LEO ORNSTEIN : history can be surprisingly fickle.
by Roberto Ramadori, 2014
In his comparatively brief heyday – from about 1910 to 1925 – Leo Ornstein was the five-foot-four giant of modern music in America. Carol Oja, in the recent book Making Music Modern describes him as "the single most important figure on the American modern-music's scene in he 1910s".
Born in Russia around 1893, he was recognized as a prodigy at an early age. In 1907, because of the Russian pogrom, he arrived with his family in New York City, and he met Pauline Mallet-Prevost, herself a fine pianist, whom he would marry in 1918. She would became his lifelong collaborator, and musical scribe. He continued his piano studies with Mrs. Bertha Fiering Tapper. She, in 1910, accompained him on his first foreign tour and introduced him to important musical figures throughout Europe.
His New York debut took place in 1911, with a completely conventional program. However, within a few years he was dazzling New York audiences with works of Albeniz, Schoenberg, Debussy, Ravel, Scriabine, and Bartok, many of which he first performed in the U.S.A. He also created a furor with his own radical compositions. Ironically, having been irrevocably labelled as a radical, he was now unwilling to bend to the demands of his own image. Instead he insisted on writing in whatever style seemed demanded by the music itself.
Towards the end of the 1920s, at the height of a successful concert career, he stopped performing in order to devote himself more fully to teaching, until the mid 1950s, and to composing in whatever manner he saw fit, and until his death in 2002. Whitin a few years after he stopped performing, most of the music world forgot about him. Thanks in part to a paper and an interview (1977) by Vivian Perlis of Yale University, and to the first modern recordings of his music, in the 1970s there began to be a resurgence of interest. Since then there have been celebratory-concerts from time and today musicians increasingly perform his music both in the U.S.A. and elsewhere. Despite this, many of his compositions have never been heard in public. In 1975, he was awarded with the Marjorie Peabody Waite Award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
The dominant feature of Ornstein's personality was a costant restless energy. It shows itself not only throughout his music and in its variety, but also in the progress of his life. He left that the most important music gift lay in powerful melodic lines. Everything else could be learned, but a gift for melody you either had or you didn't.
Leo Ornstein's method of composing was also unusual. He heard the work complete in his mind. All that was required was its performance or notation. There could even be a long gap between the original inspiration and the copying down of the music for Ornstein trusted his memory completely. However he didn't care for the process and it fell to his wife to act as musical stenographer and her performed work. But, when she finally insisted that they notate the first three Piano Sonatas, it was too late, Ornstein could not recall them, so is new Piano Sonatas where written only from 4th to 8th.
For example, the Eight Piano Sonata (1990) shifts between styles having the inner movements naive and unpretentious, while the outer movements are powerful and brusque.
Pauline Ornstein, writing about her husband's music and attempting to explain the Janus faces, differentiated "a-tonal" and "multi-tonal" works.
"Both are discordant – she writes on her memorial -, which is an easily recognized feature, but the difference lies in a far subtler area. The internal pressures and conflicts of many co-existing keys – like in most famous Suicide in an Airplane - , provide movement, variety, and contrasts as opposed to the relative sterility and inertia of one all-embracing chromatic tonality".
Writings.
Oja, Carol, J., Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s, Oxford University Press, 2000.
Perlis, Vivian, and Van Cleve, Libby, Composers' Voices from Ives to Ellington, An oral History of American Music, Yale University Press, 2005.
