| BAD BOY OF MUSIC | |||||||||||
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In
his very entertaining autobiography, Bad Boy of Music (Doubleday
& Doran, 1945; reissued by Samuel French, 1990), George Antheil describes
moving from Berlin to Paris in 1923. There he lived with his Hungarian wife,
Böske Markus, in a tiny apartment located directly above the bookstore
Shakespeare & Co., owned by Sylvia Beach. Beach, who published Joyces
Ulysses, introduced Antheil to the author, as well as to other modernist
legends, including Pound, Eliot, and Ford Madox Ford. Antheil also counted
among his friends such notables as Léger, Braque, Dali, Max Ernst,
and Man Ray. Among musicians, Erik Satie was an admirer of Antheils
and vice versa. OUT OF PRINT |
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![]() Also available in hardcover German translation from Europäische Verlagsanstalt |
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| Riots
came rather to be the order of the day at my concerts because I was one
of the few pianists of that period always to end a concert with a modern
group [of pieces], preferably of the most ultra' order.
...
My piano was wheeled out on the front of the stage, before the huge Léger
cubist curtain, and I commenced playing. Rioting broke out almost immediately.
I remember Man Ray punching somebody in the nose in the front row. Marcel
Duchamp was arguing loudly with somebody else in the second row. In a
box near by Erik Satie was shouting, What precision! What precision!'
and applauding. The spotlight was turned on the audience by some wag upstairs.
It struck James Joyce full in the face, hurting his sensitive eyes. A
big burly poet got up in one of the boxes and yelled, You are all
pigs!' In the gallery the police came in and arrested the surrealists
who, liking the music, were punching everybody who objected." |
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| I'll buy it! | |||||||||||
| Special
offer! Get Bad Boy of Music and the 2-cd set Antheil Plays Antheil for just $30 as long as they last (a savings of $5.95) |
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