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Chapter One
Leo Ornstein
"Wild Man" of the 1910s
Perhaps the stronger the hold of the past the more violent the need for freedom from it.
—Leo Ornstein
The decade between 1910 and 1920 was the mysterious Paleolithic period of American modernist music. Occasional glints of activity were overshadowed by a near single-minded focus on historic European repertories. Concert-goers were far more likely to hear Schubert than Stravinsky, and they had little chance of encountering music by a forward-looking composer born in America.
In the middle of this hazy, emergent scene, a charismatic keyboard virtuoso and composer named Leo Ornstein dazzled New York with a series of four recitals at the Bandbox Theatre in January and February 1915. This same theater served as home to the Washington Square Players, a group also founded in 1915 to produce modernist drama. Ornstein's concerts "really startled musical New York and even aroused orchestral conductors, in some measure, out of their lethargic method of programme-making," recalled the critic Carl Van Vechten. They brought New York "a breath of the intentions of modern thought as applied to music," declared Alfred Stieglitz's daringly avant-garde art magazine, 291. At them, Ornstein performed not only recent music by European composers, such as Arnold Schoenberg, Alexander Scriabin, Maurice Ravel, Isaac Albeniz, Erich Korngold, and Cyril Scott, but also adventurous new works of his own. Until the end of the 1910s, Ornstein remained the touchstone of modernist musical expression in the city—"the high apostle of the new art in America," as Van Vechten proclaimed. With a flair for flamboyance and self-promotion, Ornstein provided an early model of how a modernist composer might make a career in the United States. He also embodied a classic immigrant saga, arriving from the Ukraine and subsequently rising into a position of prominence in the creative arts.
Ellis Island became one of the passageways through which early modernism entered America. Ornstein was the first major figure to emigrate, arriving in the United States in 1907. His family was fleeing the persecution of Jews that had followed the Russian Revolution of 1905. Born in 1893 in Kremenchug in the Ukraine, he was then fifteen and had already begun musical studies at the conservatory in Petrograd. The biggest wave of immigration occurred a few years later, in the midst of World War I. It preceded the later, better-known arrival of Europeans fleeing fascism during the 1930s and 1940s. The harpist and composer Carlos Salzedo came from Paris in 1909, not long after Ornstein. Then Edgard Varèse appeared in 1915, followed by Ernest Bloch, who arrived from Switzerland in 1916. Dane Rudhyar left Paris that same year, and the pianist and new-music organizer E. Robert Schmitz came in 1918. As performers, teachers, organizers, and music journalists, these men became activists for modernism, both in introducing new European works to America and in supporting the latest American compositions. They performed a function similar to that of foreign-born figures in the American visual arts, such as Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Stella, Max Weber, and Gaston Lachaise, who were major galvanizing forces among modernist painters in New York.
Immediately after reaching the city, Ornstein set out to complete his education. He enrolled at the Institute of Musical Art (later to become The Juilliard School), where he worked with Bertha Fiering Tapper, a noted piano teacher of the day. Tapper (1859-1915) was an ardent mentor of the young virtuoso and an intriguing figure in her own right. Born in Norway, she had studied in Leipzig with Carl Reinecke and Louis Maas, and was friends with Edvard Grieg, for whom she edited two volumes of piano compositions. In 1910, she brought Ornstein to Europe for the first time and helped him make valuable contacts on an international circuit. After the two returned to New York, Ornstein staged his debut there at the New Amsterdam Theatre on 5 March 1911, where he offered a thoroughly conventional program of music by Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, and Anton Rubinstein. This was followed by similar concerts in Philadelphia and elsewhere.
Sometime within the next two years, a flaming "futurist" emerged. (In the 1910s, just about any forward-looking artist was called a "futurist"; it was the hip label of the decade.) In 1913 Ornstein composed his Dwarf Suite and Wild Men's Dance before setting off with Tapper on a second tour of the continent. Europe intensified his attraction to modernism. In Berlin, Ornstein met Ferruccio Busoni, and in Paris, he fell in with M. D. Calvocoressi, a well-known music critic of the day. All the while, he continued to fashion himself into a latter-day Franz Liszt, integrating his own compositions into his concerts. He programmed contemporary European works as well. This pattern began when Ornstein participated in a series of lecture-recitals given by Calvocoressi in Paris in 1914, at which he performed music by Schoenberg and Cyril Scott, together with his own Impressions de la Tamise and Danse Sauvage. But his solo debut as a modernist virtuoso took place in London on 27 March 1914 at Steinway Hall, where he performed three chorales by Bach, as transcribed by Busoni, together with "a group of Schoenberg pieces," and his own Sonata (Op. 35), Wild Men's Dance, Impressions of Notre Dame, Moods (Op. 22), Six Short Pieces (Op. 19), and Prelude (Op. 20, No. 2). Other recitals in Paris and London established Ornstein's credentials abroad, an important step for gaining notice in New York. There were only occasional hints of chauvinist hoopla in the reception of Ornstein in America—little of the attitude of "here, finally, is a young American who can compete with the European masters" that greeted the generation of Aaron Copland and Henry Cowell. Rather, perspectives on him seemed to be shaped within an international perspective. He was seen more as Jewish than as American.
Ornstein quickly built himself into something of a cult figure, especially for the tone clusters that became his trademark and for his capacity to mesmerize an audience. He transplanted the star magnetism of a nineteenth-century keyboard virtuoso into a modernist context. "You see a young man of a rather distraught, disheveled appearance and a sort of cowed, hang-dog manner slouch upon the stage," wrote the critic Charles L. Buchanan in 1916. "He sits before the piano in a crumpled-up, hesitating, half pathetic way. A lock of black hair falls over a frail, sensitive and not unprepossessing countenance." Once Ornstein dove into his own music, however, he transformed "pathetic" eccentricity into a sense of being "possesst [sic] by a bewildering and diabolic degree of energy." Commentators on both sides of the Atlantic noted the power of his presence. The London Daily Telegraph marveled over how Ornstein's listeners were "hypnotized as a rabbit by a snake," and Buchanan compared Ornstein's piano playing to the revivalist preaching of Billy Sunday.
From 1916 through 1921, Ornstein presented a string of public performances that featured new music, especially his own compositions. Most took place on Saturday afternoons in Aeolian Hall. Ornstein's appeal was still on the rise, with one reviewer commenting that his recital in November of 1916 "was no less than a graduation into popularity for this young and revolutionary pianist" and that he had a "largely increased following." At that particular event, his Impressions of the Thames and A la Chinoise were "so enthusiastically" received that he added his Wild Men's Dance as an encore. A less well publicized series of four recitals, given by Ornstein during the spring of 1916 in the West Side home of Claire Raphael Reis, had significance in yet another dimension: it laid groundwork for the composers' organizations that were to have such an impact during the 1920s. Like Ornstein, Reis had also been a pupil of Tapper, and after their teacher died in 1915 she stepped in to take up the young virtuoso's cause. The "intimate" recitals she arranged were intended not only to promote Ornstein's career but, more significantly, to form a "nucleus" for "a modern music society." Her collaborator in this enterprise was the critic Paul Rosenfeld, one of the defining figures in American modernism.
In 1922 Ornstein began to withdraw from the concert stage, just as a more broad-based modernist movement was emerging. He later claimed that he felt he could not "carry [his futurist style] any further without becoming completely and utterly unintelligible." He also was weary of coping with his "extreme nervousness" about performing in public. In the 1920s, Ornstein taught first at the Philadelphia Musical Academy and then at his own Ornstein School of Music, also in Philadelphia, where he remained until his retirement in 1953. (John Coltrane studied there.) Through the course of the decade, he reappeared occasionally—for the premiere of his Piano Concerto by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1925 and that of his Piano Quintette at a League of Composers concert in 1928, among other sporadic events. But those appearances ended after 1930. By 1933, when Henry Cowell summarized the brief history of the modernist movement in American Composers on American Music, he addressed Ornstein's case in the first few pages of his introduction, saying Ornstein had "startled the world with his unheard-of discords and his renunciations of form." Then Cowell quickly dismissed him as "not [having] influenced the general trend since 1920 at the latest." Just as tellingly, he did not include a profile of Ornstein as one of his chapters.
Such was Ornstein's curious story—rising rapidly on the New York scene and then virtually disappearing from sight. While Ornstein would have seemed a natural patriarch for radical young American composers of the 1920s, he never was acknowledged as such—perhaps because his teaching career in Philadelphia removed him from the center of new-music activity.
Despite this later eclipse, Ornstein was the single most important figure on the American modern-music scene in the 1910s. Even if his music is little performed today, a few of his titles have resonated across the decades—Wild Men's Dance, Impressions of Notre Dame, Dwarf Suite, A la Chinoise. These pieces all date between 1913 and 1918, and they share certain traits: programmatic titles, tone clusters, a percussive approach to the piano, a post-impressionist harmonic idiom, and fluid structures. Each has an improvisatory feeling—as though hatched before the listener's ears. Added to this, Ornstein was not only a captivating performer but also an effective image-maker. Playing off the nineteenth-century idealization of composition as being practiced by solitary geniuses who experienced lightning bolts of inspiration, Ornstein gave it an up-to-date slant. He claimed his music to be the product of "the irresistible urging of some mysterious spiritual force," suggesting a compulsion akin to automatic writing. In this construction, his mind and body were receptacles for creative messages conceived at a level beyond conscious control.
This last notion smacked of the "vital impulse" articulated by the philosopher Henri Bergson, whose writings about creativity had a widespread impact on the development of modernism in both Europe and America. With a legion of followers among modernist painters, writers, and composers, Bergson strove for a view of art that would attain a spiritual resonance. Creative artists affected by his ideas included Wassily Kandinsky, William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Edgard Varése. Bergson was the first to shape a "process philosophy, which rejected static values in favour of values of motion, change, and evolution." He urged his readers, "Always follow your inspiration." Bergson appeared to intellectuals of the early twentieth century "as a liberator sent to rescue mankind from the chains of scientific rationalism." He was viewed as "a champion of creativity and freedom in a world which seemed threatened by the ogres of materialism and determinism."
Bergson's publications were easily accessible in New York. According to one scholar, Bergson turned "creativity and intuition" into the buzzwords of 1910. An English translation of Creative Evolution was published in the United States in 1911, four years after it appeared in France, and Bergson gave a series of much-publicized lectures at Columbia University in 1912-13. He was also an important force in the symbolist leanings manifested in Alfred Stieglitz's journal, Camera Work. An extract from Creative Evolution was published there in October 1911, and other Bergson essays followed in January and April 1912. Art historian Sherrye Cohn believes that Camera Work's regular contributors, including especially the dadaist Marius de Zayas, "stressed the extra-intellectual, instinctual, and precognitive powers of the mind as indispensable to the creation and experience of art" and that they did so in part because of Bergson's impact.
These were the very terms in which Ornstein discussed his creative method. A 1918 monograph about Ornstein by Frederick Martens, which is filled with quotations from the composer, lays out Ornstein's way of composing as having several key components. The pieces were "written at one sitting" and inspired by "a subtle musical intuition" rather than "a mathematical design." They were "never compose[d] at the piano," they were "developed in his mind" and in some cases not notated for years. Often he dictated them to his wife, the pianist Pauline Mallet-Prevost. According to historian Vivian Perils, all his scores dating after their marriage in 1915 are in her hand. An extreme case of Ornstein's disregard for notation came with Three Moods, which he told Perlis had been in his memory for thirty years before he finally wrote it out in 1948. He had much to say about his unusual compositional process:
To me, you see, music has absolutely no meaning if it doesn't have some emotional impact. I'm not interested in music as an intellectual [pursuit]—not at all, I'm bored to death with it.... And you see, what happened there apparently, there was some kind of emotional [energy] that drove the thing. And then, sort of instinctively and without knowing what it was all about, I grabbed at anything that was at hand to just get the thing down.
In an essay about Ornstein's music from 1916, Carl Van Vechten reported the same rationale: "The boy says only that he writes what he feels. He has no regard for the rules, although he has studied them enough to break them thoroughly. He thinks there is an underlying basis of theory for his method of composition, which may be formulated later. It is not his purpose to formulate it."
Other commentators reported on Ornstein's "spiritual energy," his "simple, unspoiled, ardent, sensitive human" qualities, his "childlike" imagination, and his role as a "passive transmitter" of new sounds. These phrases resonate with Bergsonism, depicting creativity as a form of spiritual channeling, as an intuitive kind of primitivism, as sublimely antiformalist. They also fit with the notion of performance as catharsis. Bergson favored "intuition" over intellect, seeing it as constituting the "vital impulse" behind creativity. "But it is to the very inwardness of life that intuition leads us," he wrote in Creative Evolution; "by intuition I mean instinct that has become disinterested, self-conscious, capable of reflecting upon its object and of enlarging it indefinitely.... Intuition may enable us to grasp what it is that intelligence fails to give us, and indicate the means of supplementing it." This statement tied to the philosopher's focus on evolution, which underlay his belief that the more advanced states of human biology and social order were not necessarily better. Unleashing spontaneous impulses was fundamental to his theories. "For consciousness," Bergson continued, "corresponds exactly to the living being's power of choice; ... consciousness is synonymous with invention and with freedom. Now, in the animal, invention is never anything but a variation on the theme of routine.... With man, consciousness breaks the chain. In man, and in man alone, it sets itself free."
Ornstein deliberately cultivated these qualities of "freedom" and "invention," seeking to bring about the triumph of "instinct." He also promoted the notion of his music as thoroughly original—as being untouched by other new compositions. This last was a common stance for modernists of the early twentieth century. At the height of Ornstein's career, Martens claimed that "Ornstein has often been spoken of as an imitator of Schönberg; yet The Wild Men's Dance, and others of his more individual compositions, had been written before he had ever seen or heard anything by the Viennese composer." Ornstein also took part in promoting the purity of his originality: "When I wrote the 'Moods,' 'Wild Men's Dance,' 'Notre Dame Impressions' and 'Chinatown' [meaning probably A la Chinoise] I was unaware of any contemporary composers or compositions. I was not acquainted with any new music at all. I was brought up in the most rigid classical tradition. It has puzzled me greatly why I began to hear the things that I did since there was nothing in my musical background to explain the gap between my early training and what I suddenly was hearing." It is impossible to verify these claims, yet they raise intriguing issues. Certainly by 1914—and perhaps even earlier—Ornstein could not have maintained with any credibility to be living in a new-music vacuum, for around that date he met Calvocoressi and took on the role of proselytizer for fellow modernists, regularly performing compositions by Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and others.
Ornstein's stance recalls that of Charles Ives, who also disavowed his connection to European modernism. In 1931 Ives told E. Robert Schmitz, "I have never heard nor seen a note of Schoenberg's music." Both Ives and Ornstein faced charges that their work was derivative; they were constantly being compared to Europeans, who were put up as the standard against which to measure American composers. In the case of Ives's outburst to Schmitz, he was defending himself against a review by Henri Prunières in which the French critic had said "there is no doubt that [Ives] knows his Schoenberg." Ornstein confronted the same comparisons, such as the following made by Winthrop Parkhurst in 1920: "Leo Ornstein is unquestionably a musical anarchist, ... [but] he is neither the discoverer nor the actual creator of modern musical anarchy. On the contrary, his system of harmonic and contrapuntal polity is derived directly from and based directly on the heresies of half a dozen contemporaries and forerunners. Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Strauss, Scriabine: these are some of the men on whom he leans heavily for authority." The impulse to fend off such reductive comparisons with rising European titans—especially in a modernist climate—must have been great.
There is a substantial body of music by Ornstein, much of it still in manuscript, with a few works published by small firms. It divides into three large groups: compositions from Ornstein's heyday in the 1910s, most written for solo piano; works from the 1920s, when he branched out into orchestral and chamber compositions; and a diminished but steady output through the subsequent decades that surged in the 1970s, when Ornstein returned energetically to composing after being rediscovered by the historian Vivian Perlis. The most "thrilling" pieces, as Paul Rosenfeld evaluated them, date from the 1910s and are distinguished by their "aesthetic of spontaneous, uncalculated, virginal response." These traits account for both their strengths and shortcomings.
Of the fourteen solo piano works written by Ornstein during the 1910s, two will be looked at here: Three Moods of 1914 and A la Chinoise of 1918. Together they give a good sense of the dimensions of Ornstein's style, which added up to a quirky fusion of the old-fashioned and the avant-garde. As is typical of Ornstein's work from this period, these pieces follow a time-worn nineteenth-century custom of bearing titles that evoked some extra-musical image, whether the emotional states of "Anger," "Grief," and "Joy" in Three Moods or impressions of a distant scene, as in A la Chinoise. Other examples of Ornstein's landscape pieces included A Paris Street Scene at Night (1912), Impressions of Notre Dame (1914), and Impressions de la Tamise (ca. 1914). Many of his works extended Debussyan practices. In "Grief," for example, there is a gently undulating bass and misty ambience. A la Chinoise includes filigreed sixteenth-note textures in its middle section, albeit with chromatic pitch constructions. There are also frequent pentatonic melodies.
Yet these works break decisively with the past in a trait that became Ornstein's signature: chromatic tone clusters that are either delivered percussively (as in the heavy pounding bass clusters of "Anger") or, ironically enough, contained within the rippling, post-impressionistic textures described above. The latter occur in A la Chinoise, in which Ornstein presents a series of static thirty-second-note clusters (Example 1.1). Most clusters here are built of three to five notes, involving none of the fist or forearm groups soon to be devised by Henry Cowell. But they are striking for their chromaticism and their dogged repetitions. At the opening of A la Chinoise, for example, the undulating cluster pattern builds in volume until a pentatonic melody (the most common stereotype used to evoke Chinese musical practice) enters in the left hand, with clusters continuing above. Even a central section, which has far more hard-hitting clusters, still projects a five-pitch tune, although a more chromatic one than at the opening (Example 1.2). This technique of juxtaposing an experimental voice (here, the clusters) with a traditional one (the pentatonic melodies) bears comparison to a similar practice in Henry Cowell. In The Tides of Manaunaun (ca. 1917) Cowell assigned forearm black-key clusters to the left hand while the right hand carried a diatonic melody.
Excerpted from MAKING MUSIC MODERN by CAROL J. OJA. Copyright © 2000 by Carol J. Oja. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
