"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"
About this Quote
Ornstein is doing something sly here: praising Schoenberg while quietly trimming down the legend. The line opens with a disarming concession - “extremely gifted” - then pivots to a corrective “and in spite of.” That hinge phrase reframes Schoenberg’s famously systematized modernism (theories, methods, the whole intimidating apparatus) as secondary to the older, less quotable engine of composition: the ear. It’s not anti-intellectual so much as anti-myth: the myth that Schoenberg wrote like an engineer assembling a serial machine.
The intent is also generational politics. Ornstein, himself a onetime avant-gardist who later stepped away from the movement’s institutional momentum, is talking from the long view of a composer who watched modernism harden into curriculum. “Theories and so on” is pointedly dismissive, a phrase that lumps manifestos, lectures, and doctrinal camp-following into a cloud of chatter. What matters, he implies, is the moment the pencil hits the staff: real music still gets decided by inner audition, by taste, by a body’s sense of line and tension.
The subtext is a defense of intuition in an era that often dressed intuition up as inevitability. Schoenberg becomes less the high priest of a new order and more a musician with an unusually powerful “internal hearing.” Ornstein isn’t knocking the innovations; he’s reclaiming their human source. In a culture eager to treat modern art as a set of rules you either “get” or don’t, he insists it started where all music starts: inside someone’s head, sounding before it’s explained.
The intent is also generational politics. Ornstein, himself a onetime avant-gardist who later stepped away from the movement’s institutional momentum, is talking from the long view of a composer who watched modernism harden into curriculum. “Theories and so on” is pointedly dismissive, a phrase that lumps manifestos, lectures, and doctrinal camp-following into a cloud of chatter. What matters, he implies, is the moment the pencil hits the staff: real music still gets decided by inner audition, by taste, by a body’s sense of line and tension.
The subtext is a defense of intuition in an era that often dressed intuition up as inevitability. Schoenberg becomes less the high priest of a new order and more a musician with an unusually powerful “internal hearing.” Ornstein isn’t knocking the innovations; he’s reclaiming their human source. In a culture eager to treat modern art as a set of rules you either “get” or don’t, he insists it started where all music starts: inside someone’s head, sounding before it’s explained.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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