Leo Ornstein
Encyclopedia
Leo Ornstein (ca. December 2, 1893 – February 24, 2002) was a leading American experimental
composer
and pianist
of the early twentieth century. His performances of works by avant-garde composers and his own innovative and even shocking pieces made him a cause célèbre on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ornstein was the first important composer to make extensive use of the tone cluster
. As a pianist, he was considered a world-class talent. By the mid-1920s, he had walked away from his fame and soon disappeared from popular memory. Though he gave his last public concert before the age of forty, he continued writing music for another half-century and beyond. Largely forgotten for decades, he was rediscovered in the mid-1970s. Ornstein completed his eighth and final piano sonata at the age of ninety-seven, making him the oldest published composer in history (a mark since passed by Elliott Carter
).
, a large town in the Ukrainian
province
of Poltava
, then under Imperial Russian rule. He grew up in a musical environment—his father was a Jewish cantor
, while a violinist uncle encouraged the young boy's studies. Ornstein was recognized early on as a prodigy on the piano
; in 1902, when the celebrated Polish pianist Josef Hofmann visited Kremenchug, he heard the eight-year old Ornstein perform. Hofmann gave him a letter of recommendation to the highly regarded St. Petersburg Conservatory
. Soon after, Ornstein was accepted as a pupil at the Imperial School of Music in Kiev
, then headed by Vladimir Puchalsky. A death in the family forced Ornstein's return home. In 1903, Osip Gabrilovich
heard him play and recommended him to the Moscow Conservatory
. In 1904, the ten-year-old Ornstein auditioned for and was accepted by the St. Petersburg school. There he studied composition with Alexander Glazunov
and piano with Anna Yesipova
. By the age of eleven, Ornstein was earning his way by coaching opera singers. To escape the pogroms incited by the nationalist and antisemitic organisation Union of the Russian People
, the family emigrated to the United States in February 1906. They settled in New York's Lower East Side
, and Ornstein enrolled in the Institute of Musical Art—predecessor to the Juilliard School
—where he studied piano with Bertha Feiring Tapper. In 1911, he made a well-received New York debut with pieces by Bach
, Beethoven
, Chopin
, and Schumann
. Recordings two years later of works by Chopin, Grieg
, and Poldini
demonstrate, according to music historian Michael Broyles, "a pianist of sensitivity, prodigious technical ability, and artistic maturity."
and startling. Ornstein himself was unsettled by the earliest of these compositions: "I really doubted my sanity at first. I simply said, what is that? It was so completely removed from any experience I ever had." On March 27, 1914, in London, he gave his first public performance of works then called "futurist", now known as modernist. In addition to a Busoni
arrangement of three Bach choral preludes and several pieces by Schoenberg
, Ornstein played a number of his own compositions. The concert caused a major stir. One newspaper described Ornstein's work as "the sum of Schoenberg and Scriabine
[sic] squared." Others were less analytical: "We have never suffered from such insufferable hideousness, expressed in terms of so-called music."
Ornstein's follow-up performance provoked a near-riot: "At my second concert, devoted to my own compositions, I might have played anything. I couldn't hear the piano myself. The crowd whistled and howled and even threw handy missiles on the stage." The reaction, however, was by no means universally negative—the Musical Standard called him "one of the most remarkable composers of the day...[with] that germ of realism and humanity which is indicative of genius." By the next year, he was the talk of the American music scene for his performances of cutting-edge works by Schoenberg, Scriabin, Bartók
, Debussy
, Kodály
, Ravel
, and Stravinsky
(many of them U.S. premieres), as well as his own, even more radical compositions.
Between 1915 and the early 1920s, when he virtually ceased performing in public, Ornstein was one of the best known (by some lights, notorious) figures in American classical music. In the description of Broyles and Denise Von Glahn, his "draw was immense. He constantly performed before packed halls, often more than two thousand, in many places the 'largest audience of the season.'" His solo piano pieces such as Wild Men's Dance (aka Danse Sauvage; ca. 1913–14) and Impressions of the Thames (ca. 1913–14) pioneered the integrated use of the tone cluster
in classical music composition, which Henry Cowell
, three years Ornstein's junior, would do even more to popularize. In the description of scholar Gordon Rumson, Wild Men's Dance is a "work of vehement, unruly rhythm, compounded of dense chord clusters...and brutal accents. Complex rhythms and gigantic crashing chords traverse the whole range of the piano. This remains a work for a great virtuoso able to imbue it with a burning, ferocious energy." Aaron Copland
recalled a performance of it as the most controversial moment of his later teen years. In 2002, a New York Times reviewer declared that it "remains a shocker." According to critic Kyle Gann
, Impressions of the Thames, "if Debussyan in its textures, used more prickly chords than Debussy ever dared, and also clusters in the treble range and a low pounding that foreshadowed Charlemagne Palestine
, yet modulated...with a compelling sense of unity."
As an example of what Ornstein described as "abstract music", his Sonata for Violin and Piano (1915; not 1913 as is often erroneously given) went even further; "to the brink", as he put it: "I would say that [the sonata] had brought music just to the very edge.... I just simply drew back and said, 'beyond that lies complete chaos.'" In 1916, critic Herbert F. Peyser declared that "the world has indeed moved between the epoch of Beethoven and of Leo Ornstein." That spring, Ornstein gave a series of recitals in the New York home of one of his advocates; these concerts were crucial precedents for the composer societies around which the modern music scene would thrive in the 1920s. Ornstein also traveled to New Orleans in 1916, where he discovered jazz
. The following year, critic James Huneker wrote,
In addition to "futurist", Ornstein was also sometimes labeled—along with Cowell and others in their circle—an "ultra-modernist." An article in the Baltimore Evening Sun
referred to him as "the intransigent pianist, who has set the entire musical world by the ears and who is probably the most discussed figure on the concert stage." In The Musical Quarterly
he was described as "the most salient musical phenomenon of our time." Swiss-born composer Ernest Bloch
declared him "the single composer in America who displays positive signs of genius."
By 1918, Ornstein was sufficiently renowned that a full-length biography of him was published. The book, by Frederick H. Martens, suggests not only the level of Ornstein's fame at age twenty-four, but also his divisive effect on the cultural scene:
Cowell, who had encountered Ornstein while studying in New York, would pursue a similarly radical style as part of a grand intellectual and cultural mission, which also involved ambitious writings on music theory and publishing and promotional efforts in support of the avant-garde. Ornstein, the vanguard iconoclast of American classical music, followed a much more idiosyncratic muse: "I'm guided entirely by just my musical instinct as to what I feel is consequential or inconsequential." Evidence of that is the fact that, even at the height of his ultra-modernist notoriety, he also wrote several lyrical, tonal works, such as the First Sonata for Cello and Piano: "[It] was written in less than a week under a compulsion that was not to be resisted", Ornstein later said. "Why I should have heard this romantic piece at the same period that I was tumultuously involved in the primitivism of [other works] is beyond my understanding." Commenting on the piece after Ornstein's death approximately three-quarters of a century later, critic Martin Anderson wrote that it "rivals Rachmaninov
's [cello sonata] in gorgeous tunes."
Before the turn of the decade—probably in 1918 or 1919—Ornstein produced one of his most distinctive works involving tone clusters, Suicide in an Airplane. Its score calls for a high-speed bass ostinato
pattern meant to simulate the sound of engines and capture the sensation of flight. The piece would serve as an inspiration for the Airplane Sonata (1923) of George Antheil
, who reflected Ornstein's influence in other works such as Sonata Sauvage (1923). Writing in 2000, pianist and historian Joseph Smith cited Suicide in an Airplane among those pieces of Ornstein's that "represented (and may still represent) the ne plus ultra of pianistic violence."
Ornstein, burned out, effectively gave up his celebrated performance career in the early 1920s. His "music was soon forgotten", writes scholar Erik Levi, leaving him "an essentially peripheral figure in American musical life." As described by Broyles, "Ornstein had mostly retired by the time the new music organizations of the 1920s appeared. Too early and too independent, Ornstein had little desire to participate in the modernist movement by the time it caught hold in the United States.... [He] seemed little bothered by the publicity or the lack of it. He listened only to his own voice."
Ornstein's primary compositional style was changing as well. As described by latter-day critic Gordon Rumson, his
This transformation contributed to Ornstein's fade into obscurity. Those whom he had inspired now rejected him, almost as vehemently as the critics he had shocked a decade earlier. "[H]e had been radical modernism's poster boy throughout the 1910s, and when he abandoned that style for one more expressive the ultramoderns reacted as a lover scorned", according to Broyles. "Not even Cowell, known for his accepting temperament, could forgive Ornstein."
Having abandoned not only the concert stage, but also the income that went with it, Ornstein signed an exclusive contract with the Ampico label to make piano rolls. He made over two dozen rolls for Ampico, mostly of a nonmodernist repertoire; the composers he performed most often were Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt
. Two rolls contained his own compositions: Berceuse (Cradle Song) (ca. 1920–21) and Prélude tragique (1924). Ornstein never recorded, in any format, even a single example of his futurist pieces which had brought him fame.
In the mid-1920s, Ornstein left New York to accept a teaching post at the Philadelphia Musical Academy, later part of the University of the Arts
. During this period, he wrote some of his most important work, including the Piano Concerto, commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra
in 1925. Two years later, he produced his Piano Quintet. An epic tonal work marked by an adventurous use of dissonance and complex rhythm
ic arrangements, it is recognized as a masterpiece of the genre.
In the early 1930s, Ornstein gave his last public performance. A few years later, he and his wife—the former Pauline Mallet-Prèvost, also a pianist—founded the Ornstein School of Music in Philadelphia. Among the students there, John Coltrane
and Jimmy Smith
would go on to major careers in jazz. The Ornsteins directed and taught at the school until it closed with their retirement in 1953. They essentially disappeared from public view until the mid-1970s, when they were tracked down by music historian Vivian Perlis: the couple was spending the winter in a Texas trailer park (they also had a home in New Hampshire). Ornstein had continued to compose music; equipped with a powerful memory, he was not diligent about writing it all down and had not sought to publicize it for decades. Though his style had tempered greatly since the 1910s, it retained its unique character, and with his rediscovery came a new burst of productivity. In Gann's description, piano works composed by Ornstein in his eighties, such as Solitude and Rendezvous at the Lake, featured melodies that "sprang through endless ornate curlicues that brought no other composer to mind."
In 1988, the ninety-five-year-old Ornstein wrote his Seventh Piano Sonata. With this composition Ornstein became, by a couple of years, the oldest published composer ever to produce a substantial new work. In 1990, at the age of ninety-seven, Ornstein's final work, the Eighth Piano Sonata, was completed and given its world premiere. The names of the sonata's movements reflect not only the passage of a remarkable span of time, but an undimmed sense of humor and exploratory spirit: I. "Life's Turmoil and a Few Bits of Satire" / II. "A Trip to the Attic—A Tear or Two for a Childhood Forever Gone" (a. "The Bugler" / b. "A Lament for a Lost Boy" / c. "A Half-Mutilated Cradle—Berceuse" / d. "First Carousel Ride and Sounds of a Hurdy-Gurdy") / III. "Disciplines and Improvisations." Reviewing the work's New York debut, critic Anthony Tommasini
wrote, "Between the roaring craziness of the first and third movements, the middle movement is a suite of four short musical musings on childhood mementos discovered in an attic. Though completely incongruous, the shift in tone is audacious and the music disarming. The audience listened raptly, then erupted in applause."
In early 2002, Ornstein died in Green Bay, Wisconsin
. At the age of 108, he was among the longest-lived of composers.
Experimental music
Experimental music refers, in the English-language literature, to a compositional tradition which arose in the mid-20th century, applied particularly in North America to music composed in such a way that its outcome is unforeseeable. Its most famous and influential exponent was John Cage...
composer
Composer
A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...
and pianist
Pianist
A pianist is a musician who plays the piano. A professional pianist can perform solo pieces, play with an ensemble or orchestra, or accompany one or more singers, solo instrumentalists, or other performers.-Choice of genres:...
of the early twentieth century. His performances of works by avant-garde composers and his own innovative and even shocking pieces made him a cause célèbre on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ornstein was the first important composer to make extensive use of the tone cluster
Tone cluster
A tone cluster is a musical chord comprising at least three consecutive tones in a scale. Prototypical tone clusters are based on the chromatic scale, and are separated by semitones. For instance, three adjacent piano keys struck simultaneously produce a tone cluster...
. As a pianist, he was considered a world-class talent. By the mid-1920s, he had walked away from his fame and soon disappeared from popular memory. Though he gave his last public concert before the age of forty, he continued writing music for another half-century and beyond. Largely forgotten for decades, he was rediscovered in the mid-1970s. Ornstein completed his eighth and final piano sonata at the age of ninety-seven, making him the oldest published composer in history (a mark since passed by Elliott Carter
Elliott Carter
Elliott Cook Carter, Jr. is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer born and living in New York City. He studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris in the 1930s, and then returned to the United States. After a neoclassical phase, he went on to write atonal, rhythmically complex music...
).
Early life
Ornstein was born in KremenchukKremenchuk
Kremenchuk is an important industrial city in the Poltava Oblast of central Ukraine. Serving as the administrative center of the Kremenchutskyi Raion , the city itself is also designated as a separate raion within the oblast, and is located on the banks of Dnieper River.-History:Kremenchuk was...
, a large town in the Ukrainian
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
province
Oblast
Oblast is a type of administrative division in Slavic countries, including some countries of the former Soviet Union. The word "oblast" is a loanword in English, but it is nevertheless often translated as "area", "zone", "province", or "region"...
of Poltava
Poltava Oblast
Poltava Oblast is an oblast of central Ukraine. The administrative center of the oblast is the city of Poltava.Other important cities within the oblast include: Komsomolsk, Kremenchuk, Lubny and Myrhorod.-Geography:...
, then under Imperial Russian rule. He grew up in a musical environment—his father was a Jewish cantor
Hazzan
A hazzan or chazzan is a Jewish cantor, a musician trained in the vocal arts who helps lead the congregation in songful prayer.There are many rules relating to how a cantor should lead services, but the idea of a cantor as a paid professional does not exist in classical rabbinic sources...
, while a violinist uncle encouraged the young boy's studies. Ornstein was recognized early on as a prodigy on the piano
Piano
The piano is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. It is one of the most popular instruments in the world. Widely used in classical and jazz music for solo performances, ensemble use, chamber music and accompaniment, the piano is also very popular as an aid to composing and rehearsal...
; in 1902, when the celebrated Polish pianist Josef Hofmann visited Kremenchug, he heard the eight-year old Ornstein perform. Hofmann gave him a letter of recommendation to the highly regarded St. Petersburg Conservatory
Saint Petersburg Conservatory
The N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov Saint Petersburg State Conservatory is a music school in Saint Petersburg. In 2004, the conservatory had around 275 faculty members and 1,400 students.-History:...
. Soon after, Ornstein was accepted as a pupil at the Imperial School of Music in Kiev
Kiev
Kiev or Kyiv is the capital and the largest city of Ukraine, located in the north central part of the country on the Dnieper River. The population as of the 2001 census was 2,611,300. However, higher numbers have been cited in the press....
, then headed by Vladimir Puchalsky. A death in the family forced Ornstein's return home. In 1903, Osip Gabrilovich
Ossip Gabrilowitsch
Ossip Gabrilowitsch was a Russian-born American pianist, conductor and composer.- Biography :...
heard him play and recommended him to the Moscow Conservatory
Moscow Conservatory
The Moscow Conservatory is a higher musical education institution in Moscow, and the second oldest conservatory in Russia after St. Petersburg Conservatory. Along with the St...
. In 1904, the ten-year-old Ornstein auditioned for and was accepted by the St. Petersburg school. There he studied composition with Alexander Glazunov
Alexander Glazunov
Alexander Konstantinovich Glazunov was a Russian composer of the late Russian Romantic period, music teacher and conductor...
and piano with Anna Yesipova
Anna Yesipova
Anna Yesipova was a prominent Russian pianist. Her name is cited variously as Anna Esipova; Anna or Annette Essipova; Anna, Annette or Annetta Essipoff; Annette von Essipow; Anna Jessipowa.Yesipova was one of Teodor Leszetycki's most brilliant pupils...
. By the age of eleven, Ornstein was earning his way by coaching opera singers. To escape the pogroms incited by the nationalist and antisemitic organisation Union of the Russian People
Union of the Russian People
The Union of Russian People — a loyalist right-wing nationalist party, the most important among Black-Hundredist monarchist and antisemitic political organizations in the Russian Empire of 1905–1917....
, the family emigrated to the United States in February 1906. They settled in New York's Lower East Side
Lower East Side, Manhattan
The Lower East Side, LES, is a neighborhood in the southeastern part of the New York City borough of Manhattan. It is roughly bounded by Allen Street, East Houston Street, Essex Street, Canal Street, Eldridge Street, East Broadway, and Grand Street....
, and Ornstein enrolled in the Institute of Musical Art—predecessor to the Juilliard School
Juilliard School
The Juilliard School, located at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City, United States, is a performing arts conservatory which was established in 1905...
—where he studied piano with Bertha Feiring Tapper. In 1911, he made a well-received New York debut with pieces by Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer, organist, harpsichordist, violist, and violinist whose sacred and secular works for choir, orchestra, and solo instruments drew together the strands of the Baroque period and brought it to its ultimate maturity...
, Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven was a German composer and pianist. A crucial figure in the transition between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western art music, he remains one of the most famous and influential composers of all time.Born in Bonn, then the capital of the Electorate of Cologne and part of...
, Chopin
Frédéric Chopin
Frédéric François Chopin was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist. He is considered one of the great masters of Romantic music and has been called "the poet of the piano"....
, and Schumann
Robert Schumann
Robert Schumann, sometimes known as Robert Alexander Schumann, was a German composer, aesthete and influential music critic. He is regarded as one of the greatest and most representative composers of the Romantic era....
. Recordings two years later of works by Chopin, Grieg
Edvard Grieg
Edvard Hagerup Grieg was a Norwegian composer and pianist. He is best known for his Piano Concerto in A minor, for his incidental music to Henrik Ibsen's play Peer Gynt , and for his collection of piano miniatures Lyric Pieces.-Biography:Edvard Hagerup Grieg was born in...
, and Poldini
Ede Poldini
Ede Poldini was a Hungarian composer of the late romantic / early contemporary period. Famous in Hungary for writing many operas, he became internationally famous when Fritz Kreisler transcribed his 'La poupée valsante' for violin.Poldini studied with Tomka in Budapest and with Eusebius...
demonstrate, according to music historian Michael Broyles, "a pianist of sensitivity, prodigious technical ability, and artistic maturity."
Fame and futurism
Ornstein soon moved in a very different direction. He began imagining and then writing works with new sounds, dissonantConsonance and dissonance
In music, a consonance is a harmony, chord, or interval considered stable, as opposed to a dissonance , which is considered to be unstable...
and startling. Ornstein himself was unsettled by the earliest of these compositions: "I really doubted my sanity at first. I simply said, what is that? It was so completely removed from any experience I ever had." On March 27, 1914, in London, he gave his first public performance of works then called "futurist", now known as modernist. In addition to a Busoni
Ferruccio Busoni
Ferruccio Busoni was an Italian composer, pianist, editor, writer, piano and composition teacher, and conductor.-Biography:...
arrangement of three Bach choral preludes and several pieces by Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg was an Austrian composer, associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School...
, Ornstein played a number of his own compositions. The concert caused a major stir. One newspaper described Ornstein's work as "the sum of Schoenberg and Scriabine
Alexander Scriabin
Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin was a Russian composer and pianist who initially developed a lyrical and idiosyncratic tonal language inspired by the music of Frédéric Chopin. Quite independent of the innovations of Arnold Schoenberg, Scriabin developed an increasingly atonal musical system,...
[sic] squared." Others were less analytical: "We have never suffered from such insufferable hideousness, expressed in terms of so-called music."
Béla Bartók
Béla Viktor János Bartók was a Hungarian composer and pianist. He is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century and is regarded, along with Liszt, as Hungary's greatest composer...
, Debussy
Claude Debussy
Claude-Achille Debussy was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures working within the field of impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions...
, Kodály
Zoltán Kodály
Zoltán Kodály was a Hungarian composer, ethnomusicologist, pedagogue, linguist, and philosopher. He is best known internationally as the creator of the Kodály Method.-Life:Born in Kecskemét, Kodály learned to play the violin as a child....
, Ravel
Maurice Ravel
Joseph-Maurice Ravel was a French composer known especially for his melodies, orchestral and instrumental textures and effects...
, and Stravinsky
Igor Stravinsky
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky ; 6 April 1971) was a Russian, later naturalized French, and then naturalized American composer, pianist, and conductor....
(many of them U.S. premieres), as well as his own, even more radical compositions.
Between 1915 and the early 1920s, when he virtually ceased performing in public, Ornstein was one of the best known (by some lights, notorious) figures in American classical music. In the description of Broyles and Denise Von Glahn, his "draw was immense. He constantly performed before packed halls, often more than two thousand, in many places the 'largest audience of the season.'" His solo piano pieces such as Wild Men's Dance (aka Danse Sauvage; ca. 1913–14) and Impressions of the Thames (ca. 1913–14) pioneered the integrated use of the tone cluster
Tone cluster
A tone cluster is a musical chord comprising at least three consecutive tones in a scale. Prototypical tone clusters are based on the chromatic scale, and are separated by semitones. For instance, three adjacent piano keys struck simultaneously produce a tone cluster...
in classical music composition, which Henry Cowell
Henry Cowell
Henry Cowell was an American composer, music theorist, pianist, teacher, publisher, and impresario. His contribution to the world of music was summed up by Virgil Thomson, writing in the early 1950s:...
, three years Ornstein's junior, would do even more to popularize. In the description of scholar Gordon Rumson, Wild Men's Dance is a "work of vehement, unruly rhythm, compounded of dense chord clusters...and brutal accents. Complex rhythms and gigantic crashing chords traverse the whole range of the piano. This remains a work for a great virtuoso able to imbue it with a burning, ferocious energy." Aaron Copland
Aaron Copland
Aaron Copland was an American composer, composition teacher, writer, and later in his career a conductor of his own and other American music. He was instrumental in forging a distinctly American style of composition, and is often referred to as "the Dean of American Composers"...
recalled a performance of it as the most controversial moment of his later teen years. In 2002, a New York Times reviewer declared that it "remains a shocker." According to critic Kyle Gann
Kyle Gann
Kyle Eugene Gann is an American professor of music, critic and composer born in Dallas, Texas. As a critic for The Village Voice and other publications he has been a supporter of progressive music including such Downtown movements as postminimalism and totalism.- As composer :As a composer his...
, Impressions of the Thames, "if Debussyan in its textures, used more prickly chords than Debussy ever dared, and also clusters in the treble range and a low pounding that foreshadowed Charlemagne Palestine
Charlemagne Palestine
Charlemagne Palestine is an American minimalist composer, performer, and visual artist...
, yet modulated...with a compelling sense of unity."
As an example of what Ornstein described as "abstract music", his Sonata for Violin and Piano (1915; not 1913 as is often erroneously given) went even further; "to the brink", as he put it: "I would say that [the sonata] had brought music just to the very edge.... I just simply drew back and said, 'beyond that lies complete chaos.'" In 1916, critic Herbert F. Peyser declared that "the world has indeed moved between the epoch of Beethoven and of Leo Ornstein." That spring, Ornstein gave a series of recitals in the New York home of one of his advocates; these concerts were crucial precedents for the composer societies around which the modern music scene would thrive in the 1920s. Ornstein also traveled to New Orleans in 1916, where he discovered jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
. The following year, critic James Huneker wrote,
I never thought I should live to hear Arnold Schoenberg sound tame, yet tame he sounds—almost timid and halting—after Ornstein who is, most emphatically, the only true-blue, genuine, FuturistFuturism (art)Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It emphasized and glorified themes associated with contemporary concepts of the future, including speed, technology, youth and violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane and the industrial city...
composer alive."
In addition to "futurist", Ornstein was also sometimes labeled—along with Cowell and others in their circle—an "ultra-modernist." An article in the Baltimore Evening Sun
The Baltimore Sun
The Baltimore Sun is the U.S. state of Maryland’s largest general circulation daily newspaper and provides coverage of local and regional news, events, issues, people, and industries....
referred to him as "the intransigent pianist, who has set the entire musical world by the ears and who is probably the most discussed figure on the concert stage." In The Musical Quarterly
The Musical Quarterly
The Musical Quarterly is the oldest academic journal on music in America. Originally established in 1915 by Oscar Sonneck, the journal was edited by Sonneck until his death in 1928...
he was described as "the most salient musical phenomenon of our time." Swiss-born composer Ernest Bloch
Ernest Bloch
Ernest Bloch was a Swiss-born American composer.-Life:Bloch was born in Geneva and began playing the violin at age 9. He began composing soon afterwards. He studied music at the conservatory in Brussels, where his teachers included the celebrated Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe...
declared him "the single composer in America who displays positive signs of genius."
By 1918, Ornstein was sufficiently renowned that a full-length biography of him was published. The book, by Frederick H. Martens, suggests not only the level of Ornstein's fame at age twenty-four, but also his divisive effect on the cultural scene:
Leo Ornstein to many represents an evil musical genius wandering without the utmost pale of tonal orthodoxy, in a weird No-Man's Land haunted with tortuous sound, with wails of futuristic despair, with cubist shrieks and post-impressionist cries and crashes. He is the great anarch, the iconoclast.
Cowell, who had encountered Ornstein while studying in New York, would pursue a similarly radical style as part of a grand intellectual and cultural mission, which also involved ambitious writings on music theory and publishing and promotional efforts in support of the avant-garde. Ornstein, the vanguard iconoclast of American classical music, followed a much more idiosyncratic muse: "I'm guided entirely by just my musical instinct as to what I feel is consequential or inconsequential." Evidence of that is the fact that, even at the height of his ultra-modernist notoriety, he also wrote several lyrical, tonal works, such as the First Sonata for Cello and Piano: "[It] was written in less than a week under a compulsion that was not to be resisted", Ornstein later said. "Why I should have heard this romantic piece at the same period that I was tumultuously involved in the primitivism of [other works] is beyond my understanding." Commenting on the piece after Ornstein's death approximately three-quarters of a century later, critic Martin Anderson wrote that it "rivals Rachmaninov
Sergei Rachmaninoff
Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff was a Russian composer, pianist, and conductor. Rachmaninoff is widely considered one of the finest pianists of his day and, as a composer, one of the last great representatives of Romanticism in Russian classical music...
's [cello sonata] in gorgeous tunes."
Before the turn of the decade—probably in 1918 or 1919—Ornstein produced one of his most distinctive works involving tone clusters, Suicide in an Airplane. Its score calls for a high-speed bass ostinato
Ostinato
In music, an ostinato is a motif or phrase, which is persistently repeated in the same musical voice. An ostinato is always a succession of equal sounds, wherein each note always has the same weight or stress. The repeating idea may be a rhythmic pattern, part of a tune, or a complete melody in...
pattern meant to simulate the sound of engines and capture the sensation of flight. The piece would serve as an inspiration for the Airplane Sonata (1923) of George Antheil
George Antheil
George Antheil was an American avant-garde composer, pianist, author and inventor. A self-described "Bad Boy of Music", his modernist compositions amazed and appalled listeners in Europe and the US during the 1920s with their cacophonous celebration of mechanical devices.Returning permanently to...
, who reflected Ornstein's influence in other works such as Sonata Sauvage (1923). Writing in 2000, pianist and historian Joseph Smith cited Suicide in an Airplane among those pieces of Ornstein's that "represented (and may still represent) the ne plus ultra of pianistic violence."
Transition in the 1920s
Ornstein's primary compositional style was changing as well. As described by latter-day critic Gordon Rumson, his
musical language organised itself into a shimmering, luminous gradation between simplicity and harshness. The melodies have a Hebraic tint, and Ornstein does not shy from placing dissonant and tonal music side by side. This shifting of style is just one of Ornstein's creative tools. More importantly, there is a directness of emotion that makes the music genuinely appealing. It should also be noted that his music is ideally written for the piano and is clearly the work of a master pianist.
This transformation contributed to Ornstein's fade into obscurity. Those whom he had inspired now rejected him, almost as vehemently as the critics he had shocked a decade earlier. "[H]e had been radical modernism's poster boy throughout the 1910s, and when he abandoned that style for one more expressive the ultramoderns reacted as a lover scorned", according to Broyles. "Not even Cowell, known for his accepting temperament, could forgive Ornstein."
Having abandoned not only the concert stage, but also the income that went with it, Ornstein signed an exclusive contract with the Ampico label to make piano rolls. He made over two dozen rolls for Ampico, mostly of a nonmodernist repertoire; the composers he performed most often were Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt
Franz Liszt
Franz Liszt ; ), was a 19th-century Hungarian composer, pianist, conductor, and teacher.Liszt became renowned in Europe during the nineteenth century for his virtuosic skill as a pianist. He was said by his contemporaries to have been the most technically advanced pianist of his age...
. Two rolls contained his own compositions: Berceuse (Cradle Song) (ca. 1920–21) and Prélude tragique (1924). Ornstein never recorded, in any format, even a single example of his futurist pieces which had brought him fame.
In the mid-1920s, Ornstein left New York to accept a teaching post at the Philadelphia Musical Academy, later part of the University of the Arts
University of the Arts (Philadelphia)
The University of the Arts is one of the United States' oldest universities dedicated to the arts. Its campus makes up part of the Avenue of the Arts in Center City, Philadelphia...
. During this period, he wrote some of his most important work, including the Piano Concerto, commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra
Philadelphia Orchestra
The Philadelphia Orchestra is a symphony orchestra based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the United States. One of the "Big Five" American orchestras, it was founded in 1900...
in 1925. Two years later, he produced his Piano Quintet. An epic tonal work marked by an adventurous use of dissonance and complex rhythm
Rhythm
Rhythm may be generally defined as a "movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions." This general meaning of regular recurrence or pattern in time may be applied to a wide variety of cyclical natural phenomena having a periodicity or...
ic arrangements, it is recognized as a masterpiece of the genre.
Later life
John Coltrane
John William Coltrane was an American jazz saxophonist and composer. Working in the bebop and hard bop idioms early in his career, Coltrane helped pioneer the use of modes in jazz and later was at the forefront of free jazz...
and Jimmy Smith
Jimmy Smith (musician)
Jimmy Smith was a jazz musician whose performances on the Hammond B-3 electric organ helped to popularize this instrument...
would go on to major careers in jazz. The Ornsteins directed and taught at the school until it closed with their retirement in 1953. They essentially disappeared from public view until the mid-1970s, when they were tracked down by music historian Vivian Perlis: the couple was spending the winter in a Texas trailer park (they also had a home in New Hampshire). Ornstein had continued to compose music; equipped with a powerful memory, he was not diligent about writing it all down and had not sought to publicize it for decades. Though his style had tempered greatly since the 1910s, it retained its unique character, and with his rediscovery came a new burst of productivity. In Gann's description, piano works composed by Ornstein in his eighties, such as Solitude and Rendezvous at the Lake, featured melodies that "sprang through endless ornate curlicues that brought no other composer to mind."
In 1988, the ninety-five-year-old Ornstein wrote his Seventh Piano Sonata. With this composition Ornstein became, by a couple of years, the oldest published composer ever to produce a substantial new work. In 1990, at the age of ninety-seven, Ornstein's final work, the Eighth Piano Sonata, was completed and given its world premiere. The names of the sonata's movements reflect not only the passage of a remarkable span of time, but an undimmed sense of humor and exploratory spirit: I. "Life's Turmoil and a Few Bits of Satire" / II. "A Trip to the Attic—A Tear or Two for a Childhood Forever Gone" (a. "The Bugler" / b. "A Lament for a Lost Boy" / c. "A Half-Mutilated Cradle—Berceuse" / d. "First Carousel Ride and Sounds of a Hurdy-Gurdy") / III. "Disciplines and Improvisations." Reviewing the work's New York debut, critic Anthony Tommasini
Anthony Tommasini
-Early years:Tommasini was born in Brooklyn around 1948 and raised on Long Island. He was admitted to Oberlin College's Conservatory of Music, but chose to matriculate at Yale University in order to obtain a broader liberal arts education...
wrote, "Between the roaring craziness of the first and third movements, the middle movement is a suite of four short musical musings on childhood mementos discovered in an attic. Though completely incongruous, the shift in tone is audacious and the music disarming. The audience listened raptly, then erupted in applause."
In early 2002, Ornstein died in Green Bay, Wisconsin
Green Bay, Wisconsin
Green Bay is a city in and the county seat of Brown County in the U.S. state of Wisconsin, located at the head of Green Bay, a sub-basin of Lake Michigan, at the mouth of the Fox River. It has an elevation of above sea level and is located north of Milwaukee. As of the 2010 United States Census,...
. At the age of 108, he was among the longest-lived of composers.
Sources
- Anderson, Martin (2002a). "Obituary: Leo Ornstein", The Independent (London), February 28 (available online).
- Anderson, Martin (2002b). Liner notes to Leo Ornstein: Piano Music (Hyperion 67320) (excerpted online, available with free registration).
- Broyles, Michael (2004). Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music. New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-10045-0
- Broyles, Michael, and Denise Von Glahn (2007). Liner notes to Leo Ornstein: Complete Works for Cello and Piano (New World 80655) (available online).
- Crunden, Robert Morse (2000). Body and Soul: The Making of American Modernism. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-01484-4
- Gann, Kyle (2000). "Tri-Century Man", Village Voice, December 19 (p. 136; available online).
- Levi, Erik (2000). "Futurist Influences upon Early Twentieth-Century Music", in International Futurism in Arts and Literature, ed. Günter Berghaus. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 322–52. ISBN 3-11-015681-4
- Martens, Frederick H. (1975 [1918]). Leo Ornstein: The Man, His Ideas, His Work. New York: Arno (excerpted online). ISBN 0-405-06732-1
- Mathieson, Kenny (2002). Cookin': Hard Bop and Soul Jazz, 1954–65. Edinburgh: Canongate. ISBN 1-84195-239-7
- Midgette, Anne (2002). "Leo Ornstein, 108, Pianist and Avant-Garde Composer", New York Times, March 5.
- Oja, Carol J. (2000). Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-505849-6
- Ornstein, Severo M. (2002). Liner notes to Leo Ornstein: Piano Sonatas (Naxos 8.559104).
- Perlis, Vivian (1983). "String Quartet No. 3 by Leo Ornstein [recording review]", American Music vol. 1, no. 1, spring (pp. 104–6).
- Pollack, Howard (2000 [1999]). Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0-252-06900-5
- Porter, Lewis (1999 [1998]). John Coltrane: His Life and Music. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ISBN 0-472-10161-7
- Rumson, Gordon (2002). "Leo Ornstein (1892–2002)", in Music of the Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde: A Biocritical Sourcebook, ed. Larry Sitsky. New York: Greenwood, pp. 351–57. ISBN 0-313-29689-8
- Smith, Joseph, ed. (2001 [introduction dated 2000]). American Piano Classics: 39 Works by Gottschalk, Griffes, Gershwin, Copland, and Others. Mineola, N.Y.: Courier Dover. ISBN 0-486-41377-2
- Stepner, Daniel (1997). Liner notes to Leo Ornstein: Piano Quintet and String Quartet No. 3 (New World 80509) (available online).
- Tommasini, Anthony (2002). "A Russian Rhapsody With the Power to Jolt", New York Times, March 28.
External links
- Leo Ornstein artist's website, including a list of works (many with scores and MP3s on demand), prepared by his son Severo
- The Leo Ornstein Papers at the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library at Yale University—a register of archived documents spanning his career
- "Re: 100 In The Shade" a more detailed version of Martin Anderson's Ornstein obituary
Listening
- Leo Ornstein Centenary Program, December 1, 1992 the composer, on the occasion of his 100th birthday, visits with Charles AmirkhanianCharles AmirkhanianCharles Amirkhanian is an American composer. He is a percussionist, sound poet, and radio producer of Armenian extraction. He is mostly known for his electroacoustic and text-sound music...
- Leo Ornstein: The Last of the Original 20th Century Mavericks Ornstein and his wife interviewed by Vivian Perlis
- Ornstein Archive Ornstein interviewed by Max Schubel and Jennifer Rinehart
- Ornstein Piano Music Marc-André Hamelin's performance of Suicide in an Airplane from the Hyperion Leo Ornstein: Piano Music
- Sarah Cahill Plays Ornstein video of 2002 performance of Morning in the Woods (1977) for solo piano