United States or Dominica ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
At present, however, some of those qualities that were so clearly visible in Leo Ornstein during the first years in which he disclosed himself are somewhat obscured. Something not entirely reassuring has happened to the man. A great deal of the music that he has been composing of late wants the bite his earlier work had. The colors are not so piping hot.
During the first years that he was in America after the outbreak of war in Europe, he at least played the music that he loved. But no one was ready for programs beginning with Korngold and Cyril Scott and ending with Ravel and Scriabine and Ornstein himself. So little by little Ornstein began adulterating his programs, adding a popular piece here, another there.
Leo Ornstein was born in Krementchug, Russia, December 11th, 1895. His father was cantor in the synagogue. Until 1906 Ornstein was a pupil in the Petrograd Conservatory. Because of the pogroms, his family emigrated to New York. There he attended the Friends' School and studied music in the Institute of Musical Art. Later, he studied with Bertha Fiering Tapper.
And certainly, for us, whatever the pundits claim, the wilds of Leo Ornstein are not so raging and lion-infested. For while one speculates whether these pieces are music or not, one discovers that one has entered through them into the life of another being, and through him into the lives of a whole upgrowing generation.
Dr. Solomon Rubin's ingenious philosophical studies on the origin of religions and the history of ancient peoples were also for the most part published in Ha-Shahar. Lazarus Schulman, the author of humorous tales, wrote a painstaking analysis of Heine for Smolenskin's periodical. Other contributors to the scientific department were Joshua Lewinsohn, Schorr, Jehiel Bernstein, Moses Ornstein, Dr.
Mischa Elman has told me he never practices; Leo Ornstein, on the other hand, spends hours every day at the piano. Mozart sprang, full-armed with genius, into the world. He began composing at the age of four. No training was necessary for him, but Beethoven and Wagner developed slowly. In the field of writers there are even more happy examples.
Beside the Doctor of Music there stands the Talmudic Jew, the man all intellect and no feeling, who subtilizes over musical art as though it were the Law. The compositions of this period constitute an artistic retrogression rather than an advance. They are not "modern music" for all their apparent stylistic kinship to the music of Strawinsky and Scriabine and Ornstein.
There are other reasons that might lead one to presume that these recent works represent a slump. For Ornstein has been devoting too much of his energy to concertizing. He has been traveling madly over the United States and Canada for the last few years, living in Pullman sleepers and playing to audiences of all sorts.
And human souls and songs that are gray and black like them bloom in the blind air, open their velvet petals, their lustrous, soft corollas, from crannies and windows into this metal, this dun, this unceasing roar. For Ornstein is youth. He is the one striving to adjust himself to all this thunder and welter and glare. He is the spring as it comes up through the pavements, the aching green sap.
The "Poems of 1917" are full of the wailings and rockings of little old Ghetto mothers. Again and again Ornstein speaks in accents that resemble nothing quite so much as the savage and woeful language of the Old Testament. But the music of Ornstein is much besides. It is a thing germane to all beings born into the age of steel.
Word Of The Day