Daily Inspiration Quote by Leo Ornstein

Ornstein is talking about composition the way a good editor talks about argument: not as a chain of pretty moments, but as a designed passage from one state of attention to the next. The phrase "sometimes" repeats like a shrug, yet it’s doing real work. He’s refusing dogma. For a composer famously associated with modernist abrasion and surprise, that hedging is a quiet manifesto: pattern isn’t a law, it’s a tool you pick up when you need it.

The intent here is practical, almost workshop-level. "Making a connection between one section and another" sounds humble, but it’s the core anxiety of form. How do you move listeners across a seam without losing them? Ornstein’s answer is slyly rhetorical: you don’t just connect A to B; you stage a reason for B to arrive. Pattern becomes a kind of persuasion, a felt logic. He frames it as "leading into the next thing", which is a listener-centered ethics: continuity is not for the composer’s comfort but for the audience’s orientation.

The subtext is that modern music’s reputation for randomness is often a misunderstanding. Even in music that breaks tonality or traditional development, the ear still craves intelligible motion. Ornstein isn’t retreating to conservatism; he’s describing how even rupture needs framing. In the early 20th-century context, when composers were renegotiating what coherence could mean, "pattern" becomes less a symmetrical template and more a breadcrumb trail: enough recognition to keep the listener brave.