Coming originally to America for the purpose of playing
first violin in the Boston Symphony Orchestra, he has found the
atmosphere of the New England capital so pleasant that he has remained
there practically ever since. He whom one might suppose almost native
to the Paris of Debussy and Magnard and Ravel, of Verlaine and Gustave
Kahn and Huysmans, has found comfortable an environment essentially
tight and illiberal, a society that masks philistinism with toryism, and
manages to drive its radical and vital and artistic youth, in increasing
numbers every year, to other places in search of air. And his own
career, on the spiritual plane, seems just such an exchange, the
preference of a shadowy and frigid place to a blazing and quivering one,
the exchange of the eternal Paris for the eternal Boston. His music
seems some psychic banishment. His art is indeed, in the last analysis,
a flight from the group of his kinsmen into, if not exactly the circle,
at least the dangerous vicinity of those amiable gentlemen the Chadwicks
and the Converses and all the other highly respectable and sterile
"American Composers."
Ornstein
Ornstein is a mirror held up to the world of the modern city. The first
of his real compositions are like fragments of some cosmopolis of caves
and towers of steel, of furious motion and shafts of nitrogen glare
become music.
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