By the 1910s, large segments of urban America had fully embraced modernism. Primarily because of Alfred Stieglitz and his large circle of artist, writer, and critic followers, modernism had been part of the New York art world since the beginning of the twentieth century, and American artistic modernism had assumed its own unique shape.¹

Literary modernism appeared before the First World War, and with the founding of several little magazines in the 1910s, such as Seven Arts, The Dial, and Little Review, it became firmly established.² Yet music, it seemed, lagged behind. “Where are the modernists?” Edgard Varèse lamented when he landed on American shores in December 1915.³ As the story goes, American art music had remained trapped in its own late-nineteenth-century cocoon until 1922.⁴ Then, with the emergence of the “ultramoderns,” as they were known, and the founding of the International Composers' Guild and soon thereafter the League of Composers, the American musical world changed dramatically.⁵

In this article we wish to challenge two fundamental assumptions about American musical modernism, embodied in the first paragraph: that its establishment on American soil lagged behind that of the other arts, and that it was relatively isolated from the other arts. We will argue that 1) a burgeoning modernist musical culture was in place by 1915; 2) it extended far beyond individual efforts of a few isolated composers; 3) it was led by many of the same persons who would play important roles in the 1920s, by Claire Reis and Paul Rosenfeld, for instance, and in particular by Leo Ornstein, who was the fulcrum upon which much of this activity depended; and 4) American musical modernism from the beginning had strong ties to the other arts.

Many scholars agree that American musical modernism began with Charles Ives and Leo Ornstein, both of whom amassed a body of dense, complex, challenging works well before 1920. Beyond that, however, the story becomes more complicated, as the distance between creation and acceptance was great, at least for Ives, and additionally there were other composers active, namely Henry Cowell, Carl Ruggles, and Edgard Varèse. Charles Ives's story is well known, that he balanced his compositional life with an insurance career, and made only occasional, sporadic, and mostly futile attempts to get his music before the public before 1921, when he began an ultimately successful campaign to interest musicians in his work. Like Ives, neither Cowell nor Ruggles made a significant impact on American music before 1922. Cowell became known only after his return from Europe in 1924 and Ruggles struggled to find his compositional voice, which the public did not hear until the first concert of the International Composers' Guild in 1922.

Varèse's failures in the 1910s are central to the current reigning narrative of American modernism. Varèse attempted to stir up interest in musical modernism from the moment he arrived in the United States in December 1915. His most concerted effort to convert the American musical public to modernism occurred in 1919 when he founded the New Symphony Orchestra, with the specific purpose of introducing new music to American audiences. At that time he considered himself primarily a conductor. The endeavor was well funded by a group of patrons led by Gertrude Vanderbilt; the first concert featured music by Debussy, Alfredo Casella, Bartók, and Gabriel Dupont. According to Varèse's biographer Fernand Ouellette, critical reception was so negative that the orchestra refused to continue performing unless Varèse programmed more traditional works. Varèse held fast, and the orchestra disbanded.⁶

Ouellette may have ignored another reason for the orchestra's failure: Varèse was not a very good conductor. James Huneker, critic for the New York Times, went to the concert expecting to be offended by the program, but found some of the pieces even appealing. He was, however, disturbed by the performance. According to Huneker, the orchestra sounded like a “wet hen,” Varèse's baton was “leaden, without fire,” and “the general tone quality was opaque … the total effect lacking in precision, color, nuance, or eloquence.”⁷

Concurrently Varèse also envisioned a “League of Nations of Art.” Whether this was more than an effort designed to capitalize on the intense discussion surrounding the formation of a League of Nations that was omnipresent in newspapers of the time, or whether it was a serious proposal is not known. Other than a visionary letter Varèse wrote to the New York Times, nothing came of it.⁸

In a 1934 interview, Varèse offered his own explanation for what he perceived as the failure of the American musical world to embrace modernism in the 1910s: “In the visual and plastic arts … there was change—witness Cezanne and Picasso—but in the art of the ear there were obstacles of the virtuosos and the conductors, men like Toscanini who used music simply as a means of self-glorification. It was in their power to decide what to play and how to play it—always with an eye to showing themselves off to the best light, regardless of the intention of the music.”⁹

Putting aside whether such contempt for Toscanini is justified, Varèse describes a musical system that was essentially static. Composers were at the mercy of performers and impresarios who believed that the public wanted to hear programs that could just as well have been performed in 1880.¹⁰

One composer, however, was active, successful, and well known in the 1910s: Leo Ornstein. Ornstein had trained for a career as a concert pianist, when suddenly in 1913 he discovered his own modernist compositional idiom. He first performed some of his new works in London in 1914 and created a sensation. Returning to the United States, he gave a series of four recitals in New York in early 1915 (four years before Varèse's efforts), which consisted of all modern music, virtually unknown to American audiences. The latest works of Schoenberg, Scriabin, Ravel, Grainger, and Cyril Scott were first heard by American audiences at these concerts.

Ornstein toured widely for the next six years. He constantly performed before packed halls, of often more than 2,000 people, in many places drawing the “largest audience of the season.”¹¹

At the Hippodrome in New York, a $6,000 house was guaranteed, an extraordinary sum for 1919. One week later at Aeolian Hall in New York, the audience “early mobbed the lobbies, marched at intervals to the stage, and long clung there to walls, to organ pipes, pedal base, stairs, or any niche offering a view.”¹² In 1916, a reviewer in Atlanta commented, “It couldn't have been a concert—in Atlanta—for every seat was filled, and the back of the hall crowded with those who couldn't find seats. They overflowed into the aisles and on the platform.”¹³

By 1918, Ornstein was possibly the most notorious musician in America. In 1916, Waldo Frank prophesized that of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Ornstein, “Ornstein, the youngest of these, gives promise to be the greatest.” That same year Charles Buchanan claimed that “potentially, he [Ornstein] is the most significant figure in today's music.” Two years later the “potentially” was gone: Ornstein was “the most salient musical phenomenon of our time.” The year before, Herbert F. Peyser observed that “the world has indeed moved between the epoch of Beethoven and of Leo Ornstein.” Grenville Vernon claimed that “Schoenberg, Strawinsky and Ornstein are truly the prophets of the New Evangel.” James Huneker found Ornstein the only “true-blue, genuine, futurist” composer alive,” and in London, an anonymous critic for the London Observer, dubbed Ornstein “the sum of Schoenberg and Scriabine squared.”¹⁴

Ornstein succeeded in part because he was his own performer. He did not depend on others to get his music before the public, but only had to satisfy his manager, Martin H. Hanson. Although there was constant tension between the two—Hanson wanted Ornstein to program more traditional works—as long as Ornstein drew the crowds, his manager was perfectly willing to allow him his musical preferences.

In spite of Ornstein's success, historians consider him a momentary and isolated phenomenon who created a stir wherever he went but left no real legacy and had little impact on later modernist developments. Ornstein's role is considered at best prophetic, at worst tangential. Carol Oja, who provides what is still the most detailed and vivid portrait of Leo Ornstein in the scholarly literature as well as the most important study of musical modernism in the 1920s, finds that beyond limited connections with several emerging modernist composers in the late teens, Ornstein had little impact on the musical events of the 1920s. David Joel Metzer considers Ornstein something of a father figure, whose advocacy of modern music helped prepare the way for its later acceptance, but who had little influence beyond that. Other scholars have come to similar conclusions. Broyles draws on the complexity theory concept of fitness landscapes, as used in evolutionary biology, where populations move along a smooth continuum but sometimes leap to different areas, either to succeed or die out. He portrays Ornstein as an isolated phenomenon who leapt to another metaphorical mountain but found himself alone and isolated there.¹⁵

To most scholars, musical modernism did not take root in America until the 1920s, and then primarily because of the public successes of several new societies. The most important were the International Composers' Guild and the League of Composers, which were quickly followed by others. The story of musical modernism in America has revolved around those societies.

The portrayal of Ives and Ornstein as lone voices that the public either did not want to hear (Ives) or that flocked to his efforts (Ornstein) as some sort of circus act, has much resonance in today's musical scholarship.¹⁶

According to this line of reasoning, the American public was not ready for modernism, as the careers of Ives and Ornstein demonstrate. New evidence suggests, however, that the situation of the 1910s was quite different, and at least in regard to Ornstein, this line of reasoning is incorrect.

Efforts toward the establishment of American modernism were more widespread than generally believed, and those attempting to implant modernism were not just autodidactic teenagers, angry immigrants, isolated insurance agents, or quirky pianists—that is, Cowell, Varèse, Ives, and Ornstein. Further the musical world was not isolated from modernistic activity in the other arts. Musical modernism was not a “thing-in-itself,” but was closely tied to events in literature and the visual arts. Ornstein, himself, enjoyed close connections with important figures in art and literature, many of whom would later play critical roles in the more well known events of the 1920s. While Charles Ives remained almost completely unknown, Leo Ornstein, rather than being a lone voice in the wilderness, was the center and focal point of a complex network of advocates for modernism, which embraced the most important modernist circles of the time. The networks around him both advanced his career and prepared those involved for modernism's later success.¹⁷

In an interview, Ornstein recalled, “At one time I was very interested in experimentation, and I got a coterie around me of young people.”¹⁸

It is easy to dismiss the “young people” as hangers-on, wannabes, or “groupies,” as Ornstein's wife, Pauline, characterized them. It turns out that such was not the case. The coterie involved an extended network of supporters and advocates of modernism. Ornstein was not only at their center, but he personally cultivated their involvement. These networks also indicate that American musical modernism was by no means isolated from the broader modernist movement or from activities on the European continent. On the contrary, mainly because of Ornstein's efforts, modernist activity in the music world was from the start closely connected to parallel activities in the visual arts and literature.

Most of those who gathered around Ornstein were not professional musicians: they were either interested in supporting new developments in music because of Ornstein or they were already active in the other arts. In the former category are Claire Reis (née Raphael), A. Walter Kramer, and Paul Rosenfeld, all close to Ornstein, and all, in response to Ornstein's work, planning for new organizations supporting modern music as early as 1914. In the latter circle were John Marin, William Zorach, Waldo Frank, and Rosenfeld again. More than an isolated figure, Ornstein formed a musical bridge to the other arts, later helping to move music out of its cultural isolation.

Ornstein was at the center of at least three groups or circles in the 1910s, the first in Europe and the others in the United States. He had been taken to Europe in 1913 by Bertha Feiring Tapper, his teacher, mentor, and surrogate mother.¹⁹

Ornstein's precise itinerary is not clear—contradictory accounts exist—but early on, Tapper took Ornstein to Vienna to play for her teacher, Theodore Leschetizky. Ornstein performed Danse Sauvage, which clearly was a shock to the pedagogue. According to one report Leschetizky turned purple with rage at the sound of Ornstein's playing,²⁰ but according to Ornstein, Leschetizky simply observed (probably through clenched teeth): “[I]t must be difficult to write down all those notes.”²¹ No amount of Leschetizky's diplomacy, however, could conceal the musical gap that now separated the young, brash futurist from the Old World Viennese teacher. Ornstein had announced himself.²²

After Vienna he traveled to Norway, homeland of Mrs. Tapper, and made his debut in Christiania as a concert pianist with a group of Chopin pieces and the Liszt E-flat major concerto. For the first time, he also played some of his own newer compositions, likely the Two Impressions of Notre Dame and perhaps even Danse Sauvage. The confusion and incredulity of the Christiana critics foreshadowed the reactions he would face once back in America: “[I]t was amazing that Mr. Ornstein should have decided to play a little joke on the public and transfer it from the concert hall to the dental parlor.” They concluded that he was “a young man temporarily insane.”²³

Having brought her prize student to her home country, Mrs. Tapper headed back to the United States. Ornstein was then on his own.

During the trip, Ornstein went to Berlin and met Busoni, and visited Denmark briefly. He then went to Paris, where he met Harold Bauer, the internationally famous piano virtuoso. Although Bauer expressed confusion about Ornstein's original compositions, he acknowledged the younger pianist “as a composer with a new and important message to deliver, one which deserved hearing.” Frederick Martens, who wrote the first biography of Ornstein in 1918, characterized this encounter as marking “an epoch in Ornstein's career.”²⁴

Whether it was Bauer in particular, or Paris more generally, Ornstein's horizons suddenly broadened while he was there.

Bauer, whose path would cross with Ornstein's over the years, was indeed a seminal force in getting the visitor known in Europe; he introduced Ornstein to Walter Morse Rummel, who provided the young pianist-composer with an entrée into Parisian musical society. Rummel (1887–1953) was also a pianist-composer, and a close friend and champion of Claude Debussy, premiering many of Debussy's piano works. Upon returning to the United States, Ornstein became one of Debussy's most ardent proponents and programmed his works on dozens of concerts.²⁵

In addition, Rummel was a friend of the American dancer Isadora Duncan (1878–1927), who had established a thriving dance school just six miles outside of Paris. It is possible that Rummel (re)introduced Ornstein and Duncan, who three years earlier had given concerts within a couple of days of each other in New York.²⁶

Legend surrounding this earlier encounter tells of Ornstein bringing the infamous dancer home to meet his family. Given Duncan's penchant for younger men—she would have been thirty-three years old and he merely seventeen—it comes as no surprise to learn that she purportedly informed the family she intended to marry Leo. Whether the two enjoyed any kind of intimate relationship is not known. Obviously, nothing came of her announcement, which was probably said in jest.²⁷

Rummel provided Ornstein with a letter of introduction to the poet, music critic, translator, and Ravel confidant Michel Dimitri Calvocoressi (1877–1944). Calvocoressi was a member of Les Apaches, a group of avant-garde artists, poets, and musicians in Paris who regularly met to discuss all matters pertaining to the arts.²⁸

Martens included Ornstein's first-person account of his time in Paris. It is among Ornstein's very few personal statements from this period, and so is worth reproducing in its entirety:

Calvocoressi's introductions went beyond his musician acquaintances. As Ornstein recalls, he was introduced to an even larger circle of society, one that sounds similar to the milieu he inhabited while a student at the Petrograd Conservatory. Years earlier, the diminutive youth had become the darling of the Petrograd aristocracy, while at the same time earning his way coaching operatic singers. Ornstein continues: Ornstein's success at gaining entrée into the most important modernist circles in Paris was only a prelude to his triumphs in England. In Paris, Ornstein first met a group of British composers from Oxford who invited him back to England with them. Ultimately this led to his introduction to Roger Quilter, whom Ornstein described as “a quite wonderful personality.”³⁵ Quilter's support opened doors for Ornstein in England, both to other musicians, and to Ornstein's first public concerts of all modern music, in London.

In the late 1890s, Quilter, like many English-speaking music students, attended the Frankfurt Conservatory where he pursued piano and composition. There he fell in with four other students who together became known as the Frankfurt Five or Frankfurt Group: Roger Quilter, Balfour Gardiner, Percy Grainger, Norman O'Neill, and Cyril Scott.³⁶

During the peak years of Ornstein's virtuoso touring career, 1915–21, he regularly programmed works by Cyril Scott, and occasionally pieces by Grainger. The influence of the Frankfurt Five would resonate for years to come not only in Ornstein's piano repertoire but also in his compositional style.

The Frankfurt Group shared little by way of a solid aesthetic agenda other than to maintain their individuality. As Valerie Langfield explains: “What common factor there was—and Grainger was vocal in talking and writing about this—was harmonic: he wrote of the importance to them of ‘the chord’ and their compositions tended to be ‘vertical’ rather than ‘horizontal’, and so the more telling on the rare occasions when contrapuntal techniques were used.”³⁷

Stephen Lloyd, in an article titled “Grainger and the ‘Frankfurt Group’,” offers a somewhat longer discussion of the group's aesthetic bond; it is not necessarily more helpful: “As Sir Thomas Armstrong has shown, the ‘chord’ (which he defines as a version of a chromatic chord on the major sixth of the scale with its ninth and appoggiaturas) was neither invented by the Group nor did it become their exclusive property—one only has to look, for example, to the music of Delius. Yet their thinking was often essentially chordal, especially Scott's who, as his harmonic language crystallized, made increasing use of the 1–4–7 chord (which is in fact the ‘upper half’ of Scriabin's Prometheus chord), notably to much effect in his Third Piano Sonata of 1956.”³⁸

Much the same can be said of Ornstein's most dissonant, futurist music, which is noteworthy for its coloristic chords built on fourths, or dense, highly chromatic chords that span a seventh, and for its avoidance of extended counterpoint. When counterpoint is hinted at—usually some kind of distant, short-lived echo-like passage—it assumes special significance. Ornstein's tendencies towards verticality and away from polyphony, his preference for irregular barring, his avoidance of key signatures, and focus on rhythmic energy would all have been reinforced rather than challenged by his association with the Frankfurt Five.³⁹

Quilter performed a role for Ornstein in London similar to that of Calvocoressi in Paris, introducing him to a wide circle of interesting people in positions to help.⁴⁰

Martens lists as among them: “Robin Legge, of the Daily Telegraph … the great [painter, John Singer] Sargeant, Arthur Shattuck, and Mr. Winthrop L. Rogers, the publisher, a fine violinist and a music-lover keenly interested in all new developments.”⁴¹ But it was Quilter who took the most active role, and whose friendship had the greatest impact on Ornstein's work. While enjoying an evening at Quilter's home (with Roger and his mother)—which included dinner and music, the opportunity to play “on a fine Bechstein,” and “a discussion with a young painter”— Ornstein became acquainted with the writings and art of William Blake (1757–1827).⁴² Blake made a powerful impression on Ornstein, as Martens reports: “What he heard excited his interest in the highest degree; he read everything there was to be had of Blake's, and pored over his designs, notably those for Robert Blair's The Grave and [Blake's own] The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, as well as the splendid series illustrating The Book of Job.⁴³ His instant sympathy with the artist-poet's ability to seize ‘the pictorial element of ideas, simple or sublime, and translate them into the appropriate language of sense,’ has been reflected in the tremendous sonata for violin and piano, op. 31, which, together with three songs, as yet unpublished, were its first fruits.”⁴⁴ Opus 31 was Ornstein's most adventurous, dissonant, and atonal work.

Through the influence of Quilter, Ornstein had the opportunity to give two recitals of modern music at Steinway Hall in London in March and April of 1914.⁴⁵

The first concert occurred on 27 March. Taking Quilter's advice to perform at least one traditional piece he played “Three Choral Preludes” by Bach-Busoni, and then two numbers from Schoenberg's Three Piano Pieces, op. 11, Six Little Piano Pieces, op. 19, and his own Impressions of Notre Dame, Three Moods, the Violin Sonata, the String Quartet, op. 28, Impressions de la Tamise, and what would become his signature piece, Danse Sauvage.

Critics were alternately amused, offended, and confused. Richard Capell, of the Daily Mail, wrote of the “Wild Outbreak at Steinway Hall,” and described “a pale and frenzied youth, dressed in velvet, crouched over the instrument in an attitude all his own, and for all the apparent frailty of his form, dealt it the most ferocious punishment.” The Times reviewer referred to the “violent—one might almost say brutal—assaults as Mr. Ornstein made on the piano,” but did concede that Danse Sauvage was “something, moreover that brought vividly to the mind a picture of primordial beings in all the savage abandonment of the wildest of corybantic revels.”⁴⁶

The second recital, on 7 April, consisted of only Ornstein's music. Both the critics and the crowd were ready for him. According to Capell, “The gallery hissed, booed, groaned, and guffawed with derision, and someone felt impelled to supply the missing melodic element in M. Ornstein's music with more tuneful whistling. In fact no London concert-giver in recent years has had such harsh treatment.”⁴⁷

The Daily Telegraph reported “one young hooligan … that went the length of throwing, or trying to throw, something on to the platform while Mr. Ornstein was at the piano.” Two years later Ornstein offered his own description of the concert: “I couldn't hear the piano myself. The crowd whistled and howled and even threw handy missiles on the stage.” Ornstein then concluded with a smile, “But that concert made me famous.”⁴⁸

Soon after his second London recital, Ornstein sailed back to the United States. During the summer of 1914, Ornstein corresponded with those who had made his stay there so enjoyable; the letters reveal deepening friendships and a desire to return to Europe. A note from Ornstein to Quilter sent in May of that year reflects a more informal relationship than had existed between them in February. Ornstein addresses “Dear Roger” from Blue Hill, Maine, where he is “very hard at work on my Quartette,” signs “With love, Yours, Leo” and asks Quilter to “Please give my kindest/regards to your mother.”⁴⁹

Another letter from Blue Hill, dated just eleven days later, tells something of Ornstein's summer work habits, his musical preferences, and his plans for a return trip to Europe in the fall. It is no wonder he wished to return. He had been asked to compose an original symphonic work by the conductor Sir Henry J. Wood in London; he had endeared himself to some of the most powerful musicians both there and in Paris, and he had gained entrée to important circles of patronage. A forty-concert trip to Norway was set for the fall of 1914, probably through the efforts of Bertha Feiring Tapper, and further concerts in England, France, and elsewhere were either planned or being discussed.

The outbreak of World War I in July of 1914, however, dashed any hope of going back to Europe. We can only speculate what tack Ornstein's career would have taken had he returned, fresh after his attention-grabbing London and Paris debuts, for an extended concert tour, and perhaps to reside. In Les Apaches and the Frankfurt Group, Ornstein had found a large number of friends who were equally committed to the modernist idiom. He had also established a circle of supporters among patronesses and the society set who had taken him in, and he could anticipate more opportunities to build upon his newly won fame.

The eruption of war and the resulting cancellation of his plans meant that Ornstein was left in the United States with no immediate likelihood of getting back to Europe, and no recital or concert engagements for the upcoming season. It quickly became clear that to have any prospects at all, Ornstein would have to give up the idea of a European career and devote his energies to building one elsewhere, primarily in the United States.

In very real ways, the war also cost Ornstein proximity to his first circle of friends, which he had only just found. Although a few letters written by his English acquaintances suggest attempts on their part to maintain contact with Ornstein, after the spring of 1915 he assessed the situation, cut his losses, and focused his energies on what was more likely to produce results. His career became exclusively American; he never again went to Europe as a performing artist. With no ready-made group to embrace him on this side of the Atlantic, Ornstein had to create one of his own. He did, and it included Claire Reis, Paul Rosenfeld, A. Walter Kramer, and Waldo Frank. The situation became even more urgent when in September 1915 Bertha Feiring Tapper unexpectedly died. Her efforts to get her favorite pupil before the public eye, however, were not forgotten.

Prior to Tapper's death, Claire Reis, a former student in Mrs. Tapper's studio at the Institute of Musical Arts, had already begun her own campaign to champion her classmate Leo Ornstein: first because, like her teacher, she believed in his music and his pianistic talents, and second because she saw him as a potential lightning rod for the modernist cause to which she was committed and with which she would later become identified.⁵⁰

Years later she acknowledged that Ornstein's “dynamic personality and fiery enthusiasm as an artist made him very attractive.”⁵¹ He was a good front man.

In the fall of 1914, Reis invited her close friend Waldo Frank (1889–1967) and a new acquaintance, Paul Rosenfeld (1890–1946), to accompany her to an informal recital given by Ornstein at Tapper's home at 362 Riverside Drive.⁵²

Reis on piano, Frank on cello and A. Walter Kramer on violin had formed their own informal chamber ensemble; they played sonatas and trios together one evening a week. In Reis's words, “[W]e made up an avant-garde, exploring a new world in the universe of music.” Rosenfeld was “the only ‘outsider’ allowed to listen to our trio-evenings.”⁵³ But Rosenfeld's outsider status would not remain for long. Upon attending the Ornstein recital, Frank and Rosenfeld, who knew each other from their Yale days, became instant believers in him. Frank in particular paints a vivid and somewhat metaphorical portrayal of that encounter: Rosenfeld and Reis had both recently returned from Europe determined “to awaken … the slumbering consciousness of the American people” in modern music.⁵⁵ Rosenfeld soon began to imagine multiple possibilities for the futurist virtuoso. He spent the next summer at Blue Hill, Maine, where Ornstein also stayed. In August 1915 Rosenfeld wrote to Raphael that he and Leo were strategizing ways Ornstein could be promoted and employed to further the cause of modern music.⁵⁶ He also had the idea for a new music society: The club itself did not materialize, but for the next few years, Reis, Kramer, Frank, Rosenfeld, and Ornstein formed the nucleus of a modernist booster club, with Ornstein the focal point. The degree to which their efforts put Ornstein and musical modernism in the spotlight cannot be overestimated. He was an active participant in the larger modernist artistic initiative. From early on A. Walter Kramer, doing his best to stir up interest in Ornstein and in new music, wrote lengthy, musically insightful articles that were placed in periodicals with large readerships.⁵⁹ The first of these extended pieces appeared in the 12 December 1914 issue of Musical America. In “Has Leo Ornstein Discovered a New Musical Style?” Kramer presented what would quickly become the essentials of the Ornstein legend: Ornstein's physical appearance—“his ascetic appearance, the face of a dreamer”—the story of the Ornstein epiphany, the Paris and London debuts, and Ornstein's compositional process and aesthetic goals.

In reference to the latter, Kramer explains, “Let us understand that Mr. Ornstein's purpose is not to discover harmonies that are new, or that are altered in the manner of the modern Frenchmen. The opening group of notes in his “First Impression of Notre-Dame” … does not claim to be an altered 13th or anything of the kind.” A few bars of the introductory measure of this work and of his third prelude from “Three Preludes,” op. 20 adorn the top of the article for readers to consult.⁶⁰

He continues: “His music is color—for that is the basis on which he builds.” Finally Kramer concludes his paean with a lofty prediction about Ornstein's place in music history: “Leo Ornstein may be ahead of his time. I am inclined to think that he is ushering in a new epoch; that he is employing his genius toward the attainment of a new musical expression, an expression, which perhaps not permanent in itself, must play an important role in the development of the music of years to come. And I am certain that he is a prophet of this development, that he will lead us to the music of the future.”⁶¹

Whether Kramer had a hand in the actual arrangements for the upcoming so-called Bandbox Concerts,⁶²

January to March 1915, which would put Ornstein on the modernist musical map, or whether he was recruited to provide important and necessary publicity in response to a request from Bertha Feiring Tapper will probably never be known. The size of the article, occupying a full page and spilling over to another, with a photograph of Ornstein as well as examples of his scores and references to forthcoming recitals, suggest a carefully orchestrated effort by an experienced hand. Whether Reis, Frank, and Rosenfeld had roles in what immediately transpired is unknown, but also not unlikely. Reis was committed to Tapper, and Tapper was committed to Ornstein. Frank and Rosenfeld were committed to seeing modernism prosper.

Beyond his cooperative efforts with Kramer and Reis, a letter of 7 December 1914 shows Ornstein agreeing to meet with Waldo Frank, at that time an aspiring, unpublished author.⁶³

Frank apparently took advantage of the audience with Leo to gather material for an article of his own. His first published story was a 1,500-word piece titled “Leo Ornstein” that appeared in April 1915 in The Onlooker.⁶⁴ On 25 February 1915, just three days before the third of the Bandbox Concerts, Ornstein requested the article Frank had finished in December: “A magazine in Pittsburgh wants an article on me. Can you send over the one you have written? I may be able to place it there.”⁶⁵ Whether The Onlooker was the periodical Ornstein had in mind is unknown. But what is clear, is that far from sitting back and watching others work on his behalf, as Ornstein's wife later described Leo's promotional activities,⁶⁶ Ornstein was in the middle of the effort.

In 1926, Frank published a detailed portrait of Ornstein in an unusual book with the unwieldy title Time exposures, by Search-light: being portraits of twenty men and women famous in our day, together with caricatures of the same by divers artists, to which is appended an account of a joint report made to Jehovah on the condition of man in the city of New York (1926), by Julius Caesar, Aristotle and a third individual of less importance.⁶⁷

The book contained chapters on figures in literature, the visual arts, and music, including Otto H. Kahn, William Lyon Phelps, Georgia O'Keeffe, Ignace Paderewski, Max Steuer, Carl Sandburg, Helen Westley, Thomas Beer, Ernest Bloch, Charles Chaplin, John Dewey, Sinclair Lewis, Leo Ornstein, Theodore Dreiser, Katherine Cornell, and Alfred Stieglitz.

By 1926, Ornstein had significantly reduced his concertizing schedule and was teaching in Philadelphia. Frank's chapter in the book was an attempt to explain why he did that. It is a hagiographic account, pitting Ornstein as “Music” against the concert world of managers, critics, and press, labeled the “Machine,” in which the Machine ground down Music. Frank's first encounter with Ornstein, taken from this book, has already been quoted. The rest of Frank's chapter has the same allegorical tone. Frank makes Ornstein a martyr to his art: “And the rite began in which was sacrificed the circus-performer, the Pullman-jumper, the darling of thrilled ladies—in which was produced the scarce known Ornstein of to-day.” Given Ornstein's continuing presence in the New York and Philadelphia music scenes throughout the 1920s and '30s, Frank's remarks are dramatically overstated. Ornstein certainly pulled back from the near maniacal schedule he had kept between 1916 and 1920, but he did not disappear from the scene altogether. He continued to perform, and his name was still known and used to endorse many musical projects. As with much of Frank's writing, the author appears to get caught up in his own emotional creations without letting facts check his prose.⁶⁸

Ornstein collaborated in two artistic projects with Frank. The first was the Poems of 1917, published in 1918. With a prose poem “Prelude” by Frank and ten programmatically titled solo piano pieces by Ornstein, the two men crafted a joint artistic response to the world war. Ornstein's piano poems appeared as musical analogues of the works of the soldier-poets Wilfrid Owen, Ivor Guerney, Issac Rosenberg, and Siegfried Sassoon, whose heartrending verses brought the inhumanity of war home on both sides of the Atlantic. Later, in 1927, they collaborated again on a set of five songs, Ornstein's Five Songs, op. 17. While these songs had nowhere near the impact of the Poems of 1917, Leopold Stokowski was sufficiently interested in them to request an orchestral version, which Ornstein provided. To our knowledge this version was never performed.

Starting in 1916, Paul Rosenfeld began a thirty-year career of arts criticism that resulted in 196 articles and four books devoted exclusively to music, as well as others that touched upon the subject. Four of his articles focused on Ornstein, three of the books had lengthy passages on the composer, and another was dedicated to him.⁶⁹

Advancing Ornstein's and musical modernism's causes were one and the same. What Rosenfeld and Ornstein had imagined as a series of six concerts at Steinway Hall taking place in the early months of 1916, became four intimate Sunday recitals at Arthur and Claire Reis's home, two in March and two in April that fitted around Ornstein's increasingly busy schedule.⁷⁰

For a time, Paul Rosenfeld, Waldo Frank, and Ornstein were all close. Over the years they developed a complex triangle of relationships colored in part by the petty jealousies that attend many group friendships, and Rosenfeld's tendency to ignore personal feelings or notions of loyalty when it came to his published criticisms. After Ornstein moved away from radical modernism in his compositions, Rosenfeld moved on to champion other composers, but Waldo Frank remained Ornstein's closest friend for at least the next forty years. The exact relationship between Frank and Ornstein, Rosenfeld and Ornstein, and Frank and Rosenfeld is not clear. Although letters from Ornstein and some tantalizing albeit ambiguous comments in Frank's diaries regarding Rosenfeld suggest a degree of intimacy, there is no doubt that for a period of time Frank, Rosenfeld, and Ornstein formed a tight triangle.

When Ornstein was at the peak of his fame, numerous others wrote articles, reviews, and chapters on the pianist/composer, including some of the most famous names in modernist literary and artistic circles: Lawrence Gilman, Carl Van Vechten, Charles L. Buchanan, Winthrop Parkhurst, William J. Henderson, Gdal Saleski, and Margaret C. Anderson. Ornstein became both a cause célèbre and whipping boy. While Reis, Rosenfeld, Frank, and Kramer formed one circle pushing modernism, they were part of a much larger and more established circle. Photographer Alfred Stieglitz's “Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue,” known as “the 291,” had been a meeting place and focal point for artistic activity and discussion since 1905. The Stieglitz Group, as they became known, included photographer and cofounder Edward Steichen and a roster of artists and writers whose names would soon become synonymous with American modernism: Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Alfred Maurer, Georgia O'Keeffe, Abraham Walkowitz, and Max Weber, to name a few. Participants of a more literary bent included Hart Crane, Edmund Wilson, and Ornstein's close friends Waldo Frank and Paul Rosenfeld.

As Ornstein's inner circle became wider and better placed, opportunities were presented to collaborate with still more and different people across the arts. It is likely that through his friendship with Waldo Frank, Ornstein was mentioned to the up-and-coming writer and critic Edmund Wilson who needed a composer-collaborator on a new project he was imagining, and who would become yet another important associate of Ornstein's.

In 1923, Wilson and Ornstein collaborated on a major theatrical project, “Cronkhite's Clocks,” for the Ballets Suédois, a dance group formed in Paris in 1920 as an alternative to the by then famous and entrenched Ballets Russes. Its multidisciplinary approach, which often relegated dance to a status secondary to drama, painting, film, or acrobatics caused the company to be viewed by many as even more adventurous than the Russian troupe. As Nancy Van Norman Baer has observed, “The Ballets Suédois would come to be identified as much with the dynamic interpretation of visual arts as it was with dance…. it willingly ceded control of production aspects to the visual arts it employed.”⁷¹

The new art form it proffered caused no small trouble for newspaper editors who were unsure which critic to have review a performance.⁷²

The Ballets Suédois made its American debut in New York in November 1923. Edmund Wilson was hired as the American press agent for the company, and after seeing the success of it debut work, the satirical “Within the Quota,” which surprisingly had music by Cole Porter, Wilson was inspired to create his own Ballets Suédois story-scene; by December 1923 he had started writing “Cronkhite's Clocks.” Like many of his contemporaries, Wilson was a fan of Charlie Chaplin. As early as 1919, Waldo Frank had spoken enthusiastically of Chaplin as the nation's “most significant and most authentic dramatic figure.” Frank explained why he felt so strongly: “Within the cultural limitations imposed upon him by his public, he is a perfect artist. Inimitably graceful, mobile of body and feature, capable of a kaleidoscopic scale of feeling from tears to laughter, from ‘rough-house’ to the most delicate mimic dance, where is his equal in our dramatic world?”⁷³

Wilson determined that Chaplin was the perfect conduit for his dramatic ballet-pantomime and within a month of the company's arrival in the country persuaded Rolf de Maré to finance a trip to California so that Wilson could entreat Chaplin to participate in his project. He spent the month of February on the West Coast.

In January 1924, Wilson wrote to his friend John Peale Bishop, a former Princeton classmate, describing his dramatic project as “a great super-ballet of New York.” He enthusiastically explained that “it would include a section of movie film in the middle, for which Ornstein is composing the music and in which we hope to get Chaplin to act. It is positively the most titanic thing of the kind ever projected and will make the productions of Milhaud and Cocteau sound like folk-song recitals.” Wilson described the dramatis personae and sounds: “It is written for Chaplin, a Negro comedian, and seventeen other characters, full orchestra, movie machine, typewriters, radio, phonograph, riveter; electromagnet, alarm clocks, telephone bells and jazz band.”⁷⁴

If, in fact, the list of office equipment, appliances, and tools describe parts of Ornstein's score, it would be the single instance of his using such resources in a musical composition. Although Ornstein was often described as a “futurist” he never employed nontraditional instruments or used extended techniques in any of his works.

Chaplin did not consent to the Wilson-Ornstein project, preferring instead to appear only “in shows that he himself created.”⁷⁵

In addition, performances of the Ballets Suédois that had originally been scheduled for the West Coast in spring 1924 never took place. Plans to have the company spend six months of each year in the United States and six months in Paris were canceled. By the end of 1924, the Ballets Suédois was in serious financial straits and in March of 1925 they disbanded. Additional opportunities that had opened up for Ornstein meant he could not devote his full energies to the project, although Wilson attempted to keep it alive through 1925.

Reis, Frank, and Rosenfeld represented the nexus between the Bertha Feiring Tapper circle and the Stieglitz Group. With feet in both camps and Ornstein an enthusiastic participant, they were perfectly poised to bring music into the modernist mainstream. When Ornstein married Pauline Mallet-Prevost on 13 December 1918, Rosenfeld, as a gift for the occasion, presented Ornstein with a painting by John Marin, an important Stieglitz acolyte, and a close friend of Rosenfeld's. The extent of Ornstein's relationship with Marin or the precise circumstances of their first meeting is undocumented, although members of both Ornstein's and Marin's surviving families agree the two men knew each other. In both temperament and experience they would have had much in common. The Ornstein family also remembers that Ornstein was relatively close to Georgia O'Keeffe, who married Stieglitz, although we have found no corroborating evidence for that assertion.

It was likely Marin who introduced Ornstein to the artists William Zorach (1887–1966) and Marguerite Zorach (1887–1968). Marin had exhibited at a number of shows with the Zorachs. They were successful and well known in New York modern art circles and friends with not just Marin, but also Abraham Walkowitz and Max Weber of the Stieglitz Group.

Just before William Zorach turned from painting to devote himself almost exclusively to sculpture he created one of the most striking portraits of Ornstein that exists, Leo Ornstein, Piano Concert, 1918.

The futurist painting vibrates with the energy and excitement regularly ascribed to Ornstein's concerts. One can feel the momentum of Ornstein's hammering hands. Zorach was taken with the raw power of the young pianist, and according to one account later regularly bemoaned the disappearance from the arts scene of one so promising. According to John Marin's daughter-in-law Norma Marin, who knew the Zorach family well, “Bill Zorach told of Leo Ornstein all the time. How very gifted he was, how he led an unfortunate life. So much talent and then he disappeared.”⁷⁶

Precisely which aspect of Ornstein's life Zorach considered unfortunate is unclear beyond his disappearance from the public scene. Certainly Ornstein's material needs were well taken care of throughout his life. Zorach would likely have empathized with at least part of Ornstein's story: both were Russian Jews who had arrived in the country as poor immigrants, both were devoted readers of poetry, and both achieved fame in their fields, although Zorach's was slower coming and longer lasting.⁷⁷

Zorach's portrait might be the most famous of Ornstein, but he was the subject of many other renderings. Had no written artifacts detailing Ornstein's importance to America's early modernist culture survived, the number of paintings, drawings, and sculptures that were made would prove his centrality to the movement. His youth, his notoriety, and his aesthetic mien made him an ideal object for artists attracted to his music. Leon Kroll, at one time the president of the Society of Painters, Sculptors and Graveurs, chairman of the art committee of the Academy of Arts and Letters, winner of numerous awards at major art shows, and cousin of William Kroll, violinist of the Kroll Quartet, painted his own portrait of Ornstein in 1917, The Musician—Leo Ornstein.⁷⁸

The painting projects a different Ornstein. As Leon Kroll explained in his memoirs, his father had played both the cello and bass viol: “I was brought up knowing something about music.” Kroll's comfort around musicians informs the work. The dramatically simple portrait in shades of blue and brown captured the twenty-four-year-old from the perspective of the painter, seated close by, viewing him through the raised lid of the grand piano as he played. The lack of distracting detail conveys an architectural clarity and modernity to the work. Ornstein's open-collared shirt and loose-fitting jacket suggest an intimate, private moment. His eyes are closed, his head is tilted just slightly downward; his graceful left hand is raised and hovers over the keyboard as if he is divining the sounds. Kroll caught the artist in a moment of mystic communion with his music.⁷⁹

While these artists did not specifically promote Ornstein in a way that the Reis–Rosenfeld–Frank circle did, it is clear that they were taken with him as an artist and as one they considered important to emerging modernism. The existence of the paintings testify not only to their interest in Ornstein but in music as part of the modernist movement.

Yet if Ornstein's relationships with Marin, Kroll, and the Zorachs were occasional, his associations with Rosenfeld and Frank were central. Ornstein's personal interactions with Rosenfeld reached their peak prior to his marriage in 1918, with the two men summering in Maine in 1915 and 1916. A letter Rosenfeld wrote to Reis in July 1915 expressed the many reasons Rosenfeld was drawn to Ornstein. After reporting on “how very sick and feeble Mrs. Tapper had been feeling all summer,” Rosenfeld launched into what became a homily on the conjoined relationship of art and life, and Ornstein's embodiment of their unity: “I needn't protest to you that I love art, I consider it one of Life's greatest privileges to serve her. But—how does art that [is] warm-hearted, impure, behave? How does the art that comes from fear and cowardice and self-intoxication react to life? Quite in the manner of Tristan and Isolde in offering a substitute for some of the grand emotions…. And I contend that it is important to give their emotion back to life and to draw them away. For we want fuel to heighten that imagery that seeks to transform matter into spirit, and that fuel can only be given the world by artists of grand and lofty impulse, free and brave and glorious. Don't you agree.” Rosenfeld's aspirations for a transcendent art are already evident, as is his tendency toward emotional prose.

At this point in the letter, Rosenfeld refers back to earlier conversations with Waldo Frank when the two men had discussed similar ideas: “And that is why I feel that life and art go hand in hand. For both aspire alike…. Waldo explains [that] my attitude is a realization that I will never be a first-rate artist and his own is a realization that we have to give up life in order to be a first-rate artist. And there it stands. The question that only time can decide.”⁸⁰

As the letter draws to a close, Rosenfeld imagines his hopes for the fully integrated art-life realized in Leo Ornstein: “I think Leo is on the same track. For he's thrown ‘art’ over, and gives back to life, and to nature, and the song of the winds and the birds and the beating of his own heart, as the only truth. Energy, energy, is his continual cry. And so his hatred of concerts and so much art, and his own desire to awake the spirit of individual expression, and to seeing the world through his own eyes. I think for Leo the creation of beauty is far less important than the sensing of that beauty, and that his art aspires not to the making of fine music but to the making of fine people. Only in that sense does ‘all service rank the same with God’ if I have love at heart. And that love casts itself in the artist, too.”⁸¹

Rosenfeld does not question whether Ornstein had any such lofty aspirations for himself or his music. He pins his hopes on Ornstein as a musical artist capable of real transcendence, and in the process he transports himself with his own prose. Catching himself, Rosenfeld apologizes to Reis: “Pray forgive me if I've preached, I've been priggish. I know you'll understand.”⁸²

By investing Ornstein with near-spiritual powers, Rosenfeld placed the young composer-pianist on a pedestal, elevating him beyond the reality of his accomplishments.

In the nine-year period beginning in 1913 and lasting to 1922, when the International Composers' Guild was launched, three circles of musicians, writers, artists, and promoters actively influenced American musical culture. The first, the Frankfurt Group in England, had only an indirect influence on Ornstein, though an important one. They provided the forum for Ornstein's first modernist public outings, reinforced Ornstein's own compositional preferences, and bolstered his belief in the cause he would champion in the United States. The second, the Tapper–Reis–Rosenfeld–Frank circle, included individuals whose activities in the 1920s would be essential in disseminating modernism on American shores. That circle revolved around Ornstein, whom they used (and who used them) to advance personal and artistic agendas.

Third is the much broader Stieglitz Group, which for at least a time was the locus of modernism in the United States. Many of the people around Ornstein had specific links to this circle, and Ornstein soon developed his own ties to its members. Later, as the small literary magazines became a force in their own right, they formed their own circle. But during the late teens, their writers were as much at home in the Stieglitz Group as were artists.

Thus as early as 1915 writers, artists, and other musicians formed a coterie to advance a modernist agenda, with Ornstein as one of the central orbs around which people in many different spheres circled. Ornstein sought and maintained contacts, and actively promoted himself and musical modernism. Contrary to received wisdom, musical modernism did not stand apart from the broader modernist movement sweeping America in the 1910s. In large part, through Ornstein modernism acquired its public sound and its public face, and in what may be Ornstein's greatest contribution, modernists began to pay attention to music. Artists embraced music, and modernist writers began to write about music in their journals and books, such that when the movement finally flourished in the 1920s, music already had an accepted place in the literary journals of the time.

Prior to 1922, musical modernism was alive and well; it did not take Varèse and later Copland to imprint it upon the American artistic world. They opened shops, which prospered, but a clientele was already in place. Ornstein was a focal point around which an active modernist movement began to unfold in the United States well before the 1920s. To return to the image of the fitness landscape, Ornstein did more than leap by himself to a new mountain; he brought much of the intellectual and artistic world of the 1910s with him.