Elliott Cook Carter
Quotations

"I like music to be beautiful, ordered, and expressive of the more important aspects of life."

 

"Thus, as a serious composer, one has to write for a kind of intelligent and knowledgeable listener one seldom comes across in any number"

 

"It's always seemed to me that instruments, in a certain sense, offer one materials for composition just by virtue of having, as they always do, built-in "character-structure," so to speak, which can be suggestive of musical possibilities both on the level of sonority and on that of actual music behavior"

 

"Yet, the curious thing about all this is that the educational system [of America] not only has had to cater, for the most part, to the non-intellectual aims of many who were less well off but has been geared, almost exclusively, at every economic level to the idea of teaching people to make more money."