George Antheil
| George Antheil | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
George Johann Carl Antheil July 8, 1900 Trenton, New Jersey |
| Died |
February 12, 1959 (aged 58) New York City |
| Occupation | Composer, pianist, author, and inventor |
| Spouse(s) | Boski Markus |
George Antheil (/ˈæntaɪl/; July 8, 1900 – February 12, 1959) was an American avant-garde composer, pianist, author and inventor whose modernist musical compositions explored the modern sounds – musical, industrial, mechanical – of the early 20th century.
Spending much of the 1920s in Europe, Antheil returned to the US in the 1930s, and thereafter spent much of his time composing music for films and, eventually, television. As a result of this work, his style became more tonal. A man of diverse interests and talents, Antheil was constantly reinventing himself. He wrote magazine articles (one accurately predicted the development and outcome of World War II), an autobiography, a mystery novel, newspaper and music columns.
In 1941 he and the actress Hedy Lamarr developed a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used a code (stored on a punched paper tape) to synchronise random frequencies, referred to as frequency hopping, with a receiver and transmitter. This technique is now known as spread spectrum and is widely used in telecommunications. This work led to their being inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.
Antheil was born George Johann Carl Antheil, and grew up in a family of German immigrants in Trenton, New Jersey. His father owned a local shoe store in the city. Antheil was raised bilingually, writing music, prose, and poetry from an early age, and never formally graduated from high school or college. According to Antheil's autobiography The Bad Boy of Music (1945), he was "so crazy about music", that his mother sent him to the countryside where no pianos were available. Undeterred, George simply arranged for a local music store to deliver a piano. His somewhat unreliable memoir mythologized his origins as a futurist, and emphasized his upbringing near a noisy machine shop and an ominous prison. George's younger brother was Henry W. Antheil Jr. He became a diplomatic courier and died on June 14, 1940, when his plane was shot down over the Baltic Sea.
...
Wikipedia