At present, however, some of those qualities that were so clearly visible in Leo Ornstein during the first years in which he disclosed himself are somewhat obscured. Something not entirely reassuring has happened to the man. A great deal of the music that he has been composing of late wants the bite his earlier work had. The colors are not so piping hot. The outlines are less bold and jagged and clear-cut. Some of the convulsive intensity, the fury, has passed out of the rhythmic element. The melodies are less acidulous, the moods less unbridled. No doubt, something happier has entered into his music, something more voluptuous and smooth. The 'cello chants passionately and dreamily in the two sonatas Ornstein has written of late for it. The racial element is softened, become gentler and duskier and more romantic. The Jew in it no longer wears his gaberdine. If he wears a prayer-shawl at all, it is one made of silk. The Jeremiah of the desert has given way to the young, amorous, dream-filled poet, a poet of the sort that arose among the Jews in Spain during the years of the Moorish ascendency. Yet, a certain intensity, a certain originality, a certain vein of genius, has undergone eclipse in the change. Something a little brilliant, a little facile, a little undistinguished, has introduced itself, even into the best of the newest pieces. The texture is thinner, the tension slacker. Ornstein does not seem to be putting himself into them with the same directness and completeness with which he put himself into his earlier work. Moreover, occasionally there come from his pen works into which he is not putting himself at all. A choral society of New York a year or two ago produced two small _a capella_ choruses of his that might have been the work of some obscure pupil of Tchaikowsky's. The piano sonatina of the Funeral March, although by no means as insignificant, is nevertheless uncharacteristic in the resemblances it bears the music of Ravel. One thing the earlier compositions are not, and that is, derivative. Ornstein, they make plain, had benefited by the achievements of Debussy and Moussorgsky and Scriabine. But they made plain as well that he had developed a style of his own, a style that was, for all its crudeness and harshness, personal. In becoming again a disciple he reverts to something that he seemed to have left behind him when he wrote his clangorous "Dwarf Suite."