Elliott Carter

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

Yes, I get a report from BMI about the frequency of performances, and it is very surprising. They played one of my most advanced pieces, and one of my most unusual ones on the radio.

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.

The Third Quartet I made the instruments in pairs - Two different pairs - Violin and viola, and violin and cello. They played very different things from each other all through the whole piece.

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

My entire life has really revolved around music that was written about the time that I was born, 1908, to just before the First World War and shortly after it. This music I've always known, and it is that music that's most important to me.

Well I tried to, but I could never write anything that I liked or was worthwhile. I threw it all out and realized that I had to make a serious study- that my tastes were far more advanced than my abilities.

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.

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.

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.

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

In any case, Ives encouraged me to go into music even though he himself had such a hard time being a composer.