''Wild Men's Dance'' (aka ''Danse Sauvage'') is a piano work by Russian-American composer

Leo Ornstein Leo Ornstein (born ''Lev Ornshteyn''; ; – February 24, 2002) was an American Experimental music, experimental composer and pianist of the early twentieth century. His performances of works by avant-garde composers and his own innovative and ev ...

, dating from either 1913 or 1914. It is widely regarded as the first classical composition to be composed almost entirely of brash

tone cluster A tone cluster is a musical chord comprising at least three adjacent tones in a scale. Prototypical tone clusters are based on the chromatic scale and are separated by semitones. For instance, three adjacent piano keys (such as C, C, and D) s ...

s, predating the "forearm" music of

Henry Cowell Henry Dixon Cowell (; March 11, 1897 – December 10, 1965) was an American composer, writer, pianist, publisher, teacher Marchioni, Tonimarie (2012)"Henry Cowell: A Life Stranger Than Fiction" ''The Juilliard Journal''. Retrieved 19 June 2022.C ...

by a few years. In 1918, critic Charles L. Buchanan described Ornstein's innovation: " egives us masses of shrill, hard dissonances, chords consisting of anywhere from eight to a dozen notes made up of half tones heaped one upon another."

Composition

Ornstein had begun composing works containing

dissonant In music, consonance and dissonance are categorizations of simultaneous or successive sounds. Within the Western tradition, some listeners associate consonance with sweetness, pleasantness, and acceptability, and dissonance with harshness, unple ...

and startling sounds in the early 1910s. Ornstein himself was unsettled by the earliest of these compositions: "I really doubted my sanity at first. I simply said, what is that? It was so completely removed from any experience I ever had." On March 27, 1914, in London, he gave his first public performance of works under the banner of "futurism", now known as

modernism Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy), subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and soc ...

. ''Wild Men's Dance'' was the foremost piece of these concerts. Music scholar Gordon Rumson would describe ''Wild Men's Dance'' as, "a work of vehement, unruly rhythm, compounded of dense chord clusters ..and brutal accents. Complex rhythms and gigantic crashing chords traverse the whole range of the piano. This remains a work for a great virtuoso able to imbue it with a burning, ferocious energy."

References

Citations

Sources

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External links

Scores

Leo Ornstein Scores
several scores, including ''Wild Men's Dance'', featuring tone clusters

Listening

* 20th-century classical music 1913 compositions 1914 compositions Compositions for solo piano Compositions that use extended techniques Modernist compositions Music controversies {{uncited category, date=August 2022, cat1=Music riots Music riots