"We can use techniques in modifying things, in controlling things, but the first impulse has to be something that you simply cannot make just out of technique, or else it becomes perfectly evident that it is nothing but technique that you're exercising"
About this Quote
Ornstein draws a bright line between craft and the original charge that makes craft worth having. Coming from a composer who lived through modernism's great seduction - the thrill of new systems, new sonorities, new ways to organize sound - his warning lands like a corrective to an era that often mistook innovation for necessity. Technique, for him, is not the spark; it's the set of instruments you bring to the fire. You can shape, "modify", and "control" a piece into coherence, but if the initiating impulse isn't irreducibly felt, the result reads as manufactured: impressive, airtight, and emotionally vacant.
The key word is "impulse". He isn't romanticizing sloppiness or improvisation; he's defending a pre-technical urgency, the kind that arrives before you can justify it. Ornstein's subtext is that audiences and performers can sense when a work is built backward, when the concept, method, or virtuosity is the point rather than the carrier. "Perfectly evident" is the sting: technique loves to imagine itself invisible, but it has a tell. Overdetermined structure, conspicuous cleverness, surfaces polished past the grain.
Context matters here. Ornstein was celebrated early for radical piano writing, then receded from the public scene as musical discourse hardened around competing orthodoxies. That long perspective lends the quote its calm severity: he isn't railing against technique, he's demoting it. The intent is almost ethical - make something because you must, then use every tool you have to articulate it. Otherwise you're not composing; you're demonstrating.
The key word is "impulse". He isn't romanticizing sloppiness or improvisation; he's defending a pre-technical urgency, the kind that arrives before you can justify it. Ornstein's subtext is that audiences and performers can sense when a work is built backward, when the concept, method, or virtuosity is the point rather than the carrier. "Perfectly evident" is the sting: technique loves to imagine itself invisible, but it has a tell. Overdetermined structure, conspicuous cleverness, surfaces polished past the grain.
Context matters here. Ornstein was celebrated early for radical piano writing, then receded from the public scene as musical discourse hardened around competing orthodoxies. That long perspective lends the quote its calm severity: he isn't railing against technique, he's demoting it. The intent is almost ethical - make something because you must, then use every tool you have to articulate it. Otherwise you're not composing; you're demonstrating.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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