music clip of the day

Here’s more from my favorite 101-year-old composer.

Elliott Carter, Two Diversions for Piano (2) (1999)/Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano

Want more Elliott Carter? Here. Here.

More Pierre-Laurent Aimard? Here.

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lagniappe

I used to write these gigantic pieces that were very complex and took a long time to compose, if not to play. I am now much more impatient and couldn’t stand working for so long on the same thing. But also those pieces were me working out certain ideas about music. Those ideas are now part of my life, so I don’t have to think about them in quite the same way. But some things never change, in that you are still glad to finish a piece and still wonder whether it is as good as you hoped it might be when you started out.

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The Two Diversions were an idea of Ursula Oppens. Oppens decided that Carnegie Hall should commission composers to write what they considered easy pieces, and to make an album for piano students, and so I wrote two pieces for this album. I don’t think they’re as easy as they’d hoped, but there are some people with even harder ones.

—Elliott Carter (first quote’s from here, second here)