Education Quote by Elliott Carter

Carter isn’t flattering Europe so much as indicting America’s cultural business model. The line sounds casual, even a little offhand ("I mean..."), but it smuggles in a sharp diagnosis: audiences don’t just "like" contemporary music; they’re trained to hear it, and institutions decide whether that training happens. His key move is to shift taste from something natural to something cultivated. Preference isn’t a mystery of national character. It’s policy.

The subtext is a defense of difficulty without the romantic posturing. Carter, often treated as the patron saint of thorny modernism, frames his music not as a private riddle for elites but as a public good that requires infrastructure. "State supported organizations" is doing a lot of work here: orchestras, festivals, broadcasters, conservatories that can afford to program living composers because they’re not wholly hostage to ticket sales, donors, or the churn of cultural nostalgia. When those institutions "felt" an obligation, the public didn’t magically become smarter; it simply got repeated, normalized exposure.

There’s also a quiet jab at American anti-statism in the arts: the belief that the market is the fairest curator. Carter implies the opposite. Markets reward the familiar, and familiarity calcifies into canon. Europe, in his telling, subsidizes risk long enough for it to become legible. America, too often, asks new music to justify itself instantly, like a startup pitching to an impatient investor.

Context matters: Carter came of age as modernism hardened into a mid-century battleground, when "education" became both a real mission and a lightning rod. He’s betting that public taste is plastic - and that institutions shape it whether they admit it or not.