Leo Ornstein

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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."Quoted in Broyles (2004), pp. 78–79. By the next year, he was the talk of the American music scene for his performances of cutting-edge works by Schoenberg, Scriabin, Bartók, Claude Debussy, Kodály, Maurice Ravel, and Igor Stravinsky (many of them U.S. premieres), as well as his own, even more radical compositions.Broyles (2004), p. 72; Martens (1975), p. 29.

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.Broyles and Von Glahn (2007), p. 4. 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."Rumson (2002), p. 352. Aaron Copland recalled a performance of it as the most controversial moment of his later teen years.Crunden (2000), p. 213. In 2002, a New York Times reviewer declared that it "remains a shocker."Tommasini (2002). 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."Gann (2000).

As an example of what Ornstein described as "abstract music", his Sonata for Violin and Piano (1915; not 1913 as is often erroneously given)See, e.g., Ornstein (2002). Be aware that these notes also incorrectly claim that Ornstein "never again played in public" after the mid-1920s. went even further; "to the brink", as he put it: "I would say that the had brought music just to the very edge. ... I just simply drew back and said, 'beyond that lies complete chaos.Quoted in Broyles (2004), p. 80. In 1916, critic Herbert F. Peyser declared that "the world has indeed moved between the epoch of Beethoven and of Leo Ornstein."Quoted in Broyles and Von Glahn (2007), p. 2. 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.Oja (2000), p. 216; Crunden (2000), p. 3. Ornstein also traveled to New Orleans in 1916, where he discovered jazz.See Broyles and Von Glahn (2007), p. 9. 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, Futurist composer alive.Quoted in Anderson (2002a).

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."Quoted in Broyles (2004), p. 342, n. 3. 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."Quoted in Crunden (2000), pp. 4–5.

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.Martens (1975), p. 9.

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."Quoted in Rumson (2002), pp. 353–54. 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:Broyles and Von Glahn (2007) date the piece 1915 (p. 5). Anderson (2002a) and the detailed website maintained by the composer's son, Severo date it 1918. Retrieved 1/31/07. "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 is beyond my understanding."Quoted in Broyles and Von Glahn (2007), p. 6. 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 in gorgeous tunes."Anderson (2002a).

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.See Anderson (2002b) on question of dating. Its score calls for a high-speed bass ostinato pattern meant to simulate the sound of engines and capture the sensation of flight.Levi (2000), p. 331. Confoundingly, Levi declares, "Ornstein's brief flirtation with Futurism appears superficial and sensationalist", despite the facts that (a) in the immediately preceding paragraph he observes that "the composer appears to have had no contact with the Italian Futurists" (hardly a "flirtation") and (b) Ornstein wrote significant works in a "futurist" style for over half a decade (hardly "brief"). 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).See Rumson (2002), p. 353. 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."Smith (2001), p. vi.

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. "He 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."Broyles (2004), p. 150.

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.Perlis (1983), p. 104. Note that Perlis imprecisely states, "No recordings of Ornstein's music or his performances existed prior to 1976." In fact, as noted above and described by Broyles (2004), Ornstein did record the work of others for Columbia Records in 1913. He made over two dozen rolls for Ampico, mostly of a nonmodernist repertoire; the composers he performed most often were Chopin, Schumann, and Franz Liszt. Two rolls contained his own compositions: Berceuse (Cradle Song) (ca. 1920–21) and Prélude tragique (1924).See Rollography Part of the Reproducing Piano Roll Foundation 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.Broyles (2004) says this took place in 1924 (pp. 80–81). Broyles, again, with Von Glahn (2007) says 1925 (p. 4). 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 arrangements, it is recognized as a masterpiece of the genre.See, e.g., Anderson (2002a).