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"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."
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"The opera tells the story with all the built-in contradictions and from many different angles."
"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."
"Any subject is good for opera if the composer feels it so intently he must sing it out."
"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."
"This is not a rock opera. This is not Tommy. I can write songs that emote, and that's it."
"Well, the very best operas are the ones written by the very best composers."
Explore more quotes by Carlisle Floyd
"The story of Willie Stark fascinated me because it was tackling the story of a man who outwardly has all the success one could possibly want and who is destroyed by his personal demons."
"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."
"When I've seen my operas in Europe, they have always struck me as more American than when I hear them here. I can't tell you what that phenomenon is."
"What is American music? The most satisfying answer I've come across is that it was a kind of natural comfort with the vernacular which is diverse and regional; it's not one particular set of sounds."
"There's the Bacon society, which is fostered by his fourth wife Helen Bacon, but I don't know what kind of performances his music gets. He wrote symphonic music and some chorale music."
"We don't have access to a national forum that we had in those days, through the news magazines which were the television news of the time. It's very disturbing to me that we've sort of been pushed to the corners."
"I had all the normal interests - I played basketball and I headed the school paper. But I also developed very early a great love for music and literature and the theater."
"America tends to worship the modest talent because it doesn't put us in an uncomfortable position vis-a-vis the artist."
"I've never set out consciously to write American music. I don't know what that would be unless the obvious Appalachian folk references."
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