Success Quote by Leo Ornstein

Ornstein is warning against the intoxicating trap of craft: the moment when the maker starts writing for the pleasure of the tool rather than the person on the other end of it. Coming from a composer famous for early, ferocious modernism, the line reads less like a retreat from experiment than a hard-won critique from inside the engine room. He knows how seductively “language” - harmony, rhythm, texture, the whole technical grammar of a style - can become its own private game. You can chase novelty, system, or complexity and still miss the point if the result doesn’t land as felt experience.

The phrasing is telling: “grave danger,” “I, myself,” “very aware.” That self-implication matters. This isn’t a conservative scolding of avant-garde excess; it’s an artist admitting how easily ego and curiosity masquerade as artistic necessity. “Involved and intrigued” sounds almost innocent, like a researcher falling in love with methodology. But Ornstein draws a bright line: technique is “only a means.” The real destination is “an aesthetic experience” that “the listener has to get” - not in a dumbed-down sense, but in the visceral sense of apprehension. If the audience can’t grasp the experience, the work risks becoming a sealed container: perfectly constructed, socially inert.

Contextually, this is a late-life modernist’s corrective to the 20th century’s arms race of innovation. Ornstein keeps the experiment, but demands accountability: not to fashion or theory, but to perception.