Leo Ornstein Quotations

I think recordings have been a terrific advance because now, when you have a piece of music, particularly something that appears to the listener very complicated, there's really a push to the world to try to figure out what it was that he was hearing.

But in the end, music is ultimately an aural art, pure and simple.

There are some people, by the way, that associate a certain amount of visualization with the performance of music. Those are people that really are not centrally concerned only with music, the traditional things.

By the way, the point between rationality and what we would call the irrational is a very difficult point to establish. There’s no specific line, as you know.

Hopefully, I have a certain amount of what you call musical talent.

A person improvising is sometimes very fortunate that just at that second things coincide.

Of all the arts, music is really the most abstract.

You write it down because finally, when it's written down you do get it out of your system somewhat.

Now, what we are not talking about, what you're really coming to, is what compromises one makes so that the listener understands somewhat of what you're doing, what you're trying to express.

When I was speaking about communicating, I meant that the listener - we have to reach the listener; otherwise, of course, you're writing the piece, as I say, only for the satisfaction of seeing it on the paper for yourself, and then it ends right there.

Because essentially Schoenberg was an extremely gifted man. And in spite of many of his theories and so on, when he really began to write music, he still was guided very much by his internal hearing, by what we call your internal ear.

No, I think that a person writes a poem because they have an inner urge of something that they want to express, and I think it's that inner urge that you want to express when you write a piece of music.

Now, there are sometimes making a connection between one section and another that sometimes you do want to see the pattern because it helps you to lead into the next thing - it's a rhetorical thing, where you just see how the pattern has to go into the next thing.

We can use techniques in modifying things, in controlling things, but the first impulse has to be something that you simply cannot make just out of technique, or else it becomes perfectly evident that it is nothing but technique that you're exercising.

Today each composer is not only involved in aesthetics, but he's actually trying to create his own language.

In writing music, the structure of each piece is a very important factor.

The difference between the student and the born composer is he really hears the thing, and they have to stage it and manipulate it by technical equipment.

By the visual pattern, but mostly I'm guided entirely by my ear, what I hear.

I think there have been some periods when the writing almost became a bit of a burden.

It doesn't necessarily mean at all that the composer plays his own works best.

Besides merely some pleasure that we get out of the combinations of pitches together and lines, I think that there is some satisfaction that we get in the fact of having this diffuse thing organized very concretely and put onto a frame and have it actually decided.

The danger of that - and there's a grave danger that I, myself, have to be very aware of - is that you become so involved and intrigued in the language that sometimes you lose track that that is only a means to an aesthetic experience that the listener has to get.

To the person that deals in visualizations, I suppose there is something rather exciting about a whole set of people - they all going symmetrically, up or down, in a military sort of precision.

Today, with a recording, he can hear the thing enough times until he really gets acquainted with the language, and then he can begin to make an estimate of the intrinsic, aesthetic value of that piece of music.

There is a paradox because I think you've struck a chord there that we ought to simply pursue - it is true that music is a form of communication.

Some I made, that I definitely wanted in a certain way, and some I simply decided to leave to the discretion, to the impact of the performer, himself.

It doesn't matter how far I may have carried some of the things, but I always pull back at the point where it ceases any longer to really be music.

Well, no. I believe that it's not at all impossible that some of the performances that I've heard so far by some pianists may be superior to my own playing because those are two totally different acts altogether.

What it looks like on paper may be interesting enough, but what the listeners hears is ultimately what stays with him, that he is concerned with.

Yes, well, I tell you, because once I have completed a work, I simply am interested only in what I may hear in the next work that's coming.

Every time I'm a bit surprised always, what the patterns look like and what the whole thing looks like because, of course, I primarily hear.

I'm interested in producing a work of art, and unless I hear the thing thoroughly, I would have no reason to put it down at all.

I know that there are some people who apparently operate with their eyes on the paper. They are more guided almost by the pattern.

I consider that my own personal life and anecdotes may be amusing enough and interesting enough, but they're in a different realm.

I distrust anything that you don't hear.

I'm really interested in writing a piece of music that will move you, that will really move you. That is really the only reason that I'm writing music.

Improvisation is terribly haphazard.