Richard Pennycuick ([log in to unmask]) writes: >The only other CM composer I knew of who passed 100 was Leo Ornstein >(1892-2002), although I think there is some doubt about that. No doubt at all. The doubt was attached to his exact age. As the family left their paperwork behind when they fled from the anti-Semitic pogroms in 1906, Ornstein was never sure whether he was 107, 108 or 109. I am attaching my obituary of him from February of last year. A fascinating composer and man. Leo Ornstein's life is the stuff of fiction. A child prodigy in his native Russia, he was driven into exile by anti-Semitism, became an avant-garde composer and virtuoso pianist of international renown by his early twenties, plunged into obscurity at the height of his fame, was completely forgotten, and defied old age: he may have been 109 when he died, making him almost certainly the oldest composer ever. Ornstein's first music lessons were with his father, a synagogal cantor, and then with the composer-pianist Vladimir Puchalsky (who later taught Vladimir Horowitz) in Kiev. The boy made such rapid progress that at the age of twelve he was admitted to St Petersburg Conservatoire, where he studied piano with Anna Essipova and composition with Glazunov. But twelve was younger than the official limit, and that is where the later confusion about his age began: his father had added a couple of years to gain him admission. When in 1906 the family fled to the United States to escape the pogroms of Tsarist Russia, they of course left the official documentation behind - and so in later life Ornstein couldn't confirm his real age. The Ornsteins settled in New York where, at the institution that later become the Juilliard School of Music, Leo began lessons with Bertha Fiering Tapper, who helped shape his prodigious pianistic talents. He had already been composing for some time - attractive, elegant, tonal pieces of considerable craftsmanship - when he made his concert debut in 1911, and around a year later, apparently unaware of such developments elsewhere, he suddenly began writing music of such fierce radicality that it attracted slighting comments about his sanity; he even worried about it himself. His style now was unlike anything else in music. He employed the piano as a percussion instrument, pounding out savage rhythms and ferocious cluster-chords with a primal energy that appalled the timid. He embraced atonality independently of Schoenberg's parallel experiments in Europe and rhythmic primitivism unaware of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. The titles of his pieces - among them Danse sauvage and Suicide in an Airplane - reflected the extremist brutality of the music and rapidly gained him notoriety. By his early twenties he was one of the most highly reputed of contemporary composers: in an article of 1915 Percy Grainger grouped him with Debussy, Ravel, Strauss, Schoenberg and Stravinsky; Ferruccio Busoni was another who acknowledged his importance. His music was associated with the Italian futurists such as Marinetti and Russolo (inaccurately, since he didn't share their artistic aims), the critic James Huneker writing: I never thought I should live to hear Arnold Schoenberg sound tame, yet tame he sounds - almost timid and halting - after Ornstein who is, most emphatically, the only true-blue, genuine, Futurist composer alive. His reputation was also as a pianist of fearless curiosity - he gave the first US performances of music by Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Debussy, Ravel, Bartok, Kodaly and others. But his manic modernism was short-lived (nor was it all-encompassing: the pianist Mark Gasser, who is preparing a CD of Ornstein's music, describes the exquisite Suite Russe of 1914 as "Bach meets Rachmaninov"). He explained later that he felt his Violin Sonata of 1915 (which, when the violinist Louis Krasner took it along to a chamber-music class, got him thrown out) "had brought music just to the very edge, and [...] I have no suicidal tendencies at all. I simply drew back and said, 'Beyond that lies complete chaos'". That realisation initiated what the Canadian composer-pianist and scholar Gordon Rumson (in an article on Ornstein in International Piano last spring, one of the first serious examinations of his music in decades) describes as a "third" period, beginning around 1922 during which [his] musical language organised itself into a shimmering, luminous gradation between simplicity and harshness. The melodies have a Hebraic tint, and Ornstein does not shy from placing dissonant and tonal music side by side. This shifting of style is just one of Ornstein's creative tools. More importantly, there is a directness of emotion that makes the music genuinely appealing. It should also be noted that his music is ideally written for the piano and is clearly the work of a master pianist. In 1922 Ornstein withdrew from the concert platform, too: his music was not concerned with fad and fashion, but that was how it was discussed, and he had had enough of controversy. After his appointment as head of the piano department of the Philadelphia Musical Academy in 1925, he settled there and devoted the rest of his career to teaching, setting up the Ornstein School of Music in the city in 1940 with his wife; he retired in 1953. But he continued to compose well into old age, producing a generous body of piano music; his worklist also contains a piano concerto (1925), a handful of other orchestral scores (several were lost), songs and a number of important chamber-music pieces, including three string quartets (the most recent dating from 1976), a cello sonata (1918) that rivals Rachmaninov's in gorgeous tunes, and a feistily energetic, epic piano quintet (1927) that is a masterpiece. His large-scale Eighth Piano Sonata, his last composition, was finished in September 1990, when Ornstein was in his late nineties. That may well be a unique achievement: Havergal Brian wrote the last of his 32 symphonies in 1968, when he was 92, and Berthold Goldschmidt his Deux Nocturnes for soprano and orchestra at 93, but Ornstein surpassed even those remarkable records. Many of Ornstein's compositions would not be available to posterity without the devoted perseverance of his wife, Pauline, also a former student of Tapper's and a fine pianist in her own right. Ornstein would often wait years between composing a work and committing it to paper: he could hold cupboardsful of music in his head, complete in every detail, and perform them with complete confidence. Pauline pressed him to write them down and eventually took over the task of doing so from his dictation. Much to Ornstein's surprise, when they sat down to notate the first three piano sonatas, he found he had entirely forgotten them. And the musical world had entirely forgotten him. Occasional recordings came and went, but no one paid him any systematic attention - except his son, Severo, a computer scientist and early Internet developer, who produced a complete edition of the piano music and continues to work on the rest of his output. Ornstein meantime seemed to have decided against growing old: his hundredth birthday (however imprecise the date) went by without thinning his hair or his memory, and he was still giving interviews three weeks before his death. He lived long enough, indeed, to see the beginnings of a revival of interest in his music. A biography is in preparation. The pianists Janice Weber and Marc-Andre Hamelin have both recorded CDs of his music; their appearance is imminent. They will help rewrite the history of twentieth-century music just as Ornstein helped write it in the first place. Martin Anderson Leo Ornstein, composer and pianist, born Kremenchug, Ukraine, (?) 2 December 1892 or 1893, married 1918 Pauline Mallet-Prevost (d 1985), 1 son, 1 daughter, died Green Bay, Wisconsin, 24 February 2002. Martin Anderson Toccata Press www.toccatapress.com