Elliott Carter Quotes

I currently spend a lot of time thinking about orchestration and every detail of a piece.

It's easy for me to write a quasi-virtuosic orchestral score. What is harder is to do that and say, all right, that works, but how else can you do it?

When I'm writing for certain instruments, you want to write within what you know about that instrument but also challenge the player. Something like 'Aheym' is very virtuosic - but because I have a history of performing music, I don't like unplayable music.

When you write for an orchestra, the sky's the limit.

You can only learn orchestration if you have the possibility of using an orchestra.

I think that the process of making music is a hard one to describe as well.

I feel at home in an orchestral score.

It's always difficult to know if a song needs more than piano, and I worry about my tendency to go in a sparse direction.

I always dreamed of writing in an orchestral context. But when you finish a piece, you want to hear it. So we played everything with Phish.

If you're going to start with melody you'll need some tympani, I think.

I'm interested in creating a little sound world for songs, really crafting it, building it, and making it like a little doll's house with little things inside it, staircases and rooms and everything kind of relates to everything else. I've never seen it as drums, bass, guitar and vocals in very separate spaces.

I don't want to write any more for the old Man-power instruments and am handicapped by the lack of adequate electrical instruments for which I now conceive my music.

There was one thing Beethoven didn't do. When one of his string quartets was played, you can believe the second violin wasn't improvising.

George Martin, he's very good at a very sort of lush, sweet arrangement.

When I first wrote for orchestra, I didn't realize, when you have 20 people playing a violin line, that is very different than one person playing that line.

The bass line is the anchor for me. I started with the bass, and either doubled that and then added the harmonies, or sometimes added my own harmonies that I've always wanted to sing on the song. And then it just went on from there - singing violin parts and trumpet parts and just trying to emulate the sounds of the instruments.

Writing beautiful melodies is not fashionable because it is very difficult to do.

It was both exciting and frustrating to work with an orchestral group.

I had to do this very aggressive, big score in a very short time, and knowing that in the beginning, middle, and end would be this very, very famous theme, but I still had to weave a score around it and make it work as a score was really challenging.

You can find the whole world of a film in one instrument, or you can find a world of sound in the orchestra.

I've always wanted to pull off 'No One is to Blame' by Howard Jones. I've done that a couple times in solo shows, but I can't figure out how to do that with a full band and make it work.

Oh, I'll tell you about 'Anyone Can Whistle' - the lesson I learned with doing that record is that the simplest songs are the hardest to do.

I've learned a lot from the masters of orchestration, like Ravel and Stravinsky.

When I think of Morricone, more than his using a specific instrument or a specific sound, it's his way of approaching music that sticks out.

I love making music. I love being involved in arranging music. It's very natural to know what I want to hear next and come up with ideas that are variations of what might be good.