Leo Ornstein

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Leo Ornstein (ca. December 2, 1893 – February 24, 2002) was one of the leading American experimental composers and pianists of the early twentieth century. Though he gave his last public concert around the age of forty, he continued to compose through his late nineties.

Ornstein as a young man
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Ornstein as a young man

Born into a Jewish family in Kremenchug, a large town in the Ukrainian territory then under Russian rule, Ornstein reportedly had mastered the piano by the age of eight and was admitted to the St. Petersburg Conservatory as a ten-year-old. His family emigrated to the United States in 1907, where he enrolled in New York's Institute of Musical Art (the predecessor to the Juilliard School). Though he made an unexceptional New York debut in 1911, within two years he was the talk of the music scene for his performances of cutting-edge works by Bartók, Debussy, Kodály, Ravel, Schoenberg, Scriabin, and Stravinsky (many of them American premieres) as well as his own, even more radical compositions.

From 1913 through the mid-1920s, when he largely withdrew from concertizing, Ornstein was one of the better known (by some lights, notorious) figures in American classical music. Pieces of his such as Wild Men's Dance (aka Danse Sauvage; ca. 1913–14) for solo piano and Sonata for Violin and Piano (1915; not 1913 as is often erroneously given) 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. 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." (In addition to "futurist," Ornstein was also sometimes labeled—along with Cowell and others in their circle—an "ultra-modernist.") It is unclear when Ornstein wrote one of his most memorable pieces involving tone clusters, Suicide in an Airplane—probably 1918 or 1919. In 1927, he wrote his Piano Quintet—an epic tonal work marked by an adventurous use of dissonance and complex rhythmic arrangements, it is recognized as a masterpiece of the genre. While Ornstein made no audio recordings, his playing was by all accounts world-class; it is preserved on numerous piano rolls he recorded for the Ampico label.

Ornstein around 90
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Ornstein around 90

In the early 1930s, Ornstein gave his last public performance. Around that time, he and his wife—the former Pauline Mallet-Prèvost, also a pianist—founded the Ornstein School of Music in Philadelphia. The couple directed and taught at the school until it closed with their retirement in 1958. They essentially disappeared from public view until the mid-1970s, when they were tracked down by music historian Vivian Perlis, spending the winter in a Texas trailer park (they also had a home in New Hampshire).> Ornstein had never stopped writing music, though he had not sought to publicize it for decades. 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 its 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."

In early 2002, Ornstein died in a small nursing home in Green Bay, Wisconsin, at the age of 108.

[edit] References

  • Anderson, Martin (2002). Liner notes to Leo Ornstein: Piano Music (Hyperion 67320). (Source of Huneker quote and clarification of Suicide in an Airplane dating. The track listing for the second movement of the Eighth Piano Sonata mistakenly refers to "Sources of a Hurdy-Gurdy"; the liner notes correctly state "Sounds of a Hurdy-Gurdy.") Excerpted online at Sleeve Notes—Ornstein Piano Music
  • Oja, Carol J. (2000). Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-505849-6. (Verified year of Ornstein's birth—often given as 1892, sometimes as 1894—per communication with Michael Broyles, coauthor of forthcoming Ornstein biography: p. 409, n. 2.)
  • Ornstein, Severo M. (2002). Liner notes to Leo Ornstein: Piano Sonatas (Naxos 8.559104). (Be aware that these notes incorrectly claim that Ornstein "never again played in public" after the mid-1920s; they also give an unsupported date of 1913 for Suicide in an Airplane. The dating in Severo Ornstein's website dedicated to his father, however, seems consistently proper.)
  • 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. (Confirms Ornstein performed at a 1930 Copland-Sessions concert: p. 44.)
  • Stepner, Daniel (1997). Liner notes to Leo Ornstein: Piano Quintet and String Quartet No. 3 (New World 80509-2). (Well-sourced notes give 1933 as date of Ornstein's last public concert, though they do give the incorrect 1913 for Suicide in an Airplane.)

[edit] External links

[edit] Listening

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