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Carlisle Floyd Quotes


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Carlisle Floyd
June 11, 1926 -
Nationality: American
Category: Composer
Subcategory: American Composer

I find it enormously valuable to be sure that that the pacing is what I think it is and that the scenes have the shape I think they have musically and dramatically.

   

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.

   

If I felt that one of my operas did not come off I would certainly say so.

   

It seems to me opera is just as relevant as an expressive art as anything else.

   

Most of the important composers in our country are clustered in the Northeast.

   

America tends to worship the modest talent because it doesn't put us in an uncomfortable position vis-a-vis the artist.

   

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.

   

People in very high places suddenly fall, and we are always surprised because we don't factor in the basic element that they're humans and, therefore, they are flawed and have weaknesses.

   

Our most intimate contact with civilizations long since dust has been through the art which has survived them.

   

We think the Puritans always dressed in black and white, which they didn't. They loved very bright colors. And there were other differences in perceptions that gave one a very different view of them.

   

I was encouraged by my mother and, to a lesser extent, by my father.

   

The performances of my works in the last 10 years are probably equal to all the previous years put together. There are so many venues now and there is a completely new public for opera that's grown up outside of the traditional core opera public.

   

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.

   

I found a certain kind of music congenial to me; it never occurred to me to write music that was academically acceptable.

   

You can't possibly predict what will last or not. But once you attempt to write for the ages, you're doomed.

   

Socially I never was an outsider. I have never thought of the conflict element before frankly, but perhaps it was wanting to belong, and at the same time wanting to retain one's own personality.

   

I've never set out consciously to write American music. I don't know what that would be unless the obvious Appalachian folk references.

   

Anyone who creates something new or does something different artistically is going to be singled out.

   

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.

   

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.

   

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