Antheil first won fame in postwar Paris, presenting works with such titles as Airplane Sonata and Sonata Sauvage. Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and other modernist writers admired him, although Stravinsky was unimpressed. One concert occasioned a Rite-style riot at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, although it turned out that the brouhaha had been staged for the benefit of the film director marcel L'Herbier, who needed a wild crowd scene for his thriller L'Inhumaine.

—Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century