Leo Ornstein

Born in Kremenchug[?], Russia in either 1892 or 1893, Ornstein was one of the most popular radical composers in the United States, where he immigrated in 1907. A child prodigy, Ornstein mastered the piano at age eight.

From the period 1910 to 1925, Ornstein was the giant of modern music being performed in the states. Among his most notable pieces I Allegro Barbero was one of the first fusion pieces, combining new musical techniques such as tone clusters[?] and polyrhythms before they were widely used.

Ornstein gave countless preformances in the 1910s and 20s, but in 1933, he retired from the stage because he disliked performing. Even though he had retired, Ornstein kept composing up until age 98.

In the mid 1970s, a renewed intrest in his work began, and the question surfaced: What ever happened to Leo Ornstein? As it turns out, he was living in a mobile home in Texas, still writing music. He and his wife Pauline Mallet-Provost also founded the Ornstein School of Music[?] in 1935 and operated it until it closed in 1958. In 1990, at the age of 98, Ornstein's final work , the Eighth Piano Sonata was completed and given its world primier.

In early 2002, the radical composer Leo Ornstein died in a small nursing home in Green Bay, Wisconsin at the age of 109.