Leo Ornstein Quotes & Sayings

“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.”

“I distrust anything that you don't hear.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”