Leo Ornstein Quotes

• Improvisation is terribly haphazard.

  Leo Ornstein

  Improvisation, Haphazard

  45 Copy quote

• 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.

  Leo Ornstein

  Differences, Manipulation, Students

  8 Copy quote

• I distrust anything that you don't hear.

  Leo Ornstein

  Distrust

  8 Copy quote

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

  Leo Ornstein

  Art, Simple, Ends

  4 Copy quote

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

  Leo Ornstein

  Art, Abstract, Art Music

  8 Copy quote

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

  Leo Ornstein

  Trying, Today, Language

  9 Copy quote

• 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.

  Leo Ornstein

  Writing, Men, Ears

  7 Copy quote

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

  Leo Ornstein

  Coincidence, Sometimes, Persons

  4 Copy quote

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

  Leo Ornstein

  Writing, Written

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Leo Ornstein

  Talking, Trying, Compromise

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Leo Ornstein

  Connections, Patterns, Want

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Leo Ornstein

  People, Way, Certain

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Leo Ornstein

  Writing, Thinking, Pieces

  4 Copy quote

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

  Leo Ornstein

  Mean, Play, Composer

  8 Copy quote

• 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.

  Leo Ornstein

  Thinking, Together, Lines

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Leo Ornstein

  Moving, Writing, Pieces

  4 Copy quote

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

  Leo Ornstein

  Writing, Important, Pieces

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Leo Ornstein

  Writing, Pieces, Paper

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Leo Ornstein

  Lines, Way, Difficult

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Leo Ornstein

  Exercise, Technique, Use

  4 Copy quote

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

  Leo Ornstein

  Ears, Patterns, Visuals

  7 Copy quote

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

  Leo Ornstein

  Musical, Talent, Certain

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Leo Ornstein

  Thinking, Trying, Pieces

  4 Copy quote

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

  Leo Ornstein

  Writing, Thinking, Burden

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Leo Ornstein

  Military, People, Precision

  18 Copy quote

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