He is a hard-working youth, serious, it would seem, to the heart. His published music is numbered into the thirties and his répertoire is extensive. He spends a great deal of time working hard on the music of a bygone age, although he finds it no stimulation for this one, but to be taken seriously as a pianist he is obliged to prove to melomaniacs that he has the equipment to play the classic composers. Of all the compositions that he learns, however, he complains of his own as the most difficult to memorize; a glance at _The Wild Men’s Dance_ or more particularly at a page of his second sonata for violin and piano will convince any one of the truth of this assertion. The chords will prove strangers to many a well-trained eye. I wonder if so uncannily gifted a sight reader as Walter Damrosch, who can play an orchestral score on the piano at sight, could read this music? Of his principles of composition the boy says only that he writes what he feels. He has no regard for the rules, although he has studied them enough to break them thoroughly. He thinks there is an underlying basis of theory for his method of composition, which may be formulated later. It is not his purpose to formulate it. He is sincere in his art. Once he said to me, “I hate cleverness. I don’t want to be clever. I hate to be called clever. I am not clever. I don’t like clever people. Art that is merely clever is not art at all.” With Busoni and Schoenberg he believes that there are no discords, only chords and chords ... and that there are many combinations of notes, “millions of them” which have not yet been devised. “When I feel that the existing enharmonic scale is limiting me I shall write in quarter tones. In time I think the ear can be trained to grasp eighth tones. Instruments only exist to perform music and new instruments will be created to meet the new need. It can be met now on the violin or in the voice. The piano, of course, is responsible for the rigidity of the present scale.” Ornstein never rewrites. If his inspiration does not come the first time it never comes. He does not try to improve a failure. His method is to write as much as he can spontaneously on one day, and to pick the composition up where he left off on the next. His opinions of other modern composers are interesting: he considers Ravel greater than Debussy, and speaks with enthusiasm about _Daphnis et Chloë_. He has played music by Satie in private but does not find it “stimulating or interesting.” ... Schoenberg ... “the last of the academics ... all brain, no spirit. His music is mathematical. He does not feel it. Korngold’s pieces are pretty but he has done nothing important. Scriabine was a great theorist who never achieved his goal. He helped others on. But Strawinsky is the most stimulating and interesting of all the modern composers. He feels what he writes.”