owest and highest registers of the
instrument clash in "Improvisata." Rhythms battle, convulsively, almost.
In portions of the "Sinfonietta," five rhythms are to be found warring
against each other. Melodic curves, lines, sing ecstatically over
turbulent, mottled counterpoint in the piano and violin sonatas. The
violin sonata is something of an attempt to exhaust all the
possibilities of color-contrast contained in the little brown box. In
the first "Impression de Notre-Dame," the piano is metallic with the
booming bells. In the second, it is stony, heavy with the congested,
peering, menacing forms of gargoyles. In the accompaniment to the song
"Waldseligkeit," it seems to give the musical equivalent for the
substance of wood. 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 was doubtless thankfulness to
William Blake, that other "mad" inventor of wild images and designs,
that other "rager in the wilds," for fortification and sustenance, that
made him preface his violin sonata with the Argument of "The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell," and defend himself with the verses:

"Once meek, and in a perilous path,
The just man kept his course along
The vale of death.
Roses are planted where thorns grew,
And on the barren heath
Sing the honey bees....

"Till the villain left the paths of ease,
To walk in perilous paths, and drive
The just man into barren climes.

"Now the sneaking serpent walks
In mild humility,
And the just man rages in the wilds
Where lions roam."

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.

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