Leo Ornstein - Fame and Futurism

Fame and Futurism

Ornstein soon moved in a very different direction. He began imagining and then writing works with new sounds, dissonant 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 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... 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."