Leo Ornstein | |
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 Leo Ornstein as a young man, c. 1918 | |
| Born | December 11, 1895 |
| Died | February 24, 2002 (aged 106) Green Bay, Wisconsin, United States |
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Leo Ornstein (born Лев Орнштейн, Lev Ornshteyn; c. December 11, 1895[n 1] – February 24, 2002) was an American experimental composer and pianist of the early twentieth century. His performances of works by avant-garde composers and his own innovative and even shocking pieces made him a cause célèbre on both sides of the Atlantic. The bulk of his experimental works were written for piano.[1]
Ornstein was the first important composer to make extensive use of the tone cluster. As a pianist, he was considered a world-class talent.[2] By the mid-1920s, he had walked away from his fame and soon disappeared from popular memory. Though he gave his last public concert before the age of forty, he continued writing music for another half-century and beyond. Largely forgotten for decades, he was rediscovered in the mid-1970s. Ornstein completed his eighth and final piano sonata in September 1990 at the age of ninety-four, making him the oldest published composer in history at the time (a mark since passed by Elliott Carter).
Cite error: There are <ref group=n> tags on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist|group=n}} template (see the help page).
- ^ Broyles 2001.
- ^ In addition to the citations below, see also, e.g., Broyles and Von Glahn (2007), p. 9 ("a pianist of extraordinary skill"); Rumson (2002), p. 352 ("enormous pianistic skills"); Perlis (1983), p. 104 ("recognized as a world famous concert pianist"). According to Oja (2000), he was "the single most important figure on the American modern-music scene in the 1910s" (p. 15).