouraged Antheil to collaborate with him in
the creation of operas. T. S. Eliot was only one among hundreds of
notable figures who attended his concerts. Still other well-known
expatriates such as Margaret Anderson and Sylvia Beach went out
of their way to help him. For a time, Antheil was a star in the most
glamorous and welcoming city in the world.

Paris in the twenties was as different as is imaginable from Tren¬
ton, New Jersey, where Antheil was born in 1900. In his auto¬
biography, Bad Boy of Music, Antheil described his birthplace as
"across the street from a very noisy machine shop, thus. . .giving
ammunition into the hands of those who claim there is such a thing
as prenatal influence." In other ways, Antheil's youth was, by his
own account, "Penrodian" and "singularly sane." The fact that he
studied both violin and piano did not set him apart from his
schoolmates because most of them also were learning to play an
instrument. What made Antheil different was that he liked to prac¬
tice. And, in an early demonstration of the flair for which he was
to become famous, Antheil gave a concert of his own compositions
for his friends. The audience responded with cheers and whoops to
his first piano sonata, "The Sinking of the Titanic" w\\\c\i Antheil
wrote had ' 'great rolling chords in the bass and a touching version
of 'Nearer My God to Thee' as a finale.''

Antheil's formal musical education continued in Philadelphia,
where he studied with  Constantine von Sternberg (who had

Opposite. George Antheil returning to his Paris apartment above
Shakespeare & Co. as Sylvia Beach looks on.