Leo Ornstein Quotes

Everything I record, I just try to sound like me and come up with songs that suit what I do, and then just go for it.

As a songwriter, you tend to develop your own style, your own technique, based around what it is you're trying to write and perform, in terms of your own music. So a way of evolving a guitar style as a songwriter is much easier, I think, than developing a true style of your own just from listening to music or playing other people's music.

Aaron Copland was a man that had a very specific point of view about what music should be which was that, he felt that new music should have the composer should show a personality in his music.

The most important thing is that you honor that musical integrity, whether you make music that sounds like ABBA or you make music that sounds like Void.

The modern composer builds upon the foundation of truth.

In the past, I tried to be more of a typical session guitarist. I wasn't so concerned with impressing anybody.

The development of new instrumental and vocal idioms has been one of the remarkable phenomena of recent music.

If you force yourself to write away from the piano, you come up with more inventive things. If you're too good a piano player, as some composers are, the music may become flavorless and glib. And if you're not a very good pianist, you're limited to the same patterns.

I realized pretty soon that I have to do more than just play bass in the background way. So, I developed a kind of playing which only a handful of musicians accepted.

I study what's happening in music. I want to sound different than everybody else.

All my music sounds the same to me.

I just wanted to make melodies. I started trying to do my own thing and let the melodies make the genre themselves.

I discovered that I didn't want to be strict like a German composer.

If you go out and just play the old stuff and never write new stuff, you're not really a complete musician, you're a performer.

Music is the most important thing. I'm thinking of my future. There has to be something new, and I want to be part of it. I want to lead an orchestra with excellent musicians. I want to play music which draws pictures of the world and its space

For anybody to say well this is not Hip Hop and that's not Hip Hop, that is not the way the formula was laid down. It was for the people who were going to continue take anything musically and string it along.

I don't try to make the guitar sound like the harpsichord or lute. That makes you end up being like a bad copy.

I never presumed that a technique of composition or an idea was so special that just using it would guarantee the quality of the music.

The reflection of the world is blues, that's where that part of the music is at. Then you got this other kind of music that's tryin' to come around.

As a musician, I look for certain things that stimulate me. And what I look for is something that's an evolution on a particular genre that I never heard before.

Progressive music probably wouldn't even really exist if not for the people of the United States having picked up on it and nurtured it in the way they did. It really is an American form of music in the sense that it was nurtured here. So it belongs here. It has become part of the fabric of American musical culture.

From my time in 'King Crimson,' I'd describe a Progressive band as one that keeps trying to break musical barriers, and keeps trying to do new music.

The way that I've always gone about making music, the rule of thumb, has just been to make what I love.

My intentions have been, and are always, to just really get behind what my ideas are musically and to just ride this thing out, cause it feels good, and I think for the most part it's good music. Even when it's not, I'd like to still search for something that could be even like a little bit mind-blowing or shocking to me.

There's an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unspeakable, all those things come into being a composer, into writing music, into searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don't exist.