The Columbus Symphony's February 27th and 28th program salutes the 1920s in Paris, New York and Berlin. We'll hear Kurt Weill's Little Threepenny Opera Suite, George Antheil's Jazz Symphony, Scherzo a la russe by Stravinsky and Bolero. Gertrude Stein would sit in her Paris atelier surrounded by her walls filled with "pictures" by Picasso, Cezanne, Matisse and Man Ray and declare to the assembled young men at her feet, "You boys are the lost generation." Young Americans who came of age during World War I went to live in Paris to enjoy the boulevards, wine and les femmes, where they could live well for five dollars a week. These young men were part of a world recovering from the first world war; a new world that seemed to heave a sigh of relief and enjoyed some decadence. Good living was as important as good work. Music and writing, indeed all of the arts at this time also began to hit at the disasters to come as the 1920's went on. The boys in question were Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, and often George Antheil. The writers will be familiar to you. But who is George Antheil? He was born in New Jersey in 1900. By the time he died fifty-nine years later, Antheil had made a (notorious) name for himself as a composer, writer, inventor, pianist and newspaper columnist on the subject of female endocrinology. In this last capacity he met the actress Hedy Lamar (billed as "The most beautiful woman in the world") who needed advice on the care of her torso. I'm not making this up. The two got talking and months later shared a patent on a form of sound-wave scrambling that helped allied torpedoes function with better aim. Antheil the composer is featured on this week's Columbus Symphony concerts. With or without Hedy Lamar, George Antheil had a steel trap mind for music. He loved everything about music except conventional instruments. Whether it was true creativity or a wacky sense of public relations, Antheil's Ballet mechanique was THE scandal of 1925. It wasn't a ballet at all. The only dancing came from ticket holders who were bolting out of Carnegie Hall. Antheil's score called for sixteen player pianos, an airplane propeller, and several wind machines. Said machines blew everyone all to hell. One gentleman took off his shirt and tied it to his cane to wave a white flag of surrender. There was so much screaming that George fired a pistol into the air! You can't make this stuff up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVlsnXmOtLo We'll hear Antheil's Jazz Symphony this weekend. It's a twelve-minute hullabaloo written in 1925. Jazz at the time was considered indecent by many, along with bobbed hair, speakeasies and free love. To label a jazz symphony took some daring. Further, Antheil made it clear he considered this a piece for the concert hall, smoky night clubs be damned. The Jazz Symphony is deliberately 'catchy' as opposed to tuneful. There's stomping anger to it as well, and some thick textures that just miss chaos. It seems most people in 1925 knew the good times wouldn't last. Antheil made no secret of his disdain for Gershwin and Rhapsody in Blue, a hit which had rocked New York. You'll hear little digs at Gershwin in the Jazz Symphony, licks and glissandi toward the end meant to parody Gershwin's Blue. Like all of Gertrude Stein 's boys, Antheil lacked focus. He was interested in many areas and owned none of them. How he got into female endocrinology, much less writing a newspaper column on the subject, beats me. Smart as he was, George Antheil was no doctor. He called himself The Bad Boy of Music. True that. There's no question that his music, extending to symphonies, string quartets and opera, is worth a listen. Prepare to be entertained.
Christopher Purdy is Classical 101's early morning host, 7-10 a.m. weekdays. He is host and producer of Front Row Center – Classical 101’s weekly celebration of Opera and more – as well as Music in Mid-Ohio, Concerts at Ohio State, and the Columbus Symphony broadcast series. He is the regular pre-concert speaker for Columbus Symphony performances in the Ohio Theater.