Leo Ornstein Quotes

And I like to interpret music. So I think it's all interpretive.

I am an interpreter of music rather than a composer of it.

As a singer, you have to bring the soul to the song.

In some ways, it's more rewarding to hear someone interpret a piece of music that you're a part of.

Musicians are also interpretive artists and we are just as creative as painters and writers. We interpret in a way that expresses ourselves.

I do not ask for my music to be interpreted, but only for it to be played.

You kind of have to become a song so to speak and we wanted to make sure that Tom did them with the best abilities he had and captured all that what the song is all about.

I don't see how they can with most of my pieces, but I think it's unfortunate that they can through familiarity with flashy performances of a great deal of other music.

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.

The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways.

Speaking purely from a musical standpoint, I think I am a great performer.

The art of interpretation is not to play what is written.

I don't have favourites, I think, when you play, you have to be like a prostitute, you have to love the piece you are playing. Even if you don't like it, you have to play it as if you would like it. Then you are a good interpreter.

Music is a performing art, as any Native American will tell you. It isn't there in the score.

Performing written music, even when I've written it, is not very interesting to me.

All I have is my performance, I try to feed in the best of everything that I could possibly do into those 90 minutes and to make a live entertainment show out of it.

Songs suffer at the mercy of the performer.

I'm really not a songwriter, so if I hear a song, I feel it and like it, I'll do it. But I'll make it the way I want to hear it.

I try to convey the musical notes through dance, take on the music.

I love performing on my own scores. I do it quite a lot.

That's all I ever do, just try and do the best I can and cater to the song, cater to the music.

It's really been enlightening for me to work with composers because I used to think that everything in the music was exactly what the composer meant. Well, it's what the composer meant in that moment when they wrote it.

At the end of the day, I am singing the composer's creation, and I follow the instructions given to me. What I feel may be a right take may not work for the composer or his vision on how he thinks the song should sound.

I learned how to be more theatrical and have more fun, and to take a song and sing it over and over again in different ways, and make it different each time. I'm not just singing the song - it's this thing that's affecting me.

Typography is to literature as musical performance is to composition: an essential act of interpretation, full of endless opportunities for insight or obtuseness.