"Today each composer is not only involved in aesthetics, but he's actually trying to create his own language"
About this Quote
Modernism’s real flex wasn’t writing prettier melodies; it was refusing to inherit the old grammar at all. When Leo Ornstein says that “each composer is not only involved in aesthetics, but he’s actually trying to create his own language,” he’s pinpointing the 20th century’s pivot from style to system. “Aesthetics” is the polite, museum-ready category: choices about beauty, taste, surface. “Language” is deeper and riskier: rules, syntax, what counts as sense. Ornstein isn’t praising eccentricity for its own sake; he’s describing a cultural condition where the shared musical vocabulary had fractured, and the composer’s job expanded from making art to inventing the terms by which the art could even be heard.
The subtext is both thrilling and ominous. A private language promises radical freedom - new harmonies, new rhythms, new timbres, even new ideas of what music is. It also threatens mutual intelligibility. If every composer builds a bespoke dialect, who’s left to be the community of fluent speakers? Ornstein, who lived from 1892 to 2002, had a front-row seat to the churn: the collapse of late-Romantic consensus, the rise of atonality and serialism, the machine age’s noise and speed, the postwar academy’s theory-heavy gatekeeping. His line reads like a calm diagnosis of artistic self-reliance under pressure: tradition no longer guarantees meaning, so meaning has to be engineered.
It works because it reframes “innovation” as necessity, not swagger. The composer isn’t merely decorating sound; he’s negotiating modernity’s broken commons, one invented grammar at a time.
The subtext is both thrilling and ominous. A private language promises radical freedom - new harmonies, new rhythms, new timbres, even new ideas of what music is. It also threatens mutual intelligibility. If every composer builds a bespoke dialect, who’s left to be the community of fluent speakers? Ornstein, who lived from 1892 to 2002, had a front-row seat to the churn: the collapse of late-Romantic consensus, the rise of atonality and serialism, the machine age’s noise and speed, the postwar academy’s theory-heavy gatekeeping. His line reads like a calm diagnosis of artistic self-reliance under pressure: tradition no longer guarantees meaning, so meaning has to be engineered.
It works because it reframes “innovation” as necessity, not swagger. The composer isn’t merely decorating sound; he’s negotiating modernity’s broken commons, one invented grammar at a time.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
|---|
More Quotes by Leo
Add to List
