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"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."
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"When can you understand that the music you play is very good? It is when people look at you but see no one, no one but the music!"
"As the strings of a lute are apart though they quiver the same music."
"Music is well said to be the speech of angels."
"To understand fully the importance of music, you must try to image a world without music! Such a world would be a world of hopelessness and boredom!"
"As I fingered my way through the songs, I felt my worries slough away. My music has always been the best remedy for my dark moods. As I sang, even my bruises seemed to pain me less."
"So when a man surrenders to the sound of music and lets its sweet, soft, mournful strains, which we have just described, be funnelled into his soul through his ears, and gives up all his time to the glamorous moanings of song, the effect at first on his energy and initiative of mind, if he has any, is to soften it as iron is softened in a furnace, and made workable instead of hard and unworkable: but if he persists and does not break the enchantment, the next stage is that it melts and runs, till the spirit has quite run out of him and his mental sinews (if I may so put it) are cut, and he has become what Homer calls "a feeble fighter"."
Explore more quotes by Elliott Carter
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Almost every one of my various zero numbered birthdays has had a big concert in London and often in Paris."
"These wealthy people were very interested in contemporary music. They wanted to help diffuse it and get it to be known to other people."
"In any case, Ives encouraged me to go into music even though he himself had such a hard time being a composer."
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