Spent an evening with G. Antheil who played me his 2nd, 3rd and 4th Symphonies. They’re hard to describe. He’s in a Mahler-Shostakovich period, and everything comes out of there in great unwashed gobs of sound that billow about you until it’s all over and you’re not sure what you heard. Some of it is very effective, and it all has a typical Antheil drive, but somehow when it’s all over, one doesn’t give a damn. That’s the sort of thing that’s hard to tell a composer.