LEO ORNSTEIN (1893-2002)

As a budding undergraduate pianist, I became enamored by Leo Ornstein’s music. The sheer breadth and complexity of his music made me want to not only perform it, but also understand it from an analytical standpoint. As part of my PhD studies at the University of Macedonia, Greece, I completed a 260 page dissertation about Leo Ornstein with the title: “Leo Ornstein: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Genius Early Modernism, Hebraic Elements, and Stylistic Evolution in his Pianistic Idiom”. You can read it here.

I visited San Francisco to interview his son, Severo Ornstein, an important computer scientist who invented Mockingbird (1980), the first interactive computer-based music-score editor, and oversaw its programming.

At the Yale University Music Library- Ornstein Papers Archive, I read through thousands of Leo Ornstein’s manuscripts and discovered a new work “Sonata pour le Piano (1917)”. I made a transcription (dissertation pp. 42-50) and premiered it in my debut concert with Piano Spheres, you can listen to it here.

In my dissertation, I categorize his music into recurring melodic motifs and harmonic devices and propose new methods of analyzing Ornstein’s music, in order to define the basic traits of his pianistic idiom. The comparative analysis of his piano works and the recurring patterns in his writing style, which ranges from modernism to neoromanticism enriched with Hebraic elements, define the characteristics and evolution of his work.