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 be necessary to Ornstein's genius. It is possible that he has had
to give up something in order to gain something else, to try for less in
order to establish himself upon a footing firmer than that upon which he
stood.
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