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

Leo Ornstein

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Leo Ornstein
Age: 109 †
Born: 1892
Born: December 11
Died: 2002
Died: February 24
Composer
Music Pedagogue
Pedagogue
Pianist
Krementschug
Really
Abstract
Arts
Art
Music

More quotes by Leo Ornstein

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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.
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I distrust anything that you don't hear.
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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.
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Hopefully, I have a certain amount of what you call musical talent.
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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
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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
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A person improvising is sometimes very fortunate that just at that second things coincide.
Leo Ornstein
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Today each composer is not only involved in aesthetics, but he's actually trying to create his own language.
Leo Ornstein
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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
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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
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In writing music, the structure of each piece is a very important factor.
Leo Ornstein
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You write it down because finally, when it's written down you do get it out of your system somewhat.
Leo Ornstein
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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
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It doesn't necessarily mean at all that the composer plays his own works best.
Leo Ornstein
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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
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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