The Antheil Era: Pound, noise, and musical sensation

Abstract

This essay considers the interactions between Ezra Pound and composer George Antheil. Addressing Pound's poetry and criticism, Antheil's music and essays, and modernist discourses on music and noise, Futurism, and neoplasticism, the essay argues that Antheil (for all of his neoclassical rhetoric of ‘music alone') uses music to register and profit from the material effects of industry, publicity, and scandal. His Ballet Mécanique resonated, for Pound and more broadly, as a musical factory, with a machine-like pulse that could reshape the temporality of industrial labour. The piece launched Antheil into fame, a fame from which (their contemporaries believed) Pound was eager to profit. Though criticism on Pound and Antheil tends to reinforce their formalist doctrines, Pound's surreptitious love of scandal and celebrity – an inheritance of the Italian Futurism he so often scorned – exposes these principles as mere boilerplate, as advertising for the avant-garde sensationalism and material engagement of Antheil's music.