top of page
.png){kind=small}
"Like any other composer of opera, I choose a subject not for polemical reasons, but because it contains vivid characters in highly charged dramatic situations."
Standard
Customized
Explore more quotes by Carlisle Floyd
"I found a certain kind of music congenial to me; it never occurred to me to write music that was academically acceptable."
Music
"Our most intimate contact with civilizations long since dust has been through the art which has survived them."
Art
"It's amazing how fast generations lose sight of other generations. One of the first things the young composers who come to work with me say is that they want to write music people will like, instead of gaining their credentials by being rejected by the audience."
Music
"The artist is something of an outsider in America. I have always felt that America does not value its artists, certainly not in the sense that the Europeans do."
America
"America tends to worship the modest talent because it doesn't put us in an uncomfortable position vis-a-vis the artist."
Talent
"We think the Puritans always dressed in black and white, which they didn't. They loved very bright colors. And there were other differences in perceptions that gave one a very different view of them."
Colors
"People in very high places suddenly fall, and we are always surprised because we don't factor in the basic element that they're humans and, therefore, they are flawed and have weaknesses."
People
"Most of the important composers in our country are clustered in the Northeast."
Composer
"The performances of my works in the last 10 years are probably equal to all the previous years put together. There are so many venues now and there is a completely new public for opera that's grown up outside of the traditional core opera public."
Now
"I've never set out consciously to write American music. I don't know what that would be unless the obvious Appalachian folk references."
Music
Exlpore more Opera quotes
"If you approach an opera as though it were something that always went a certain way, that's what you get. I approach an opera as though I didn't know it."
Author Name
Personal Development
"In opera, there is always too much singing."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Ironically, that was quite a bit of the appeal of Rumours. It's equally interesting on a musical level and as a soap opera."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The opera is like a husband with a foreign title - expensive to support, hard to understand and therefore a supreme social challenge."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I was interested in opera and it seemed to me that the only possible theatre for contemporary opera would be television. So I started working towards a kind of television kind of opera."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Opera is a beautiful and important diversion for me."
Author Name
Personal Development
"A show like Knots or any other show that can be called a soap opera does terribly in syndication because if you're a viewer and you miss a week you don't know what's going on."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Like an opera singer, I am able to sing out my song in paint."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Even in today's opera world, the position of the black tenor is problematic."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I don't think an opera house is ever a place that can make you entirely happy."
Author Name
Personal Development
bottom of page