Art & Creativity Quote by Leo Ornstein

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.