Excerpts from Elliott Carter’s Interview with Bruce Duffie

Bruce Duffie: Should an audience understand your music, even on its first hearing?

Elliott Carter: Well, I think many people do understand it on its first hearing, surely. One of the basic problems,
though, with first hearing is that the first performance is seldom faithful to the music… I mean to tell you, it takes a long time
for performers to learn, or to find out what’s in the music. ... The first performance very seldom presents the music as it will be worked out.
I’ve always felt, at least up until fairly recently, that it took about ten years for the performers to understand what the music was about. It
was very obvious in the case of older music. Very few people understood what Beethoven was about in his time, and certainly the last quartets
took almost a hundred years to be understood.

…

EC: I think orchestra music is tiresome to write. It’s too much orchestra. It takes too many notes. It’s too large a problem, and
then you don’t get good rehearsals. You don’t get enough rehearsals, except occasionally, and you get a public that is not terribly interested in contemporary music.