"Riots came to be the order of the day at my concerts," recalled George Antheil in his entertaining 1945 autobiography. Among the list of his most reliably cacophonous pieces, the self-anointed "Bad Boy of Music" ranks the Sonata Sauvage prominently. Composed in 1923, the same year the young American composer and piano virtuoso took Parisian literary and artistic circles by storm, the work brims with the sort of rowdy audacity for which Antheil would become famous throughout Europe, and, later, in his native America.

Antheil's style at this point resonates with that of his French contemporaries—the music of "Les Six" was then all the rage in France—in its use of jazz-like syncopation and extensive polytonality. However, while Milhaud or Poulenc might use such elements to create a charming angularity, Antheil infuses them with a splenetic energy akin to that of Bartok's Allegro barbaro.

The first of Sonata Sauvage's three movements begins with a brief, jolting barrage of tone clusters. The rest of the movement, set against the background of a plodding march, criss-crosses the borders between chromatically flavored tonality, polytonality, and atonality; its gestures and textures often taken on a physicality beyond the merely aural. The second movement exercises even more freedom in the variety of its contrasting textures; the musical discourse ranges from a slow march at the beginning, to the suddenly furious doubling of tempo at the midpoint, to the cadenza-like passage that brings the movement to a close. The third movement, which lasts just over a minute, returns to the relentless tone clusters that opened the first movement, bringing the work to a thunderous end.

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