entirely reassuring has
happened to the man. A great deal of the music that he has been
composing of late wants the bite his earlier work had. The colors are
not so piping hot. The outlines are less bold and jagged and clear-cut.
Some of the convulsive intensity, the fury, has passed out of the
rhythmic element. The melodies are less acidulous, the moods less
unbridled. No doubt, something happier has entered into his music,
something more voluptuous and smooth. The 'cello chants passionately and
dreamily in the two sonatas Ornstein has written of late for it. The
racial element is softened, become gentler and duskier and more
romantic. The Jew in it no longer wears his gaberdine. If he wears a
prayer-shawl at all, it is one made of silk. The Jeremiah of the desert
has given way to the young, amorous, dream-filled poet, a poet of the
sort that arose among the Jews in Spain during the years of the Moorish
ascendency. Yet, a certain intensity, a certain originality, a certain
vein of genius, has undergone eclipse in the change. Something a little
brilliant, a little facile, a little undistinguished, has introduced
itself, even into the best of the newest pieces. The texture is thinner,
the tension slacker. Ornstein does not seem to be putting himself into
them with the same directness and completeness with which he put
himself into his earlier work. Moreover, occasionally there come from
his pen works into which he is not putting himself at all. A choral
society of New York a year or two ago produced two small _a capella_
choruses of his that might have been the work of some obscure pupil of
Tchaikowsky's. The piano sonatina of the Funeral March, although by no
means as insignificant, is nevertheless uncharacteristic in the
resemblances it bears the music of Ravel. One thing the earlier
compositions are not, and that is, derivative. 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."

What this new period of Ornstein's composition represents it is not easy
to say. Probably, it is a period of transition, a time of the marshaling
of forces to a new and fiercer onslaught. Such a time of gestation might
well