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480 puntal polity is derived directly from and based directly on the heresies of half a dozen contemporaries and forerunners. Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Strauss, Scriabine: these are some of the men on whom he leans heavily for authority. Scriabine, in particular, is his musical guide and stay.

It is true that Ornstein has developed the revolutionary theories of several of these insurgents; has turned a private pianissimo hint into a fortissimo public maxim; has amplified Schoenberg's formula of expressing the beautiful in terms of the ostensibly hideous, and Strauss's doctrine of announcing the divine in terms of the diabolic. He has piled Ossa on Pelion, discord on dissonance, horror on the horrible, and murder on simple acts of mayhem. Nevertheless his tortures are not fundamentally new: he uses the old thumb-screws and merely tightens the bolts.

For example, compare the opening bars of his Dance of The Dead (the tenth in the series of war-pieces called Poems of 1917) with an excerpt from Scriabine's Sixth Sonata.

Scriabine says, pianissimo:

Ornstein says, forte e marcato:

Vivo (Con fuoco)