Don’t ask me how I know this, because I’m not a gamer. I think I stumbled across it while I was putting together my show on nonagenarian conductors. There’s a video game called “Dark Worlds,” which apparently has been acclaimed in some circles as one of the greatest video games ever made. In any case, it is popular enough that it has spawned two sequels. The premise has something to do with dragonslaying during the Age of Fire, an undead asylum, and the spread of the Abyss over the land of Oolacile. Or something like that.

Anyway, central to the game is a character called Ornstein. Imagine my surprise when I learned that Ornstein was named for Leo Ornstein, the avant-garde composer and pianist, who died in 2002 at the age of 106! To give you an idea of how old that is, Ornstein studied with Alexander Glazunov at the Moscow Conservatory in 1904.

To escape mounting antisemitic policies and pogroms, he emigrated with his family to the United States in 1906. His New York concert debut took place five years later, and he was hailed as an interpreter of sensitivity, prodigious technical ability, and artistic maturity. However, his reputation was about to take a startling turn.

Ornstein emerged as an ardent “futurist,” or “ultra-modernist,” taken to the performance of cutting-edge works by contemporary composers, like Bartok, Debussy, Ravel, Schoenberg, Scriabin and Stravinsky. His own compositions instigated near-riots. He is credited as being the first composer to make extensive use of the tone cluster (the dissonant clash of at least three adjacent tones in a scale), a technique soon to be taken up by Henry Cowell. One of his most distinctive compositions to employ tone clusters is titled “Suicide in an Airplane.”

By the 1920s, however, Ornstein was burnt out on the notoriety and walked away from his performance career. He accepted a teaching post at the Philadelphia Musical Academy, a precursor to the University of the Arts. During that time, he also composed a piano concerto for the Philadelphia Orchestra. In the 1930s, he founded a music school in Philadelphia, the Ornstein School of Music, with his wife, Pauline Cosio Mallet-Prevost. Among the students enrolled at the school were future jazz luminaries John Coltrane and Jimmy Smith.

The Ornsteins retired in 1953. Thereafter, they essentially lived off the grid. In the mid-1970s, they were discovered to be living at least part of the year in a trailer park in Texas.

In the video game, Ornstein’s armor resembles a lion. Also, he wears a ring called the “Leo Ring.” Both are clear references to the name of the composer.

On a video game discussion board, I stumbled across a thread labeled, “Did you guys know that Leo Ornstein was a famous composer?” Hey, whatever works.

Ornstein’s “Suicide in an Airplane:”

An example of Ornstein’s later, saner music, from 1978:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MioWCeIndhI

IMAGES: The Leos Ornstein