Elliott Carter Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“In any case, Ives encouraged me to go into music even though he himself had such a hard time being a composer.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“It was only later on that I became more interested in older music.”

“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.”

“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.”