Just forwarded to me by a friend...

   Elliott Carter nearing 100 atones for his atonality

   Sun Apr 01, 2007 6:53 pm From the Associated Press NEW YORK ---
   American composer Elliott Carter, an exemplar of the atonalist
   style of modernism and according to admirers the greatest living
   practitioner of his craft, apologized to music lovers around the
   world today for what he called "a half century of wasted time."

   "What was I thinking?" the venerable Mr.  Carter, 99, said at
   his home in Manhattan.  "Nobody likes this stuff.  Why have I
   wasted my life?" Carter said he "went wrong" back in the 1940s
   and spent the next 60 years pursuing the musical dead-end of
   atonality.  In the past seven decades, he has produced five
   string quartets, a half dozen song cycles, works for orchestra,
   solo concertos and innumerable chamber works for various
   combinations of instruments --- all in an advanced, complex style
   he now dismisses as "noise."

   Despite consistent encouragement of many mainstream musicians
   such as Boston Symphony Music Director James Levine, for Chicago
   Symphony conductor Daniel Barenboim, and the cellist Yo-Yo Ma,
   Carter said his many admirers were "delusional."

   "The critics who said they were just congratulating themselves
   for being smarter than everybody else were right all along," he
   said.  "We should all go back and get our heads on straight."
   Carter said he blamed his late wife, Helen, for turning him into
   an unrepentant modernist.  "She liked this stuff, and I could
   never say no to her," he said.  Mrs.  Carter died in 2003 at
   age 95.

   Since then, Carter said, he has been reevaluating his aesthetic.
   "I'd like to write something pretty for a change --- maybe
   something based on an Irish folk tune," he said.  He was uncertain
   whether he would withdraw his substantial catalogue from the
   repertoire, though one alternative would be to revise his works,
   ending each with a tonic triad, he said.

   "I feel like an enormous weight has been lifted from my shoulders,"
   Carter said.  "From now on, I promise to be good."

   (One should note the dateline of this story.)

Karl

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