ABSTRACT
On 26 January 1915 in New York City, Leo Ornstein presented the first of a series of four concerts of ‘modern and futurist music’ at the Bandbox Theater on East 57th St. 1 In a concert now considered a landmark in American musical modernism, Ornstein played works by Korngold, Ravel, Schoenberg, Albéniz, Grondahl and Cyril Scott, as well as three of his own pieces characterized by aggressively dissonant cluster chords. 2 Two weeks later, on 11 February 1915, Percy Grainger presented his New York solo debut concert to a capacity audience at Aeolian Hall on West 42nd St, playing works by Busoni, Brahms, Grieg, Chopin, Ravel, Albéniz and himself. In response both composers received as many plaudits as the formidable American musical press could muster: Ornstein’s portrait appeared on the cover of Musical Courier, his works were discussed in the leading music journals as well as the New York newspapers and within a few months he had signed with a manager to present further recitals in the guise of ‘The Ultra-Modern Composer-Pianist’. Grainger, famously, was ranked by Henry Finck of the New York Evening Post with Paderewski and Kreisler, and as many as 16 concerts were booked with leading American orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic. 3 In the calendar year 1915 more than 120 interviews with Grainger were published in American newspapers. 4 Being commonly hailed as the ‘young Paderewski’ and the ‘Siegfried of the piano’ Grainger chose not to position himself as an ‘ultra-modern’; nor did he, as Ornstein did, cultivate a circle of admiring protomodernists in New York. Yet within the following two years Grainger had defined himself both as ‘the most “popular” composer of the day’ and, alternatively (if incongruously), as a well-known composer of ‘futurist’ music. 5 The work that achieved this reputation for Grainger was In a Nutshell, premiered at the Norfolk Connecticut Festival of Music in June 1916. By tracking the US reception of In a Nutshell over the subsequent two years this chapter traces the development of Grainger’s reputation as a modernist composer in the United States, and concludes with a tentative explanation of the reasons why, by the end of the war, this reputation had lapsed.
