[4] From Sternberg, he received formal composition training in the European tradition, but his trips to the city also exposed him to conceptual art, including Dadaism.

[4][12] Antheil's trips to New York also permitted him to meet important figures of the modernist movement, including the musician Leo Ornstein, journalist and music critic Paul Rosenfeld, painter John Marin, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, and Margaret Anderson, editor of The Little Review.

Anderson described Antheil as short with an oddly shaped nose, who played "a compelling mechanical music", and used "the piano exclusively as an instrument of percussion, making it sound like a xylophone or a cymballo".

[13] Assured by von Sternberg of Antheil's genius and good character, Bok gave him a monthly stipend of $150, and arranged for him to study at the Philadelphia Settlement Music School.

[12][13] As her financial support enabled Antheil to maintain a degree of independence in his work, many observers believed he should have given her more credit in his autobiography for the length and extent of her contribution to his career.

[17] He spent a year in Berlin, planning to work with Artur Schnabel, and gave concerts in Budapest, Vienna, and at the Donaueschingen Festival.

His financial situation was not helped by Mrs. Bok's reduction of his stipend by half, though she often responded to requests to fund specific aspects of his concerts.

[21][22] He went as far as arranging a concert to launch Antheil's career in the French capital, but the younger man failed to show up, preferring to travel to Poland with Markus.

[3][22] Despite the inauspicious beginning, Antheil found Paris, at the time, a center of musical and artistic innovation, to be a "green tender morning" compared to the "black night" of Berlin.

"[26] She was very supportive, and introduced Antheil to her circle of friends and customers including Erik Satie, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Virgil Thomson, and Ernest Hemingway.

the police entered, and any number of surrealists, society personages, and people of all descriptions were arrested ... Paris hadn't had such a good time since the premiere of Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps.

In the audience were Erik Satie, Darius Milhaud, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and Francis Picabia.

The "ballet" was originally conceived to be accompanied by the film of the same name by experimental filmmakers Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy (with cinematography by Man Ray),[33] although the nature of the collaboration is mysterious.

[33] Antheil assiduously promoted the work, and even engineered his supposed "disappearance" while on a visit to Africa, so as to get media attention for a preview concert.

[39] The Paris première in June 1926 was sponsored by an American patroness who at the end of the concert was (according to Antheil) "tossed in a blanket by three baronesses and a duke.

[40] On April 10, 1927, Antheil rented New York's Carnegie Hall to present an entire concert devoted to his works, including the American debut of Ballet Mécanique in a scaled-down version.

During the gale, audience members clutched their programs and their hats, one "tied a handkerchief to his cane and waved it wildly in the air in a sign of surrender."

[42] American critics were hostile, calling the concert "a bitter disappointment" and dismissing the Ballet Mécanique as "boring, artless, and naive" and Antheil's hoped-for riots failed to materialize.

The failure of the Ballet Mécanique affected him deeply, and he never fully recovered his reputation during his lifetime,[43] though his interest in the mechanical was emulated by other prominent composers such as Arthur Honegger, Sergei Prokofiev, and Erik Satie.

[2] In 1933, the rise of the Nazi party made Antheil's avant garde music unwelcome in Germany, and in the depths of the Depression, he returned to the US and settled in New York City.

[2][45][46] In 1936, Antheil travelled to Hollywood, where he became a sought-after film composer, writing more than 30 scores for such directors as Cecil B. DeMille and Nicholas Ray,[2][11] including The Scoundrel (1935) and The Plainsman (1936).

[47] Antheil found the industry hostile to modern music, complaining that it was a "closed proposition", and describing most background scores as "unmitigated tripe".

"[47] His 1953 opera Volpone was premiered in New York in 1953 to mixed reviews,[49] 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).

[47] 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.

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.

"[48] 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 considered himself an expert on female endocrinology, and wrote a series of articles about how to determine the availability of women based on glandular effects on their appearance, with titles such as "The Glandbook for the Questing Male".

Antheil's interest in this area brought him into contact with the actress Hedy Lamarr, who sought his advice about how she might enhance her upper torso.

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.

[57] 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.