Art & Creativity Quote by Leo Ornstein

Music’s power is that it can feel like meaning without ever agreeing to mean anything. When composer Leo Ornstein calls it “the most abstract” of the arts, he’s staking out a defense and a provocation at once: defense against the demand that art explain itself in tidy narratives, and provocation to listeners who treat sound as a delivery system for messages.

The line lands with extra charge given Ornstein’s context. A radical modernist in the early 20th century, he wrote pieces that sounded, to many contemporaries, like machine age clangor and urban nerves. Audiences and critics wanted a translation: What does it represent? What is it saying? Ornstein’s answer is essentially: you’re asking the wrong artform to behave like literature or painting. Music can suggest motion, mood, even moral gravity, but it refuses the fixed referent. A melody isn’t “about” a tree the way a poem can be; it’s an event in time, closer to architecture made of air.

The subtext is also a sly rebuke to cultural gatekeeping. If music is radically abstract, then the listener’s craving for story can become a kind of policing: rewarding the familiar (the singable, the programmatic) and distrusting the unfamiliar (dissonance, fragmentation). Ornstein’s framing doesn’t make music cold; it makes it freer. Abstraction here isn’t emptiness, it’s autonomy: sound organizing itself by its own logic, inviting us to feel structure, tension, and release without leaning on plot as a crutch.