52 Quotes by Leo Ornstein

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.

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

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.

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.

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 visual pattern, but mostly I’m guided entirely by my ear, what I hear.

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.