American composer and pianist George Antheil was the self-proclaimed “Bad Boy of Music.” He burst upon the scene in the 1920s, expressing our mechanized age with his dissonant, loud music. His Ballet mécanique required for its performance eight pianos, the sound of a propeller airplane engine, various car horns, a buzz saw and other odd paraphernalia. In later years he went conservative, composing graceful tonal music “replete with canons, fugues, inversions, calculated and recalculated developments.” In 1936 he settled in Los Angeles and produced numerous film scores.

Obviously, his fascination with technology was more than an aesthetic posture. In 1941, in collaboration with film star Hedy Lamarr, who had recently fled Hitler's Austria, he filed a patent for a secret FM communications system, useful in remote control weapons such as torpedoes.

Composed in 1925 and drastically simplified in 1955, A Jazz Symphony was originally composed for Paul Whiteman's orchestra which premiered George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue the year before. Whiteman found it too extreme and rejected it, and it ended up at Carnegie Hall together with Antheil's Ballet mécanique. With its steamboat whistle, it created the intended scandal. Antheil predicted – wrongly, as it turned out – that it would outshine Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.

The 1955 arrangement is for a simpler orchestra and with the harsher dissonances and noises mellowed. It is not a symphony in any sense of the word, but a compilation of interwoven dance styles from the 1920s era, all given at a frantic pace.