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.
- Elliott Carter Quote

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.
- Elliott Carter Quote

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.
- Elliott Carter Quote

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.
- Elliott Carter Quote

Silences between movements are employed only in order to bring the opposing duo to the fore.
- Elliott Carter Quote

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

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.
- Elliott Carter Quote

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.
- Elliott Carter Quote

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

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.
- Elliott Carter Quote

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

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