is the Spanish rhapsody for 'cello; the string of steely beads, the setting of the "To Helen" of Poe. And the objects that float preserved in those little flasks are some of the popular ditties with which Loeffler is so fond of incrusting his work. Once they were "à La Villette," and the Malagueña, and the eighteenth-century marching song of the Lorraine soldiery, and flourished under the windy heaven. But when Loeffler transplanted them respectively into "La Villanelle du Diable," into the 'cello rhapsody and into "Music for Four Stringed Instruments," they underwent the fate that befalls everything subjected to his exquisite and sterilizing touch.
One comes to the conclusion that perhaps the most significant and symbolic thing in the career of Charles Martin Loeffler is his place of residence. For this Alsatian, French in culture, temperamentally related to the décadents, writing music at first resembling that of Fauré and the Wagnerizing Frenchmen, later that of Dukas, and last that of d'Indy and Magnard, has lived the greater portion of his life in no other city than Boston. Coming originally to America for the purpose of playing first violin in the Boston Symphony Orchestra, he has found the atmosphere of the New England capital so pleasant that he has remained there practically ever since. He whom one might suppose almost native to the Paris of Debussy and Magnard and Ravel, of Verlaine and Gustave Kahn and Huysmans, has found comfortable an environment essentially tight and illiberal, a society that masks philistinism with toryism, and manages to drive its radical and vital and artistic youth, in increasing numbers every year, to other places in search of air. And his own career, on the spiritual plane, seems just such an exchange, the preference of a shadowy and frigid place to a blazing and quivering one, the exchange of the eternal Paris for the eternal Boston. His music seems some psychic banishment. His art is indeed, in the last analysis, a flight from the group of his kinsmen into, if not exactly the circle, at least the dangerous vicinity of those amiable gentlemen the Chadwicks and the Converses and all the other highly respectable and sterile "American Composers."
Ornstein
Ornstein is a mirror held up to the world of the modern city. The first of his real compositions are like fragments of some cosmopolis of caves and towers of steel, of furious motion and shafts of nitrogen glare become music. They are like sensitive surfaces that have been laid in the midst of the New Yorks; and record not only the clangors, but all the violent forms of the city, the beat of the frenetic activity, the intersecting planes of light, the masses of the masonry with the tiny, dwarf-like creatures running in and out, the electric signs staining the inky nightclouds. They give again the alarum of dawn breaking upon the crowded, swarming cells; seven o'clock steam whistles on a winter morn; pitiless light filtering over hurrying black droves of humanity; thousands of shivering workers blackening Fourteenth Street. They picture the very Niebelheim, the hordes of slaves herded by giants of their own creation, the commands and cries of power in the bells, whistles, signals. The grinding and shrieking of loaded trains in the tubes, cranes laboring in the port, rotary engines drilling, turbines churning are woven through them. Blankets of fog descend upon the river; menacing shapes loom through it; rays of red light seek to cut the mist. Flowers that are gray and black blossom on the ledges of tenement windows giving on bare walls. And human souls and songs that are gray and black like them bloom in the blind air, open their velvet petals, their lustrous, soft corollas, from crannies and windows into this metal, this dun, this unceasing roar.
For Ornstein is youth. He is the one striving to adjust himself to all this thunder and welter and glare. He is the spring as it comes up through the pavements, the aching green sap. In part, no doubt, he is the resurrection of the most entombed of spirits, that of the outlaw European Jew. He is the breaking down of the walls with which the Jew had blotted out the hateful world. He is Lazarus emerging in his grave clothes into the new world; the Jewish spirit come up into the day from out the basement and cellar rooms of the synagogue where it had been seated for a thousand years drugging itself with rabbinical lore, refining almost maniacally upon the intention of some obscure phrase or parable, negating the lure of the world and of experience with a mass of rites and observances and ceremonials, losing itself in the gray desert stretches of theory, or wasting itself in the impossible dream of Zion restored in modern Palestine and Solomon's temple rebuilt in a provincial capital of the Turkish Empire. And Ornstein's music is the music of a birth that is the tearing away of grave clothes grown to the body, the clawing away, stone by stone, of the wall erected against the call of experience which was sure to be death-dealing. The old prohibitions are still active in it in the terror with which life is viewed, in the menace and cruelty of things, the sharpness of edges encountered, the weight of the masses that threaten to fall and overwhelm, the fury and blackness and horror of nature once again regarded. Again and again there passes through it the haggard, shrouded figure of the Russian Jew. The "Poems of 1917" are full of the wailings and rockings of little old Ghetto mothers. Again and again Ornstein speaks in accents that resemble nothing quite so much as the savage and woeful language of the Old Testament.
But the music of Ornstein is much besides. It is a thing germane to all beings born into the age of steel. It is the 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 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. It was doubtless thankfulness to William Blake, that other "mad" inventor of wild images and designs, that other "rager in the wilds," for fortification and sustenance, that made him preface his violin sonata with the Argument of "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," and defend himself with the verses:
"Once meek, and in a perilous path,