CHAPTER 12 | MUSICAL MODERNISM 281
LEO ORNSTEIN
Although Ives had been experimenting with modernist devices even before
1900, he did his composing outside of a professional musical life, and his work
was acknowledged only much later. Instead of Ives, a composer recognized more
widely at the time as an American modernist was Leo Ornstein. Born in the
Ukraine in 1893, Ornstein emigrated in 1907 to the United States, where he stud-
ied music at the Institute of Musical Art, the New York conservatory that later
became known as the Juilliard School.
Beginning at age nineteen, Ornstein produced a series of radically modern-
ist works, mostly solo piano pieces that he performed himself. Characteristic
features of his music include atonality, or the avoidance of any clear key center;
tone clusters, created by pressing adjacent piano keys, sometimes with all fi ve
fi ngers of the hand; highly dissonant harmonies; and, instead of traditional clas-
sical structures, forms that tended to meander. Like the earlier romantic and
impressionist composers, however, Ornstein favored descriptive, poetic titles,
which help shape the listener’s response to what otherwise might be bewildering
sonorities. In his Three Moods (1914), for example, the individual movement titles—
“Anger,” “Grief,” and “Joy”—are an aid in interpreting the unconventional music.
Ornstein composed his most radically modernist pieces before 1920. After-
ward, he retreated to a more conservative style and directed most of his energies
to teaching at his Ornstein School of Music in Philadelphia (where one student in
the 1940s was the visionary jazz saxophonist John Coltrane, discussed in chapter 18).
Ornstein thus played only a small part in the organized modernist movement
that emerged after 1920. His slow fade into obscurity was reversed in the 1970s
when the music historian Vivian Perlis brought his music to the public’s atten-
tion, and a spurt of creative energy led to several new compositions late in Orn-
stein’s remarkably long life. He died in 2002 at the age of 108.THE ULTRAMODERNISTS: VARÈSE, RUDHYAR, RUGGLES
Among the leaders in modern music in the 1920s were composers from Europe
who moved to the United States—chiefl y to New York City—and promoted the
cause of new music on these shores. Aggressively nontraditionalist, they and
like-minded native-born American musicians came to be known as the ultra-
modernists. The most prominent was Edgard Varèse, who arrived in New York
from Paris in 1915. Varèse, fellow French émigré Carlos Salzedo, and some oth-
ers with ultramodern leanings founded the International Composers’ Guild in
1921 to serve “composers who represent the true spirit of our times,” as Varèse
announced in a manifesto. He criticized performers for often being more inter-
ested in judging new music than understanding it. “Not fi nding in it any trace of
the conventions to which [they are] accustomed,” he wrote, they denounce new
music as “incoherent and unintelligible.”
If fi nding sympathetic performers was diffi cult, fi nding receptive listeners
was even more so. The premiere in New York of Hyperprism in 1923 sparked an
uproar in the audience, which heard nothing comprehensible in the onslaughtatonalitytone clustersEdgard VarèseHyperprism172028_12_280-304_r3_ko.indd 281 23/01/13 8:40 PM