George Antheil citations

“Attendants, will you please close and lock the doors?”

“Quite a number of observers have commented on my coolness during various riotous concerts which I performed at during those first tumultuous years of the armistice between World War I and World War II. The reason is very simple: I was armed.”

“You are a concert pianist. That was my life when I was twenty-two years old.”

“Your pianos travel with you. So does your manager. You have no time for girls. Your manager sees to it that no young predatory females get very far.”

“You are twenty-two years old, trained down to the last pound like a boxer. You do not over-eat, smoke or drink and you work six to eight hours a day at a piano with a special keyboard in which the keys are so hard to press down that when you come to your concert grand at night you seem, literally, to be riding a fleecy cloud, so easy is its keyboard action. Before each concert, of course, you eat nothing at all.”

“In the intermission, between group one and group two, you go to your dressing-room and change every stitch you have on you: underwear, shirt, tie, socks, pants and tails. Your other clothes are soaking wet.”

“You crawl over the onrushing piano passages in slow motion. Your fingers are in ten little steel strait-jackets….”

“The sweat—great slithering streams of it—pours down you. It runs down your legs, down the leg that is pedalling the sostenuto pedal, down the other leg. It oozes out all over your chest, flows down the binding around your middle where your full-dress pants soak it up. It flows everywhere, down your arms, down your hands.”