Aging & Wisdom Quote by Carlisle Floyd

Floyd cuts through a century of art-music insecurity with a line that’s half lament, half corrective. The first jab is generational: “lose sight” implies not just forgetfulness but a failure of empathy, a narrowing of imagination. In classical composition, each cohort inherits both techniques and grudges; Floyd suggests the grudges travel more reliably than the human stories. The result is a professional culture where being misunderstood becomes a badge, and where young artists are trained to treat the audience as an obstacle rather than a partner.

His second sentence is where the real provocation sits. It’s not a sentimental plea to “make it popular.” It’s a sly indictment of credentialism: the idea that rejection can function as proof of seriousness. Floyd names a perverse incentive structure in the academy and new-music world, where the safest path to status is often to signal difficulty, disdain accessibility, and outsource meaning to program notes. When a young composer tells him they want to write music people will like, they’re confessing something that shouldn’t be confessional at all: a desire to communicate without apology.

Context matters: Floyd built his reputation in opera, a form that lives or dies on audience attention and theatrical consequence. He knew that “liking” is not the enemy of depth; it’s evidence that the work has found a bloodstream. His intent is to reframe integrity not as martyrdom but as contact: art that risks being understood, and judged, in the room.