Leo Ornstein (born Lev Ornshteyn; ; – February 24, 2002) was an 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. The bulk of his experimental works were written for piano.
Ornstein was the first important composer to make extensive use of the tone cluster. As a pianist, he was considered a world-class talent.In addition to the citations below, see also, e.g., Broyles and Von Glahn (2007), p. 9 ("a pianist of extraordinary skill"); Rumson (2002), p. 352 ("enormous pianistic skills"); Perlis (1983), p. 104 ("recognized as a world famous concert pianist"). According to Oja (2000), he was "the single most important figure on the American modern-music scene in the 1910s" (p. 15). 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 in September 1990 at the age of at least ninety-four, making him the oldest published composer in history at the time (a mark since passed by Elliott Carter).
Early life Ornstein was born in Kremenchug, Poltava Governorate, Russian Empire (today part of Ukraine). He grew up in a musical environment—his father was a Jewish cantor (Hazzan), 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 Kremenchuk, he heard the six-year-old Ornstein perform. Hofmann gave him a letter of recommendation to the highly regarded Saint 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, Ossip Gabrilowitsch heard him play and recommended him to the Moscow Conservatory. In 1904, the nine-year-old Ornstein auditioned for and was accepted by the St. Petersburg school.Martens (1975), pp. 10–11. Note that Martens, like many others, has the incorrect year of Ornstein's birth and thus his age wrong: Martens says he was eight when he entered the school; Anderson (2002a), for example, says he was twelve. Part of the confusion is based in the fact that Ornstein was under the age limit when he entered the conservatory, so a false date of birth was given to the school, identifying him as older than he was (see, e.g., Anderson [2002a]). On other occasions, the family apparently understated the boy's age, to make him appear that much more of a prodigy (see, e.g., "Postlude: Vivian Perlis Remembers Leo Ornstein" NewMusicBox, April 1, 2002; web magazine of the American Music Center. Retrieved 1/31/07.) Aside from this issue, Martens's dating of Ornstein's encounters with famous pianists and the sequence of educational opportunities appears to be the most authoritative. 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.Broyles (2004), p. 73. To escape the pogroms incited by the nationalist and antisemitic organisation Union of the Russian People, the family emigrated to the United States on February 24, 1906, exactly ninety-six years before his death.Broyles and Von Glahn (2007), p. 3. 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."Broyles (2004), p. 75.
Fame and "futurism"
Ornstein soon moved in a very different direction. He began composing works containing dissonant and startling sounds. 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."Quoted in Broyles and Von Glahn (2007), p. 4. 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 squared."Quoted in Broyles (2004), p. 78. Others were more 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."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, Debussy, Kodály, Ravel, and 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 sonata] 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 works] 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 sonata] in gorgeous tunes."Anderson (2002a).