Meet the 108-Year-Old Composer Leo Ornstein (1893–2002) #piano #classicalmusic #composer

The composer Leo Ornstein was born when Dvořák wrote his New World Symphony in 1893 and lived long enough to see artists like Eminem and Britney Spears at the top of the charts in 2002.

In the 1910s, he was a pioneer of atonal piano music and tone clusters before suddenly pivoting to lush tonal works in the 1920s. Then he vanished from the public for decades until reemerging in a Texas trailer park decades later, still composing highly imaginative music well into his 90s.

This is the wild timeline of one of the strangest and most original figures in 20th-century music.

List of musical works as they appeared in the video (all by Ornstein):
1. Piano Sonata No. 4 mvt. IV (Kharitonov)
2. Danse sauvage [Wild Men's Dance] (Hamelin)
3. Impromptu No. 1 (Kharitonov)
4. Piano Sonata No. 8 finale (Hamelin)

#classicalmusic #piano #modernmusic #shorts