Antheil's Fourth

In Manhattan's Radio City last week there was an almost unprecedented musical event -a newly composed U.S. symphony failed to bore its audience. The fact that its composer was also a professional endocrinologist, the author of a book on global strategy, the writer of a syndicated column of advice to the lovelorn, and an honorary member of the

Paris police force, was purely coincidental. George AntheiFs Fourth Symphony, elegantly broadcast by Leopold Stokowski and the N.B.C. Symphony, was easily the loudest and liveliest symphonic composition to turn up in years. It was also testimony that Composer Antheil, once the No. i bad boy of U.S. musical dadaism, had come home to solid schmaltz.

Antheil's new symphony boomed with martial rhythms and surged with soulful tunes. It sounded successively like Richard Strauss's Ein Heldenleben, a circus parade and a Czechoslovakian weenie-roast. It was vulgar, raucous, unabashedly sentimental, as enjoyable as a baseball game or a day at Coney Island. Critics were unable to down the suspicion that Composer Antheil had paid careful attention to the music and success of Dmitri Shostakovich. In any event, the work proved what some of his friends have long suspected: that the talent Antheil has hid under a bushel of estheticism is one of the most robust and various in modern music.

Accented Rests. George Antheil is a cello-sized man with blond hair and childlike blue eyes. He was born 43 years ago in Trenton, N.J. where his father still runs Antheil's ("A Friendly Shoe Store"). An infant prodigy composer and pianist, George went to Europe at the age of 20, and stayed there for nearly 15 years. During his expatriation, he concertized widely, married a niece of Austrian Playwright Arthur Schnitzler. His eccentric compositions such as Ballet Mecanique, written for an orchestra of sixteen mechanical pianos accompanied by the whirring of electric motors, made him Europe's most notorious U.S. composer.

A master of high-toned cultural dead-panning, he would write solos for automobile klaxons and accents over rests in the scores of his compositions. Antheil always went about his business with a disarming childlike gravity. Like Salvador Dali, he was a man and a salesman of many talents. One of these developed when a European endocrinologist happened to leave a batch of books in his house. Antheil became such an expert on endocrinology (especially criminal) that he made a good part of his living as a writer on the subject.

Adviser to Girls. Returning to the U.S. in 1933, Antheil settled in Hollywood where he did cinema scores for Cecil de Mille and Ben Hecht, got himself a villa with swimming pool. Suddenly he moved out into a small suburban bungalow and gave up symphonic composing altogether. "I didn't feel like writing music any more," says he, "I felt that I was wrong or the world was wrong, and I decided to find out."

In the process, Antheil embarked on some of the most peculiar projects that ever occupied a composer. He wrote articles on endocrinology for Esquire; he wrote in 1940 a remarkably prophetic book on international strategy (The Shape of the War to Come); he wrote a daily column of advice to the lovelorn (Boy Advises Girl) for the Chicago Sun Syndicate; he conducted a correspondence course in piano playing.

Four years ago George Antheil returned to composing with radically changed ideas. Today he scorns the musical modernism of the past few decades, believes that Beethoven was right. Says he: "In the period between the two wars there was a false serenity, and music was intellectualized to the limit. Today we are going through the greatest period in history. . . . I am very doubtful whether the intellectualized, quibbling music that I was a part of will be important again. A return to the romantic and heroic is natural. . . ."

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