Harmony with him is something different than it is
with any other composer. Piano colors of a violence and garishness are
hurled against each other. The lowest 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.
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