Art & Creativity Quote by Leo Ornstein

Ornstein’s line has the clipped, slightly impatient cadence of someone who’s spent a lifetime watching audiences ask music to be something else. He’s not denying that listeners picture scenes or colors; he’s policing the border between music as an autonomous art and music as a delivery system for extra-musical content. The phrase “by the way” is doing work: it’s a conversational shrug that doubles as a quiet dismissal, as if the whole topic of visualization is a side hustle for people who can’t sit with sound on its own terms.

The sharpest knife is “centrally concerned.” Ornstein isn’t saying these listeners are wrong; he’s saying their center of gravity is elsewhere. That’s a very early-20th-century modernist anxiety: the fear that music gets reduced to narrative illustration, mood wallpaper, or a set of prompts for private cinema. For a composer associated with the avant-garde and percussive, dissonant experimentation, “traditional things” reads as deliberately cagey. He’s gesturing toward the internal mechanics of music - structure, rhythm, timbre, harmonic pressure - without naming them, because naming them would concede the debate to program notes and metaphors.

Context matters: Ornstein lived across the century that turned music into background (radio, film, playlists) while also elevating “absolute music” into a kind of high-cultural posture. His intent is less snobbery than triage. He’s defending listening as a disciplined act, warning that visualization can become a shortcut - a way to consume music as scenery rather than encounter it as an argument made in sound.