"I distrust anything that you don't hear"
About this Quote
A composer living through the birth of recordings, radio, and the modern concert industry is bound to develop a suspicious relationship with “music” that exists more as idea than as vibration in the air. Ornstein’s line is a compact manifesto: distrust the prestige of the abstract, the score-as-scripture, the critic’s description, the marketing copy, the trend report. If you can’t hear it, it’s not accountable. It can’t fail in public.
Ornstein came up when music was becoming newly mediated and newly mythologized. The early 20th century turned composers into brands and compositions into intellectual property; sound could be promised, reviewed, or canonized long before most people ever experienced it. “Anything that you don’t hear” points at that whole apparatus: reputations that precede reality, schools and “isms” that harden into identity badges, the social pressure to admire what you’re told is important. He’s insisting on an empirical aesthetic, a kind of ears-first democracy: the work has to meet you where you live, in time, in sensation, not in theory.
The subtext is also self-protective. Ornstein was labeled a radical futurist early on, then retreated from the spotlight. Distrust becomes a way to resist both hype and backlash. It’s an artist refusing to let other people’s narratives (including avant-garde mythology) stand in for the actual encounter.
There’s bite in the syntax, too. Not “I distrust what I can’t hear,” but “anything that you don’t hear” implicates the listener. It’s a challenge: stop outsourcing your taste. Put your body in the room.
Ornstein came up when music was becoming newly mediated and newly mythologized. The early 20th century turned composers into brands and compositions into intellectual property; sound could be promised, reviewed, or canonized long before most people ever experienced it. “Anything that you don’t hear” points at that whole apparatus: reputations that precede reality, schools and “isms” that harden into identity badges, the social pressure to admire what you’re told is important. He’s insisting on an empirical aesthetic, a kind of ears-first democracy: the work has to meet you where you live, in time, in sensation, not in theory.
The subtext is also self-protective. Ornstein was labeled a radical futurist early on, then retreated from the spotlight. Distrust becomes a way to resist both hype and backlash. It’s an artist refusing to let other people’s narratives (including avant-garde mythology) stand in for the actual encounter.
There’s bite in the syntax, too. Not “I distrust what I can’t hear,” but “anything that you don’t hear” implicates the listener. It’s a challenge: stop outsourcing your taste. Put your body in the room.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
|---|
More Quotes by Leo
Add to List
