he expression of all the men
who have tried to embrace and love the towering piles, the strange,
black, desolate pathways that are the world to-day. The figure that one
discerns in the compositions beginning with the "Dwarf Suite," Opus 16,
is one that we all have known intimately a space. These pieces are not
youth seen through the golden haze of retrospection. They are the
expression of groping, fumbling youth as it feels and as it feels,
itself to be. They are music young in all its excess, its violence, its
sharp griefs and sharper joys, its unreflecting, trembling strength. The
spring comes up hot and cruel in them. There is all the loneliness of
youth in this music, all the mysterious dreams of a world scarce
understood, all the hesitancies and blind gropings of powers untried.
Always, one senses the pavements stretching between steel buildings, the
black, hurrying tides of human beings; and through them all, the
oppressed figure of one searching out the meaning of all this convulsive
activity into which he has been born. It is such solitude that speaks in
the first "Impression of Notre-Dame" with its gray mounting masses, its
cloisteral reverberation of bells, its savage calls of the city to one
standing alone with the monument of a dead age. Violent, uncontrolled
passions cry out in the "Three Moods," with their youthful surrender to
the moment. The energy of adolescence, unleashed, rejoicing in pure
muscular activity, disports itself in the "Shadow Dances," and in the
"Wild Man's Dance," with its sheer, naked, beating rhythm. The
bitterness of adolescence mocks in the "Three Burlesques," in the "Dance
of the Gnomes," with its parodying of clumsy movements. What revolt in
the first "Piano Sonata"! And other emotions, timid and uncertain of
themselves, uneasy with the swelling sap of springtide, speak their
poetry and their pain, tell their tales and are silent, make us remember
what once we felt.

The city, the birth into the new world, youth, exist in the music of
Ornstein with all the sharpness of shock because of an imagination of a
wonderful forcefulness. There is no indirectness in Ornstein, no
vagueness. His tension is always of the fullest, the stiffest. What he
feels, what he hears, he sets down, irrespective of all the canons and
rules and procedures. 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 l