Daily Inspiration Quote by Leo Ornstein

Ornstein is talking like a composer who spent his early career being told he’d fallen off the edge of civilization. In the 1910s, his “futurist” piano pieces detonated on polite ears: tone clusters, violence, noise-as-structure. Critics didn’t just dislike the sound; they diagnosed it. The charge wasn’t “I prefer Brahms,” but “this isn’t rational.” Ornstein’s sly “as you know” turns that diagnosis back on the listener: the boundary you’re invoking is a social convenience, not a scientific measurement.

The intent is quietly destabilizing. He’s not arguing that anything goes, or that reason is irrelevant. He’s pointing out that what we badge as rational in art is often just what our training has already normalized. The “very difficult point to establish” is less an aesthetic puzzle than an exposure of authority: who gets to draw the line, and by what criteria? Harmony textbooks, concert halls, critics, and audiences are all implicated. The subtext is that “irrational” is frequently a synonym for “unassimilated.”

Context matters here because Ornstein later retreated from the spotlight, writing in relative isolation. That arc gives the remark an added edge: it’s a veteran’s observation from inside multiple regimes of taste. Modernism made yesterday’s madness into today’s technique; the scandal became a style. His sentence captures that historical churn: rationality in music isn’t a fixed property of sound, it’s a moving border that tracks power, habit, and time.