Leo Ornstein, a Russian-born composer and pianist who in the early 20th Century was a leading figure of the American avant-garde, died Feb. 24 in Green Bay, Wis. He was either 108 or 109.
Viewed as a radical composer, Mr. Ornstein was ranked with Stravinsky and Schoenberg in the 1920s and with Varese and Antheil in the 1940s, first as an innovator and ultimately as a maverick. His early works made use of tone clusters, poly-rhythms and other techniques before they were widely known.
Audiences, predictably, were divided between horror and adulation. In 1918, critic James Huneker called him “the only true-blue, genuine Futurist composer alive.”
At the same time, The London Observer described the “insufferable hideousness” of his “so-called music.”
Mr. Ornstein first came to fame as a piano virtuoso, performing his own works along with more conventional fare to packed houses.
In 1918 a biography was published, “Leo Ornstein: The Man, His Ideas, His Work” by Frederick H. Martens. It described the pianist, among other things, as “an evil musical genius, wandering in a weird No-Man’s Land haunted with tortuous sound.”
But in 1933 Mr. Ornstein, who disliked performing, retired from the stage, and after the St. Louis Symphony gave the world premiere of his “Nocturne and Dance of Fate” in 1937 he vanished into near-obscurity.
Mr. Ornstein, however, kept on composing. In the 1970s there was a revival of interest in his work, and he was living in a mobile home in Texas, happily composing.
His final work, the Eighth Piano Sonata, was composed in 1990, when he was in his late 90s.
The son of a cantor, Mr. Ornstein was born in December of either 1892 or 1893 according to his son, Severo, and began studying piano at 3. Before he was 10 he had entered the conservatory of St. Petersburg.
In 1907 his family fled the growing anti-Semitism in prerevolutionary Russia and settled in New York, where he studied at the Institute for Musical Arts and made his debut in 1911.
