There was, no doubt, much apprehension among the administration of New York's Carnegie Hall when George Antheil's music made its return to the hall in June, 1932. Five years earlier in the same space, the audience for the American premieres of Antheil's Ballet mécanique and A Jazz Symphony had erupted into a riot.

In the intervening years, however, Antheil's famously raucous musical style had been heavily influenced—and, more to the point, tempered—by Stravinsky's neoclassical language. Whether for this reason or because of the more somber atmosphere of the Great Depression, the premiere of Antheil's Concerto for Chamber Orchestra enjoyed no such scandal as that which had greeted Ballet mécanique.

Absent from the Concerto for Chamber Orchestra are the intended-to-shock exoticisms such as electric doorbells and roaring aeronautical machinery that had added to the sensationalism of Ballet mécanique. Likewise, the brash cabaret gestures of the Jazz Symphony, combined in a "shaken, not stirred" fashion, emerge in the Concerto for Chamber Orchestra as faintly popular elements that are fully assimilated, only vaguely betraying their origins. Moments of tangy polytonality and playful syncopation find company in the music of Milhaud and Poulenc. Such similarities are probably parallel rather than perpendicular; although during his first years in Europe in the mid-1920s Antheil was the toast of Parisian literary and artistic circles, he wasn't part of the musical community that surrounded "Les Six." In a manner that can perhaps be compared to the Kurt Weill of Der Silbersee, Antheil's style by 1932 had fully synthesized the composer's various and sundry influences: the gestures that comprise the Concerto for Chamber Orchestra are no longer merely referential, but purely musical.

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