Elliott Carter Quotes

The most important thing is that you honor that musical integrity, whether you make music that sounds like ABBA or you make music that sounds like Void.

In the past, I tried to be more of a typical session guitarist. I wasn't so concerned with impressing anybody.

I don't try to make the guitar sound like the harpsichord or lute. That makes you end up being like a bad copy.

As a songwriter, you tend to develop your own style, your own technique, based around what it is you're trying to write and perform, in terms of your own music. So a way of evolving a guitar style as a songwriter is much easier, I think, than developing a true style of your own just from listening to music or playing other people's music.

People are always defining and re-defining music. My style of playing has been characterized as smooth jazz and acid jazz. I listen as I play; I'm not caught up in defining the type of music I play.

It's either you finna create your own wave, you finna sound like me or you finna sound like G Herbo, you finna sound like Chance The Rapper, you finna sound like Juice Wrld. You ain't gonna get too far 'cause you sound like somebody. So, create your own lane and do your own style.

Music is the most important thing. I'm thinking of my future. There has to be something new, and I want to be part of it. I want to lead an orchestra with excellent musicians. I want to play music which draws pictures of the world and its space

Certainly being proficient in an instrument does have its problems. Because the better you get, the more you just start sounding like an ordinary guitarist. There are certainly guitarists that transcend that and do really find their sound and all that sort of stuff.

I don't want to sound like Ross; I don't want to sound like Puff. I want to make my own music: French Montana.

Today each composer is not only involved in aesthetics, but he's actually trying to create his own language.

I never presumed that a technique of composition or an idea was so special that just using it would guarantee the quality of the music.

Progressive music probably wouldn't even really exist if not for the people of the United States having picked up on it and nurtured it in the way they did. It really is an American form of music in the sense that it was nurtured here. So it belongs here. It has become part of the fabric of American musical culture.

When I listen back to my music and everyone else that's out there, I'm aware that there's something I can do that the next guy doesn't do.

I make the kind of music I like.

I wanted to make good records. But my problem is I've got a low boredom threshold, so I wanted it to look and sound different with each album, which is really tantamount to suicide, cause people lose it, they lose it - they say: 'I like that, and that's not this.'

Composers shouldn't think too much - it interferes with their plagiarism.

The drive to create music that is pure is my highest priority. Sometimes I'll get extremely technical, and other times I'll just kind of go with the gods of music.

I am consciously not trying to bring in World Music elements. The ways that I work and feel are completely different in how they sound than someone playing the Kora in Africa would play it.

Well, I don't know any piece by heart, but Mozart goes something like this... What do you think?

I have a very difficult time describing my music.

You have got to make new music, that is the way that I look at it anyway.

New music is absolutely integral to classical music.

I have a very difficult time describing my music. Because I run into people in the hardware store and they go, 'Oh, you're a musician. So what kind of music do you play?' And I go, 'Uh, I've been doin' this for many years - I don't know what to call it.'

What is nice about country music today is that most artists are not trying to do something everybody else is doing. They really are trying to develop their own uniqueness.

Is it true that we must accept the music of another race as being that which is American? Have not the white Americans sufficient individuality to develop a characteristic style of composition.