Elliott Carter Quotes

22 quotes in 396 categories

• When I was in Paris, all of the German refugees began to flow in and it was a very sad time.
• 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…
• Why write for the orchestra? For one thing it's a very challenging problem.
• 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…
• 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…
• Silences between movements are employed only in order to bring the opposing duo to the fore.
• Talking about a materialistic thing, I get about 13 times more royalties from Europe than I do from America.
• 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,…
• Almost every one of my various zero numbered birthdays has had a big concert in London and often in Paris.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• The Third Quartet I made the instruments in pairs - Two different pairs - Violin and viola, and violin and cello. They played very different…
• The Quartets have been a major part of my work.
• An auditory scenario for the players to act out with their instruments.
• In any case, Ives encouraged me to go into music even though he himself had such a hard time being a composer.
• It was only later on that I became more interested in older music.
• These wealthy people were very interested in contemporary music. They wanted to help diffuse it and get it to be known to other people.
• 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…
• 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…

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