Creativity Quote by Eugene Ormandy

A conductor’s nightmare, delivered like a vaudeville knot: Ormandy’s sentence trips over itself the way a rehearsal can when the ink on the page meets the habits in a player’s hands. The humor isn’t just in the tongue-twister; it’s in the worldview. Classical music sells the fantasy of fidelity - the “right way” is written down, preserved, repeatable. Ormandy punctures that with a musician’s shrug: the score is an instruction manual that only becomes real when it’s misread, half-read, or “helpfully” corrected.

His syntax mimics the chain reaction he’s describing. Composer or arranger “writes it the right way,” but the act of copying (literal copyists in the era of parts preparation, or the broader process of transmission) introduces errors that can become authoritative through repetition. “Copied the wrong way right” is brilliant because it captures how mistakes metastasize into norms: if everyone’s part contains the same wrong note, the orchestra can execute it with perfect unanimity and still be wrong. Precision becomes a kind of collective delusion.

Ormandy, a big-deal 20th-century conductor with a famously polished orchestral sound, isn’t confessing incompetence; he’s pointing at the fragile ecology behind that polish. The subtext is institutional: music-making depends on intermediaries - copyists, librarians, publishers, editors - and on musicians trained to trust what’s in front of them. His final self-correction (“I mean the right way wrong”) lands as a sly admission that even the person in charge can get tangled. Authority, like a score, is only as stable as its last reproduction.