George Antheil - Serenade No. 1, W.189 (1948)

George Johann Carl Antheil (July 8, 1900 – February 12, 1959) was an American avant-garde composer, pianist, author, and inventor whose modernist musical compositions explored the sounds – musical, industrial, and mechanical – of the early 20th century. Spending much of the 1920s in Europe, Antheil returned to the United States in the 1930s, and thereafter composed 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, an autobiography, a mystery novel, and newspaper and music columns.

Please support my channel:
https://ko-fi.com/bartjebartmans

Serenade No. 1 for Strings, W.189 (1948)
Dedication: Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge

1. Allegro (0:00)
2. Andante molto (3:39)
3. Vivo (11:14)

Philadelphia Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra conducted by Daniel Spalding.

Besides writing scores for movies, Antheil composed other music, including for ballet and six symphonies; his later works were in a more romantic style and influenced by Prokofiev and Shostakovich, as well as American music including jazz. Works such as Serenade No. 1, Piano Sonata No. 4, Songs of Experience and Eight Fragments from Shelley, written in 1948 showed a self-described desire "to disassociate myself from the passé modern schools of the last half-century, and to create a music for myself and those around me which has no fear of developed melody, real development itself, tonality, or other understandable forms." His 1953 opera Volpone was premiered in New York in 1953 to mixed reviews, while a visit to Spain in the 1950s influenced some of his last works, including the film score for The Pride and the Passion (1957). He also accepted a commission from the CBS Television network to compose a theme for their newsreel and documentary film series The Twentieth Century (1957–1966), narrated by Walter Cronkite.

Apart from music, Antheil had many other pursuits. In 1930, as Stacey Bishop, he wrote a murder mystery called Death in the Dark with a character based on Ezra Pound. He was the film music reporter and critic for the magazine Modern Music from 1936 to 1940, writing columns considered lively and thoughtful, noting the comings and goings of musicians and composers during an era when the industry was flirting with more "modern" scores for films. He was disappointed, however, and wrote that "Hollywood, after a grand splurge with new composers and new ideas, has settled back into its old grind of producing easy and sure-fire scores."

Before World War II, he participated in the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, putting on exhibits of artworks banned in Nazi Germany such as those by Käthe Kollwitz. He also published a book of war predictions, entitled The Shape of the War to Come.

In 1945, he published a memoir called Bad Boy of Music, which became a bestseller.

During World War II, Hedy Lamarr realized that a single radio-controlled torpedo could severely damage or sink enemy ships causing irreparable damage. However, these radio-controlled torpedoes could easily be detected and jammed, by broadcasting interference at the frequency of the control signal, thereby causing the torpedo to go off course.

Antheil and Lamarr developed the idea of using frequency hopping: in this case using a player piano roll to randomly change the signal sent between the control center and torpedo at short bursts within a range of 88 frequencies on the spectrum (88 black and white keys are on a piano keyboard). The specific code for the sequence of frequencies would be held identically by the controlling ship and in the torpedo. This basically encrypted the signal, as it was impossible for the enemy to scan and jam all 88 frequencies because this would have required too much power. Antheil would control the frequency-hopping sequence using a player-piano mechanism, which he had earlier used to score his Ballet Mécanique.

The idea was not implemented in the US until 1962, when it was used by U.S. military ships during a blockade of Cuba after the patent had expired. The patent was little known until 1997, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave Lamarr a belated award for her contributions. In 1998, an Ottawa wireless technology developer, Wi-LAN, acquired a 49% claim to the long-expired patent from Lamarr for an undisclosed amount of stock. Lamarr and Antheil's frequency-hopping scheme shares some concepts with modern spread-spectrum communication technology, such as Bluetooth, COFDM used in Wi-Fi network connections, and CDMA used in some cordless and wireless telephones. Blackwell, Martin, and Vernam's 1920 Secrecy Communication System (U.S. patent 1,598,673) was a predecessor to Kiesler and Antheil's patent, which employed the techniques in the autonomous control of torpedoes.