Carlisle Floyd Quotes

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

  Carlisle Floyd

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Different, Anyone

• I think anything that is expressed directly and as honestly as possible will last.

  Carlisle Floyd

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Possible, Anything

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

  Carlisle Floyd

  Topics in America

  Tags in Talent, Put

• 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.

  Carlisle Floyd

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Music, Amazing, Generations

• 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.

  Carlisle Floyd

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Valuable, Enormously

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

  Carlisle Floyd

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Music, Write

• I had all the normal interests – I played basketball and I headed the school paper. But I also developed very early a great love for music and literature and the theater.

  Carlisle Floyd

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Music, School

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

  Carlisle Floyd

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in American, Music

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

  Carlisle Floyd

  Topics in Father, Mother

  Tags in Encouraged

• I was interested in what was really going on in Salem at that time, and I resolved to investigate this seemingly unorthodox treatment of the people and the period.

  Carlisle Floyd

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Interested, Investigate

• 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.

  Carlisle Floyd

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Characters, Subject

• If an American audience is given a serious musical theater piece that is well produced, dramatically gripping and wonderfully acted, they’ll respond to it.

  Carlisle Floyd

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in American, Serious

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

  Carlisle Floyd

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Off, Did, Certainly

• If something is successful with the audience, it’s automatically suspect; the reverse is to say that not to reach audiences is the greatest compliment an artist can receive!

  Carlisle Floyd

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Successful, Artist

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

  Carlisle Floyd

  Topics in Art

  Tags in Relevant, Else

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

  Carlisle Floyd

  Topics in Country

  Tags in Composers, Important

• It’s necessary to track characters all the way through an opera. If you’re dealing with more than one or two characters, it’s very easy to forget that the others have lives of their own that feed into the story.

  Carlisle Floyd

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Forget, Characters

• Opera is given so little attention in the national press.

  Carlisle Floyd

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Attention, National

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

  Carlisle Floyd

  Topics in Art

  Tags in Civilization, Survive

• The artist is something of an outsider in America. I have always felt that America does not value its artists, certainly not in the sense that the Europeans do.

  Carlisle Floyd

  Topics in America

  Tags in Artist, Sense

Carlisle Floyd (31)

Birth:	11th June, 1926
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Composer

About

Carlisle Floyd is an American opera composer. The son of a Methodist minister, he based many of his works on themes from the South. His best known opera, Susannah, is based on a story from the Apocrypha, transferred to contemporary, rural Tennessee, and is set in a Southern dialect.

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Today's Anniversary - 3rd February

Births

• 1933 - Paul Sarbanes
• 1970 - Warwick Davis
• 1926 - Shelley Berman
• 1894 - Norman Rockwell
• 1813 - Thomas Mellon

Deaths

• 1924 - Woodrow Wilson
• 1922 - Christiaan Rudolf de Wet
• 1996 - Audrey Meadows
• 2012 - Ben Gazzara