Leo Ornstein (1892-2002) has been a matter of curiosity for me since my early days as a student. I heard much about him as both an advanced modernist and a brilliant pianist. Yet, until last week, I had not heard a note of his music nor seen one of his scores. He gave his first New York recital in 1911 and had successful tours of Europe, all the while earning a reputation as something of a wild man. Both his championing of then-new works by Scriabin, Debussy, Ravel, Bartók, and Schoenberg, as well as his own dissonant compositions, branded him as a “futurist” — whatever that means. The general feeling following World War I was that Ornstein ranked beside Stravinsky and Schoenberg in importance. So why the terrible neglect that followed?

Born the son of a Jewish cantor in the Ukraine, Ornstein studied piano in Kiev (then St. Petersburg) before his family immigrated to the United States in 1907. There he studied at what would become the Juilliard School of Music, and he began composing about 1910. Yet after the premiere of his piano concerto in Philadelphia in 1923, Ornstein gave up concertizing to devote himself entirely to composition and teaching — first as the head of the piano department at the Philadelphia Musical Academy, and in 1940 as founder of the Ornstein School of Music. (One of his more important students was composer Andrew Imbrie, longtime professor of composition at UC Berkeley.) Assorted awards crept in over the years, and in 1992 a program of his music was held in New York to honor his 90th birthday.

All the while, Ornstein has remained exclusively a composer for the cognoscenti. Cahill mentioned to the audience that Ornstein softened his style in later years to create more accessible music. The pity is that she did not include any of the early works, especially his notorious Danse Sauvage, which created a minor storm of protest in New York. More to the point, the three quasi-improvisational pieces last Wednesday sounded like filigree Debussy or Ravel in one of their aquatic idioms. For instance, I picked out hints of Debussy's Ondine and Poissons d'or, as well as Ravel's Jeux d'eau and Une barque sur l'océan. These were not quotations, but merely the manner of Ornstein's piano writing.

To be sure, the three Ornstein works feature some oddities. Cahill informed us that Ornstein often left out tempo markings and provided no hint of dynamics. The idea was to let the performer make his interpretation of the notes, ad libitum. In that sense, those works are aleatoric and quite possibly a precursor to John Cage's chance music. I was left with the impression that, perhaps, I have yet to hear the real Ornstein — the Ornstein of his early days and bad-boy reputation.

Grainger's piece was, as always, enormously entertaining. The “Do” of his The Immovable Do title has nothing to do with that verb. Rather, this is the musical term for the note C, as in "do-re-mi." (It is pronounced as “doe” or “dough.”) It seems that a key on Grainger's harmonium got stuck on the note C and kept repeating it for days. So Grainger made use of that in his piece for piano three-hands. The pianist plays a highly chromatic, folksy setting as an assistant and keeps repeating a bell tone on the high C. Somehow, it all works to soften the monotony of that one note. The piece is a lot of fun as well as an object lesson in Grainger's compositional craftsmanship.

Mamoru Fujieda is a big fan of American music and, in particular, of composer Lou Harrison. That devotion, as well as his interest in European medieval music, turned up in his extremely simplistic style: a tonal piece, void of modulations, and in his straightforward contrapuntal writing. It's a curious combination of a fugue and the thin basics associated with Satie's music. There are no dramatics, no swelling crescendo, or anything of the sort — just melodic basics.

By far, the most arresting music on the program turned up in the two early Cowell works. Like Ornstein, Cowell also softened his style during his later period, from about the 1940s onward. Before then, he fostered a large series of experiments, especially in the way modern pianos can be played. Exultation permeates some of his tone clusters, as the pianist first uses the right forearm, then the left, to depress almost two octaves of the keyboard into a single chord. A free hand is then available for melodic material. It was effective, and not nearly as violent sounding as one might expect.

The Fairy Answer centers on an even more influential technique invented by Cowell — playing inside the body of the piano, directly on the strings. His title comes from Irish myth, as a kind of folk explanation for echoes. The pianist plays a rather solemn hymn with the left hand, while the right reaches in and strums the melody back, creating a distant harp effect. It's a beautiful work, employing a technique used by everyone from John Cage to Pierre Boulez. Cowell demonstrated such effect in other forms too — plucked strings for pizzicato and deep gong tones produced by striking low strings with a rolled up fist. In The Banshee — in Irish myth, the harbinger of death — he created ghostly effects by rubbing hands or a handheld object lengthwise along the strings.

For her part, Cahill played all these works as well as I can imagine them being played. Here was an admirable combination of technical skill and rock-solid conviction. The proof was that the audience sat quietly for the better part of an hour, entranced as if under a spell by what surely were musical firsts for us all.