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His art is indeed, in the last analysis, a flight from the group of his kinsmen into, if not exactly the circle, at least the dangerous vicinity of those amiable gentlemen the Chadwicks and the Converses and all the other highly respectable and sterile "American Composers." Ornstein Ornstein is a mirror held up to the world of the modern city.
No doubt, to one who, like Ornstein, regarded music only as a means of communication, as speech of man to man, and occupied himself only with the communication of his sensations and experience in briefest, directest, simplest form, there must have come moments of the most terrible self-doubt, when all the anathemas of the fathers of the musical church thundered loud in his ears, and other men's forms and proportions seemed to make his shrivel.
It is this great vitality, this rich temperament, that makes one sure that we are not going to have in Leo Ornstein another Richard Strauss, another Strauss who has never had the many fertile years vouchsafed the other. It makes us sure that he will finally come to terms with his managers and audiences, and that the harm already done him by his way of life will grow no greater.
They gauged correctly from which direction the wind was blowing. They probably heard, faintly piping in the distance, the pentatonic scales of Moussorgsky and Debussy, the scales of Scriabine and Strawinsky and Ornstein, the barbarous, exotic and African scales of the future, the one hundred and thirteen scales of which Busoni speaks.
The harmonies of Gluck are extremely simple, those of Richard Strauss extremely complex. H. T. Finck says somewhere that one of the greatest charms of music is modulation but the old church composers who wrote in the "modes" never modulated at all. Erik Satie seldom avails himself of this modern device. It is a question whether Leo Ornstein modulates.
So with composition become an interval between two trains, and expression an attempt to please audiences and to establish oneself with the public as a popular pianist, it is not the most preposterous of thoughts that Leo Ornstein has lost something he once possessed in beautiful and superabundant form. Still, it is fairly incredible.
Ornstein, they make plain, had benefited by the achievements of Debussy and Moussorgsky and Scriabine. But they made plain as well that he had developed a style of his own, a style that was, for all its crudeness and harshness, personal. In becoming again a disciple he reverts to something that he seemed to have left behind him when he wrote his clangorous "Dwarf Suite."
Theodore Spiering has been responsible for the educational detail of classic and modern works; Arthur Hartmann a composer of marked originality Albert Spalding, Eddy Brown, Francis MacMillan, Max Pilzer, David Hochstein, Richard Czerwonky, Cecil Burleigh, Edwin Grasse, Edmund Severn, Franz C. Bornschein, Leo Ornstein, Rubin Goldmark, Louis Pershinger, Louis Victor Saar whose ms. always look as though engraved have all given me opportunities of seeing the best the American violin composer is creating at the present time.
A piano-poem like "Scarbo" rouses the full might of the piano, and seems to bridge the way to the music of Leo Ornstein and the age of steel. And Ravel has some of the squareness, the sheerness and rigidity for which the ultra-modern are striving. The liquescence of Debussy has given away again to something more metallic, more solid and unflowing. There is a sort of new stiffness in this music.
It would be small wonder, then, if an artist like Ornstein, who, like every real artist, requires the contact of other minds and cannot go on producing, hopeless of attaining performance and exhibition, had finally flinched and wearied of his efforts, and suddenly found himself writing such music as the intelligences of his fellow-craftsmen can reasonably be expected to comprehend.
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