Elliott Carter Quotations

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.

Silences between movements are employed only in order to bring the opposing duo to the fore.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Almost every one of my various zero numbered birthdays has had a big concert in London and often in Paris.

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.

Talking about a materialistic thing, I get about 13 times more royalties from Europe than I do from America.

The Quartets have been a major part of my work.

These wealthy people were very interested in contemporary music. They wanted to help diffuse it and get it to be known to other people.

When I was in Paris, all of the German refugees began to flow in and it was a very sad time.

Why write for the orchestra? For one thing it's a very challenging problem.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Well I tried to, but I could never write anything that I liked or was worthwhile. I threw it all out and realized that I had to make a serious study- that my tastes were far more advanced than my abilities.

Even I wrote it when I first started to compose after I left Paris. I wrote pieces that were comparatively accessible and easy to understand.

The Royal Festival Hall, I don't know whether it was 80 or 70, gave a whole festival of my music there with orchestra and everything. String quartets.

The idea of counterpoint for instance is something that has invaded my music and very few people to date can write counterpoint.

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 extermely 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.

My musical life started with hearing and being fascinated by contemporary music.

The first thing that struck me about contemporary music in general had been thatthere was not much interest in rhythm.