Elliott Carter quotes

The Quartets have been a major part of my work. (Elliott Carter)
The Third Quartet I made the instruments in pairs - Two different pairs - Violin and viola, and violin and cello. They played very different things from each other all through the whole piece.
Elliott Carter
Talking about a materialistic thing, I get about 13 times more royalties from Europe than I do from America.
Elliott Carter
Silences between movements are employed only in order to bring the opposing duo to the fore.
Elliott Carter
When people listen to my music, I hope that they will notice that if you take a piece by a composer like Schubert, the major and the minor triad is an extremely important thing not merely as harmony, but in creating melodic lines. Schubert is always walking up and down with arpeggios on C, E, G and so forth. I am not doing anything different really, except using a different system of harmony.
Elliott Carter
People call my music complex because I will have instruments playing at their own paces, as if the other instruments weren't even there. It doesn't march along in the same way that most older music does. But to me, I honestly don't think that a work like Debussy's La Mer is any less complex than my work. It's full of all sorts of sounds and textures going on at once, yet we still look at is as beautiful, structured and fluid. That's all I'm trying to do; I'm not out to compose for complexity's sake.
Elliott Carter
I think more audiences would like contemporary music if they were presented with it, told about it. It's just a matter of familiarity, I think. Then one begins to look back at old music as stuffy, or even tiresome. It's funny -- I'm beginning to like older music more than I used to, but it's like I'm going into a museum and contemplating a Rembrandt. It just feels like its part of the aristocratic class system of kings and queens and dukes which just doesn't exist anymore.
Elliott Carter
That was one of the big problems when I was at Harvard studying music. We had to write choral pieces in the style of Brahms or Mendelssohn, which was distressing because in the end you realized how good Brahms is, and how bad you are.
Elliott Carter
Aaron Copland was a man that had a very specific point of view about what music should be which was that, he felt that new music should have the composer should show a personality in his music.
Elliott Carter
Almost every one of my various zero numbered birthdays has had a big concert in London and often in Paris.
Elliott Carter
Well when I was young, when I was very young, when I was a little boy I don't remember the music I heard, but there was an article in the Brooklyn Daily written by my Aunt about how I could choose phonograph records. (Elliott Carter)
Since I'm allergic to various things, the army wouldn't accept me during the war, and I got into the Office of War Information, which sent music to Europe.
Elliott Carter
Yes, I get a report from BMI about the frequency of performances, and it is very surprising. They played one of my most advanced pieces, and one of my most unusual ones on the radio.
Elliott Carter
When I was in Paris, all of the German refugees began to flow in and it was a very sad time.
Elliott Carter
In any case, Ives encouraged me to go into music even though he himself had such a hard time being a composer.
Elliott Carter
I'm very concerned with the performer, but I'm not too concerned with the listener. It seems to me that if you can interest the performer and make him feel that he's done something really valuable, his playing will convince the audience just that. To write for the audience is just too uncertain. You never know what your audience may be like, but you can usually know what your performers will be like. A good musician has the training to appreciate all sorts of things you might try to do in a piece. A performer will also recognize whether a piece is skillfully written or original -- an audience might not always be so sure.
Elliott Carter
The pre-World War I works of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, "give a glimpse of a new universe of emancipated discourse, unfortunately quickly abandoned when Schoenberg returned to the classical musical shapes upon adopting the twelve-tone system."
Elliott Carter
In the future (...) people will become more sensitive and aware than they are now. They will have to, because society will become more complicated, more full of people, with more different things happening. People will have to become much cleverer and much sharper. Then they will like my music.
Elliott Carter
Why write for the orchestra? For one thing it's a very challenging problem.
Elliott Carter
My entire life has really revolved around music that was written about the time that I was born, 1908, to just before the First World War and shortly after it. This music I've always known, and it is that music that's most important to me.
Elliott Carter
Right at the end of the war I wrote a piano sonata, which was written at a time when Sam Barber used to come down here and we used to have lunch together in a very nice old hotel that's now not there. (Elliott Carter)
Then, when the Depression came, all of this changed completely. Since that time, the entire public is of a very different sort and there was not so much support for contemporary music in a direct way.
Elliott Carter
An auditory scenario for the players to act out with their instruments.
Elliott Carter
I mean the public likes it more in Europe than they do here because the state supported organizations have felt that playing contemporary music was part of the education of the public.
Elliott Carter
I've known those pieces ever since I was about 16 or 17; I also at that time was taken to meet Charles Ives whom I got to know fairly well. He was the one who wrote a recommendation for me to get into college.
Elliott Carter