Leo Ornstein

“I would say that Op 31 had brought music just to the very edge … I just simply drew back and said, “beyond that lies complete chaos”.”

“Improvisation is terribly haphazard.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”