Poems of 1917 Op. 41 IV. “The Wrath of the Despoiled” V. “Night Brooding Over the Battlefield” VI. “A Dirge of the Trenches” Marc-Andre Hamelin, piano Leo Ornstein (1893-2002) was once a celebrated American composer in the early 20th-century, often regarded as the “poster boy” for the avant-garde in American music. Music textbooks are quick to cite Henry Cowell as the progenitor of the tone cluster in art-music, but credit should be given to Ornstein, who made innovative applications of tone clusters in his early piano pieces of the 1910s. Although considered an American composer, Ornstein was born in Ukraine and studied at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. He established a controversial but famous repuation in America both as a pianist and as a radically modern composer. But after 1920, Ornstein slowly abandoned his efforts in the avant-garde and his idiom became relaxed and more conservative, angering many of the modernist cohorts who admired his music. In the 1930′s Ornstein and his wife founded a music school in Philadelphia and he devoted his time to teaching until the 1950′s. Throughout these decades Ornstein’s music and his very name became marginalized and he seemed to vanish from the music world entirely until the 1970′s. After turning his back on the avant-garde, Ornstein composed music in an accessible style reminiscent of Rachmaninov with occasional forays into biting dissonance. His last composition, the Eighth Piano Sonata, was finished at the age of 97, but …
Ornstein – Poems of 1917 (Nos. 4, 5, 6)
Written by admin on September 7th, 2010 in Textbooks.
Tags: 1917, Nos., Ornstein, Poems
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Stave 1: Right Hand
Stave 2: Left Hand
Stave 3: Right Hand
Stave 4: Left Hand
Stave 5: Right Hand
Stave 6: Left Hand
The Chords are played in staves 5/6 then the octaves in 4/3 are played in quick succession. After that all is simple, the top chords in stave 1/2 are to be played.
Now, the option here is to hold the bottom chords in sostenuto or sustain pedal; sostenuto allows the immediate decay of the octaves in staves 3/4 in order to make way for the chords in staves 1/2.
i dont understand somethinh, hope someone would explain, how can one only person play the part where there are six pentagrams, is there a trick for that, or what ?
Ornstein was able to paint such vivid and harrowing scenes of war: the almost apocalyptic scenes of destruction in “The Wrath of the Despoiled” and “The Battle” matched with melancholic reflection in “Night Brooding Over the Battlefield” show remarkable maturity for a 23-year-old composer.
Oh, I almost forgot to give this video five stars for sheer amazingness…
“The Wrath of the Despoiled” is incredible! And for a soloist to play it… I don’t even appreciate much of the modernism, but wow…..
The bottom four staves are held over from the previous measure via the pedal, so you just play the top line with your right hand and the second from the top with your left.
Wow, that’s the first time I’ve ever seen a solo piano piece that uses six staves at once…
anyone knows the technique to play 1:09 ???