After reading about him somewhere on this forum, I recently bought a cd of the Russian-American composer Leo Ornstein (1893?-2002). Wikipedia says Ornstein "was a leading American experimental composer and pianist of the early twentieth century. His performances of works by avant-garde composers and his own innovative and even shocking pieces made him a cause célèbre on both sides of the Atlantic." Despite his early fame and success as a pianist, Ornstein stopped performing before he turned 40, and devoted the rest of his working life to composition and teaching. He composed until about 1990, and died in 2002 aged around 108.
His early use of tone clusters is discernible on the disc, as is the influence of Schoenberg and (more strongly, I think), Debussy. His output was very eclectic, there's no clear progression from tonality to atonality, from simple to more complex. Romanticism, Impressionism, Modernism and Serialism (that's many isms!) are all thrown into the mix. But his Sonata No. 4, for example, composed in the 1920's seems decades ahead of it's time. I sense a progressive aesthetic at work, very forward looking, although I haven't heard that many solo piano works of the Twentieth Century.
I'd like to hear people's views. & here's the final movement from Ornstein's Sonata No. 4, which I really like:
