Carlisle Floyd Quotes

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

  Carlisle Floyd

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Write, Doomed

• 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.

  Carlisle Floyd

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in American, Phenomenon

• What is American music? The most satisfying answer I’ve come across is that it was a kind of natural comfort with the vernacular which is diverse and regional; it’s not one particular set of sounds.

  Carlisle Floyd

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Music, Kind, Natural

• 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.

  Carlisle Floyd

  Topics in Love

  Tags in Different

• 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.

  Carlisle Floyd

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Television, Through

• There’s the Bacon society, which is fostered by his fourth wife Helen Bacon, but I don’t know what kind of performances his music gets. He wrote symphonic music and some chorale music.

  Carlisle Floyd

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Music, Wife, Kind

• There is something inherent in our democracy that tends to want to level. America is a little uncomfortable in the presence of someone who is distinctly superior in whatever way.

  Carlisle Floyd

  Topics in Democracy

  Tags in Uncomfortable

• 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.

  Carlisle Floyd

  Topics in Success

  Tags in Story, Personal

• 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.

  Carlisle Floyd

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Performances, Together

• 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

• 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.

  Carlisle Floyd

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Thought, Before

• 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.

  Carlisle Floyd

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in People, Places

• 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

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

  Carlisle Floyd

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Attention, National

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

  Carlisle Floyd

  Topics in Country

  Tags in Composers, Important

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

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 - 14th March

Births

• 1934 - Dionigi Tettamanzi
• 1934 - Eugene Andrew Cernan
• 1869 - Algernon Blackwood
• 1957 - Tad Williams
• 1908 - Maurice Merleau Ponty

Deaths

• 2004 - Lawrence Clark Powell
• 1995 - Joseph Needham
• 1471 - Thomas Malory
• 1915 - Walter Crane
• 1953 - Klement Gottwald