I venture to claim that, in an age which is so dominated by what is terrible and ugly, it takes more courage not to go with the trend by searching desperately for even uglier sounds and noises, but to bear in mind the aptitude and potential of the human ear, and give the listener what he has a right to expect: MUSIC, which, if it is to reach anyone apart from the composer, must continue to be made of melody, harmony (in the comprehensive sense) and rhythm . .

When Paul Hindemith said about himself that he would not have been conceivable without Max Reger, what he meant was that, for all the newness of his musical language in comparison to that of Max Reger, he was deeply rooted in the great tradition of Occidental music. I acknowledge that tradition unreservedly..."

(excerpt from a statement of 1978)

"In 1979 Cesar Bresgen wrote: ‘. . . Achieving a synthesis of tone colour cosmos and traditional polyphonic thinking would seem to be Leitner’s principal concern...

My first contacts with new music date from around 1958, when I was in secondary school. It was mainly music by Johann Nepomuk David and Paul Hindemith, and the man who made it accessible to me was the director of the WeIs Bach Choir, Joseph Friedrich Doppelbauer, who later was my teacher. A few years after that, I heard music by Olivier Messiaen for the first time, and it fascinated me from the start. These two influences left a lasting imprint.

In the meantime, I have come to reject harmonic harshness which is often present in works of predominantly ‘polyphonic thinking’, just as I reject music which is only geared to ‘tone colour’.

In the final analysis, my encounter with music of the Viennese School has left the strongest imprint on my own work. Seen from my present vantage point, I would add that sentence to the words of Cesar Bresgen which are quoted above."

Ernst Ludwig Leitner