52 Quotes by Leo Ornstein

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.