Musical Modernism Before It Began: Leo Ornstein and a Case for Revisionist History

Musical modernism was born kicking and screaming in 1922 in New York, fathered by Edgard Varése and his International Composers' Guild; the French émigré saved the nation from its own backward-looking ways. Or so the story goes. But this reading ignores numerous and widespread musical activities that were well under way seven years prior to the founding of the ICG. As early as autumn 1914, members of Alfred Stieglitz's artistic circle, including Paul Rosenfeld and Waldo Frank as well as Claire Reis and A. Walter Kramer among others, were engaged in organized efforts to promote musical modernism, with Leo Ornstein as their front man. The initial result was a series of concerts in January, February, and March 1915 that Ornstein performed at the Bandbox Theatre; the programs consisted of entirely modernist music. These concerts catapulted Ornstein to fame, but he was not the isolated figure that he has been portrayed to be. Rosenfeld, Reis, and Kramer continued to promote both Ornstein and modernism with ideas for new societies, and Ornstein himself developed close ties not only to literary figures but also to artists, including Leon Kroll, William Zorach, and John Marin. Music, far from being isolated from other artistic efforts, was part of a burgeoning modernist scene that was securely in place by 1915, and Leo Ornstein was at its center.